Krell Labs

Then, their policies changed. Half my work was no longer allowed. People left the site in droves. I left too, for awhile. I came back to a ghost town. I still have 25k followers, but I don’t think more than 10% are active anymore. I’m followed by ghosts. Same with DeviantArt, although I was never quite as big there, and I’ve been gone so much longer.

This disallowed half of my work was never allowed on Facebook in the first place, or Instagram, but their algorithms are such that my stuff rarely makes it to anyone’s feeds, and if I post a link to where people could actually pay me for my content, it’s hidden unless I pay for it. Patreon swept my work away to a dark corner where no one could see it unless I personally guided them there. Twitch is so strict you can’t even show bare feet. The death of Google Reader means nobody follows RSS feeds anymore, so I can’t direct people to my own site.

So there’s Twitter I guess, where I can post whatever I want, but again, algorithms. But more than that, I don’t have the energy to build up a following once again on a site I don’t own that can delete my career on a whim. The thought of spending time jumping around through hoops for attention just to have it taken away again has stripped any motivation I had to try.

The internet has been gentrified. All the small cute houses and mom & pop shops have been shut down and replaced by big corporations that control everything. I’ve been making webcomics for twenty years, and at the start, the internet was a beautiful wild place. Everyone had a home page. It was like having a house and people came to visit you and you would visit other people in their houses. Now, we don’t visit each other in personal spaces anymore. It’s like we have to visit each other in the aisles of a megamart. Everything is clean and sanitized and the weirdos who made the internet what it was are no longer welcome. No space for freaks anymore.

People still ask me for advice on how to break into comics, and I don’t have any wisdom because I don’t recognize the internet anymore. I don’t feel comfortable working within its boundaries which seems to be getting smaller and smaller and smaller. None of the tools I used when I started exist anymore. They’ve been replaced by things I don’t know how to use. I don’t think I could break into comics today. 2002 had so few barriers compared to now. You might have started on Keenspace, but you could reach a point where you could break away to your own site and people would go to it. Now, you start on Webtoon or Patreon and I guess you just stay there? It feels so much like owning a hardware store for years and then having to go work as a cashier at the Home Depot that put you out of business. I’m looking at my career trajectory and it all points to being a Wal-Mart greeter with uncontrolled arthritis.

Culture Clash: RUDE BOY (’80) by Kimberly Lindbergs

“We felt that the whole machine was teetering on the brink of collapse. Some amazing things went down in Britain during the ’70s—the government decided they could disempower the unions by having a three-day week, for instance. Can you imagine that? … There were garbage strikes, train strikes, power strikes, the lights were going out—everything seemed on the brink, and looking through youthful, excitable eyes it seemed the very future of England was at stake.” – Joe Strummer

In 1970, when Joe Strummer was just 18-years-old, the future frontman for The Clash was asked to identify the body of his older brother David who committed suicide. David’s body was found on a bench in London’s Regent’s Park where it had laid for three days after he swallowed a lethal dose of pills. At the time of David’s death, he was estranged from his family and had joined The National Front, a far-right fascist organization that enticed angry young men and promoted neo-Nazi ideologies. In the years that followed The Clash rose to prominence in Britain’s burgeoning punk music scene, but Joe Strummer rarely talked about his brother and the impact of his death.

Despite Strummer’s silence on the subject, his music tells a vivid story about the circumstances that gave rise to The National Front and why the unsavory group may have appealed to his sibling. The frontman’s grief metastasized and found expression in the reggae rhythms and punk riffs that characterize The Clash. Between 1977 and 1985 the band recorded a handful of studio albums that gave voice to the disenfranchised while railing against social injustice, criticizing nationalism, denouncing racism, condemning capitalism and mourning the victims of perpetual war.

RUDE BOY (’80), which is currently available on FilmStruck, captures the zeitgeist of the times. This loosely scripted cinema verité drama stars 18-year-old Ray Grange, an apathetic young bloke employed at a London sex shop. Ray eventually finds work as a roadie for The Clash, but he is ill-equipped for life on the road and spends most of his time in a drunk stupor spewing racist rants that demonstrate how ill-informed he is. In response, the band members barely tolerate Ray’s presence. Drummer Topper Headon knocks him around during a boxing workout and guitarist Mick Jones threatens Ray on several occasions, but Joe Strummer sporadically takes pity on the confused youngster and attempts to straighten him out. Through it all we witness angry riots breaking out in the streets, spurred on by Margaret Thatcher’s rightwing policies and racist attitudes advocated by The National Front that Ray has adopted. At the end of the film we are left wondering what will become of Ray while a substory involving black youths weaves in and out of the loosely defined narrative in an attempt to further demonstrate the bigotry affecting Britain.

Jack Hazan and David Mingay (A BIGGER SPLASH [‘73]) shot the film between 1978 and 1979 but it wasn’t released until March 1980 and when RUDE BOY finally reached theaters critics were decidedly mixed about the results. New Music Express called it a “An innovative piece of cinematic art” but The Daily Mail asked readers, “Must we show off this foul view of Britain?” Worst of all, The Clash disowned the film due to its erratic editing, which makes the filmmakers inclusion of black youths rather ambiguous and difficult to follow. Strummer even suggested that the filmmakers were advocating racist government polices in a 1980 interview with Melody Maker stating, “We didn’t like what they were doing with the black people, because they were showing them dipping into pockets … Who wants to propagate that? That’s what the rightwing use, ‘all blacks are muggers’ which is a load of rubbish.”

It is also evident that Strummer has trouble explaining his progressive politics clearly to Ray and this has led some critics to believe that The Clash was dissatisfied with how they represented themselves on screen. But if the final product is rough around the edges, that is understandable. Punk music is dissonant, transgressive and disruptive by nature so why shouldn’t RUDE BOY embody these traits? Strummer is a lyricist and he, along with the rest of the band, can best express themselves through their music. Much to the directors’ credit, they were able to capture the confused chaos that frequently accompanied the band’s live shows as well as the political climate that inspired their songs. In turn, the concert footage is what makes this such an indispensable film.

The Clash is absolutely electric on stage. They are all raw energy and instinct with rowdy balladeer Joe Strummer leading the band through one angry anthem after another including “I Fought the Law,” “White Riot,” “Career Opportunities,” “London’s Burning” and “I’m So Bored with the USA.” Strummer is accompanied by Paul Simonon slinking across the stage like a hungry mountain lion pounding out aggressive rhythms on his low strung bass as Mick Jones wields his guitar as if he were a combat veteran looking for his next gutter fight. In the background, we catch glimpses of Topper Headon pounding on the drums while frequently appearing in a bright yellow jumpsuit that resembles Bruce Lee’s costume in GAME OF DEATH (’78). This live material was shot during the historic Rock Against Racism concert in London’s Victoria Park and their On Parole and Sort It Out tours, allowing viewers to get a varied and intimate look at the band before they found worldwide success following the release of Combat Rock in 1982.

I received a bunch of messages in this vein, but yours didn’t have any political screeds or racial epithets so you get a response. Congrats.

When it comes to writing blog posts about making comics, I’ve always tried to make it clear that I am not a guru and don’t have anything close to all the answers.

Maybe that’s okay.

Survival bias is a state where people concentrate on only the most exemplary subjects and try to emulate them, not realizing that they’re the exception, not something typical. 

If you try to figure out how to be a “huge successful writer” by only looking at superstars and big moneymakers, you’re almost certainly going to fail. Don’t get me wrong, every creative person has tremendous hardships and rejections in their careers at different points, but the level of success a J.K. Rowling, Stephen King or Robert Kirkman now have is highly unusual and not something you can reproduce.

Maybe it’s a good idea to get a bit of advice from someone currently in the trenches, someone slowly building their name bit by bit who’s honest about what worked and what didn’t as they go along.

I’ll admit, there’s still survival bias involved in my career (many people pitch their ideas to Image, many more want to work at Marvel), but I try to temper my optimistic advice with reality wherever I can. It may not be as impressive, but it’s certainly more realistic.

I’ve known friends and colleagues who wanted their creative careers to appear like Athena, a perfect armored warrior-goddess instantly striking awe and fear into all around her, who sprung fully formed from the forehead of Zeus. (Seriously, that’s the legend. Mythology is fucking weird and awesome).

It doesn’t happen that way. It never will. The people I’ve known who acted that way about creativity quickly burned out on top of a pile of half-baked concepts and unfinished work. They wanted blinding inspiration and success or nothing and nothing was what they got.

If you make things you will struggle, screw up, and hate the choices you’ve made at times, but if you stick with it you will also learn and grow. Sometimes it won’t be about money. Other times that, and keeping a roof over your head, might be your only concern. Everyone’s journey is different. You can learn a bit from other people but in the end you have to go out there and do it yourself.

I know a loser who couldn’t get a book picked up by Image Comics to save his life, so he self-published a bunch of comics until he finally had a series approved. Then his first five or six launches there all failed. He threw a hail mary, but then the book barely cracked 7k on its first issue - a total dog. He’s open about once laying on the floor, face down, and thinking his career was over (not to mention being tens of thousands of dollars in debt). His name is Robert Kirkman. That “total dog”? Walking Dead.

There’s this other loser who had actually had a hit early on in his career. He had some decent runs since then, but eventually, he was scraping by doing anthology stories for a sub-genre which was rapidly dying. Dude was given the opportunity to do a book any way he wanted when he was in his mid-40s, and things finally started kicking off for him. Jack Kirby. Fantastic Four.

Outside of comics, there’s this one loser who never ever had a hit in his lifetime. In fact, every single book of his flopped sales wise while barely maintaining any praise outside of a couple of peers. He poured all of himself into one book in particular, but it was yet another flop. He died never seeing a modicum of success. His name was F. Scott Fitzgerald and the “yet another flop” was The Great Gatsby.

There’s this loser who received some decent attention in his late 20s. However, beyond an award for debut author (which is nice, but doesn’t pay bills) every one of his books received tepid, “loser”-level sales until he similarly threw a “hail mary” debuting a new character of his when he was in his mid-40s. His name is James Patterson, the character is Alex Cross, and Patterson’s the number one selling author in America, possibly the world.

Don’t get me started about yet another loser whose first book sold so poorly his publisher immediately handed back his rights, so dude struggled to find another publisher who would even look at his work. Paulo Coelho, author of the Alchemist, one of the best-selling books of all time.

The world’s built by losers who didn’t stop when they lost and kept on losing. There’s certainly no point in any creative pursuit without failing, learning, and improving. To go one further, “losing’s” not just inherent to the process, it’s the fuel. It’s how you grow, it shows you’re taking risks and trying new things. You need to lose to develop your voice beyond what you already know.

I’ve been having a lot of heart to hearts lately with my friends who are authors and artists and we’re all saying the same thing:  It is getting harder and harder for everyone who isn’t in the top 5% of their industry to get the word out about work they are doing.  

Because of the way the industries are now, many artists are not getting the marketing and push that they deserve or need.  Much of that promotion and publicity now falls on the artist’s shoulder.  Your artist friend may have a good career, but unless they are crazy lucky, or have the “it” thing of the moment, your artist friend is probably really struggling. 

“What. But they have so many books out! They are on tour all the time! They are always doing some wacky play!”

Sadly, about 90% of artists are struggling and barely making a living wage. Most have full-time day jobs on top of their full-time art careers. Remember, every new project that they do is like starting from scratch.  

For example, many of the people who I know who are not artists see all the stuff that I am doing and think that it’s going so great for me that I don’t need their  help to get the word out about my books. But I do.  All of your artist friends (even the most famous ones) need your support all the time. 

To be a great Art Ally for any of your author/artist friends I’ve drummed up a list of things that you can do.  I’ve focused on books, since I’m an author, but I’ve added helpful tips within to give you ideas on how to help your music, performer, filmmaker, comic book, visual artist and indie game maker friends.

1) Pre-order their stuff. Seriously.  If your friend has a book (or CD or DVD or indie game or comic book) coming out pre-order it.  Pre-orders give the publishing company an indication of interest and can help with print runs. Good pre-orders sometimes help a book because the publishing company may give a book a little push with extra marketing money and publicity based on those numbers.  

2) Show up.  If your friend has a reading or something, go to it.  “But I went to it once for another book!”  That’s great!  You are a supporter!  But, every book is a whole new thing!  (Go to their rock show! Play! Art gallery opening! If your friend is in a film/made a film go opening weekend, that’s when the box office counts. Or order it on VOD the week it drops. Or buy the game the week it comes out. You get the idea.)

3) When you are there, buy the book.  “But I already pre-ordered it!”  Yeah, I know.  But buying it at the store or the reading helps the bookstore and the numbers and will help your friend do another reading there the next time. This is especially important if your friend is doing a reading not in their hometown. (If your friend is a musician, buy merch because that might be how they are paying for gas.  If your friend is an artist, buy a piece of art because that might equal a bag of groceries.)  

3a) “But argh! This is not my kind of book.  I don’t read that genre.  It’s not for me.  I’m not a kid/teen.”  Sure, that’s fair.  The book might not be for you.  But I bet you one million dollars that you know somebody that the book (or other thing) would be perfect for.  Maybe a strange aunt?  Maybe your weird nephew?  Maybe your co-worker?   And remember the holidays are always just around the corner! Why not get it signed? Think of it as a back up present. You can give it at a white elephant exchange. If all else fails, get a copy and donate it to your local library or if it’s a kids book, to the school library nearest you.  

4) Signal boost it.  While it may look to you like everybody knows about your friend’s book, they probably don’t.  Remember that we are all kind of in a bubble when it comes to social media. Authors (and artists of all kinds) are always looking for new readers/audience and you totally have a bunch of friends that your author/artist friend doesn’t know.  And those friends might have never heard of your friend’s book, movie, game, music and it might be right up their alley. And those friends have friends that you don’t know.  And so on. And so on.  So every once in a while, if you like and in a way that you are comfortable with, an easy Art Ally action is to Tweet, Instagram, Pintrest or Facebook (or repost) something about that person’s art thing on the social medias! This signal boosting helps to get new eyeballs on the book (or art thing) that your friend is doing.

5) Review it / Rate it.  Perhaps you are on Goodreads? Or perhaps you frequent Amazon or B&N or Powells?  If you really are a fan of the book (or art thing), a simple way to help boost your friend’s work is by giving it a star rating or a review.  (For musicians you can do this at those places as well. Also you can add their album to your streaming site and rate it! For films rate it on Netflix if it’s there! For games there are places to do this too!)

5a) For books, on Goodreads it’s also helpful if you add it to your to read shelf.  It’s both helpful before the book comes out and when the book comes out.  So if you haven’t done it already, go to it! Add all your friends books to your to read shelf. It’s not too late!

6) Make sure that it is in your local library branch! Libraries are the biggest purchasers of books!  An author wants their book to be read!  Libraries help with that!  Maybe you are librarian?  Or someone super close to you is a librarian?  This is where you can really help to get it on the library radar by making sure that it is on the order list for your branch or for your system. Sidenote: Many libraries are too poor to purchase books this is a great place for you to donate that extra book!

7) Many books have reader guides or teacher guides.  Are you a teacher?  Or is someone super close to you a teacher?  If you love the book, consider using it in your class!  Or if not that, you can donate the book to your (or your teacher pal’s) school library or classroom library for students to enjoy.

8) Book Club it.  If you have a book club, suggest your group read your friend’s book. Or maybe just have a one-off book club and get a group of your friends together to read your friend’s book.  If your friend writes for kids, do a mother/ daughter or father /son book club with a group of people. I’m 100% certain that your author friend would be delighted to come over (or if they live far, Skype) to discuss their book with your book club.  (for musicians you could host a living room show at your house)

9) Ask your art pal to come in and speak!  Maybe your school or library has a budget to bring in a variety of guest speakers for classrooms or assemblies?  Your friend would be perfect for this.  If your institution has no budget, you can still ask your friend to come and speak!  Lots of authors have sliding scales and can organize a way to sell their own books and that can offset a pro bono visit. Also, it will help them to get new readers.  Being an art ally is all about getting new audiences for your arty friends.  (Your other artist pals would make great classroom / assembly visitors as well.)

10) Vote and Nominate.  It’s possible that there are lists that you can vote on or nominate your friends for that they may be eligible for and deserving.  This could be anything from your local publicly voted on thing to a list that is for professionals which you might be.  It’s easy for everyone to remember to nominate the big best sellers of the year or the debut books that are getting the big pushes.  But there are many midlist books that are wonderful and get lost in that shuffle.  Make sure to champion the midlist! They really need help to be seen!  (This is the same for all of your artist friends. There is always a thing that is going on where they can use your vote or nomination. You’ve gotten those emails / updates.)

11) Hand sell.  Maybe you are a bookseller?  Make sure that the book is on the shelf.  And then, when and if you love it, hand sell it! You can also help by making sure that the book is still on the shelf once it’s sold.  Many stores don’t automatically re-order a book if it doesn’t sell more than a certain amount.  If you are not a bookseller, you can still hand sell by just talking up the book to people.  (Talk up their music, game, comic, play, and movie.)

11a) If you work in retail anywhere and your pal is a musician and you like their music: Try putting their album on at work!  Who knows? Maybe someone will ask you who that swell band is?  Your pal may gain a new listener!

12) Support their Indiegogo or Kickstarter.  For your other artist friends who are making movies, plays, albums, comics, indie video games support their crowdfunding effort.  Really.  You can totally afford the $5-10 level (even if you think the project is lame.)  And it will really help them and boost morale.  

13) Be a good literary citizen.  If you are an author, remember to be a good literary citizen. Promote yourself, but also do stuff for the larger literary community. Participate and include others.  There are many things you can do.  You can organize events.  You can pitch panels.  You can show up to things. You can volunteer to be a judge for things or to moderate panels (be a good moderator if you do.) You can write essays about other works.  Remember to extend past your own inner circle of friends to include people who you might not know. Being an artist is very hard. There are many ups and downs in a career.  At some point everyone goes through a hard time and needs help. Avoid the cool kids table mentality.  Be kind.  When you are on the top, don’t forget to keep helping your community.  Diversify your literary and artistic world.  (Other artists, you know what this is in your own field.  Art citizens for the win!)

14) Invite your friend over to dinner.  Or buy them dinner.  Or have a potluck.  Everyone could use a good night out with friends and conversation. It’s a spirit booster. No lie.  

*GROSS SOBBING AT HOW UNBEARABLY BEAUTIFUL THESE ILLUSTRATIONS ARE*