what advice do you have for a girl who wants to break into comics but feels horrifically intimidated? and honestly just scared?
I’m not quite sure what intimidates and scares you specifically but I can hazard a couple guesses, considering the state of comics…hopefully these stray bullets hit the mark, so to speak.
If you’re intimidated because comics can be hostile to women:You are in the company of legends. Considering Jackie Ormes, Jo Duffy, Ann Nocenti, Rumiko Takahashi, and beyond, anyone who would tell you comics is built for men is a liar who wouldn’t know a good comic if you rolled it up and stuck it up his nose, which is actually more than he deserves. People who think like that are completely unworthy of your attention, because, like literally everything else in our society, women have contributed a ton to the form and even the production/printing—Lynn Varley was instrumental in figuring out how to print a completely black comics page, which sounds dumb until you hit one that makes you cry. It isn’t so much “women deserve a seat at the table, too” as “women have always been at the table, which suckers don’t realize because they never look to their left or right.”
People will be crap to you, but they’re beneath you. You gotta Kanye that situation and look at ‘em like they’re nothing more than dust. Easier said than done—people saying things never stops sucking, honestly—but you gotta push your own personal confidence to the forefront through whatever method works best for you (fake it til you make it, strength through scorn, genuine confidence) and pray the barbs wash off you like water off a duck’s back. Find your crew and lean on them for support. Your people are more important than other people ever could be. Get a support system. Find your family.
If you’re scared because you might not be good enough:Everybody is terrible at first. I used to write fanfic and original fiction (about my friends, ha ha) in high school. I’ve read some of it since, and it wasn’t great. The fiction was the same way. I look back at what I wrote back then and it’s like a whole other person wrote it. I can see the edges of myself in there, little ideas and turns of phrase that sound like Me—my rap jokes have a long and illustrious history, apparently—but it sucks now.
Here’s what I did, though: I listened to Kanye. “Lock yourself in a room doing five beats a day for three summers.” I wrote and I wrote and I wrote and eventually I hit a point where I felt comfortable showing people personal writing, instead of whatever dumb video game review I was working on.
You just gotta do it. If you aren’t happy with where you’re at, you gotta grind. Practice is everything. Give yourself a set time to draw and work on small projects strictly. Don’t expect greatness out of yourself from page one, panel one. Instead, set measured and measurable goals. Three pages a week, using different layouts, riffing on one idea several times…one thing that helped me figure out some troubles I was having recently was doing a story in a way that naturally flowed from me, and then consciously switching perspectives and approach and writing the story again. And again. And a third time.
“Work the angles, sharp and precise.”
Figure out what you like least about your work and hammer it into shape. Figure out what you like most about your work and allow yourself to genuinely appreciate what you’ve done. (This is a very hard lesson to learn. The dislike part is easy.)
If you’re scared because it’s hard:Comics can be a hard mountain to climb, but set realistic expectations and work toward them. It’s like anything else. I empathize, but you really just gotta want it so bad that not doing it sucks more than doing it. If you want to do comics, you’ve gotta do comics.
I couldn’t come up with a Motivational Kanye Method for the last one, but hopefully this helps in some way. People out there are more'n ready to support you in whatever you choose to do, and comics is only as lonely as you let it be. You’re stronger with others than alone, and others will show you things in your work that you never realized. Being scared is fine, and speaking as a dude who just took over the whole website for a big comics company scared is totally natural and inescapable…just don’t let that fear keep you from doing what you gotta do.
That’s all the advice I got. If you’re still intimidated, please…don’t just believe in yourself. Believe in the me that believes in you.
