Zac Gorman

Let’s say you’re like me and by now you may have realized that probably you don’t fall into the genius category. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to make hot dogs if you’re good at it and take your work seriously. In fact, I believe it’s much healthier for a creator to abandon the hope of being a genius early and instead focus on putting in the hard work. Besides, don’t kid yourself, people FUCKING LOVE HOT DOGS. And there’s nothing wrong with wanting to support yourself from your work. In fact, it feels pretty good to fill in “artist” as your career on your tax form and not feel like you’re lying to the government.

When I was in college, I started developing what I would consider to be my first attempt at creating a Universe with a capital “U”. It was a mish-mash of fantasy novels that I liked at the time. In particular, I borrowed a lot from both Harry Potter and the His Dark Materials series. By and large, it was also total shit. Just awful, derivative, predictable shit. It was a pale comparison to the original things I borrowed from which were in fact much, much better. To return to my metaphor, I took the perfectly cooked steaks that Rowling and Pullman had written, threw them into my meat grinder along with a couple other things I loved and made my first shitty hot dog. At the time, of course, I thought it was brilliant.

Between then and now, I’ve made dozens, possibly a hundred plus such projects, most of which have never seen the light of day. I never stopped making my shitty hot dogs and I doubt that any other creator does either. And when you’re young and learning the craft, that’s okay. It’s what you have to do and it’s all part of the learning process. Just don’t expect other people to want to buy them.

As you may have guessed, this is where the problem rears its ugly head. When you’re a young creator trying to get started on a career as a creative professional, it’s likely that nobody’s gonna want your hot dogs yet. But there are other aspects of the business that you still need to learn. You need to learn how to hustle, how to get exposure and make money, how to do conventions, how to network with other artists. Even just selling a little work on the side to cut back on your hours at the coffee shop is a huge deal when you’re starting out. For a lot of young artists just getting their feet wet, this is where fanart comes in. It’s a way to start making work that people might want to buy now.

While I was making all of my shitty hot dogs, I also started making short comics about Nintendo games. I happened to be in the right place at the right time and thanks to the rabid fandom communities on Tumblr and Reddit, my work gained exposure that it never would have otherwise. It was because of fanart that I started working with Fangamer and doing video game conventions. There I met people at Double Fine, which in turn landed me my first real comic book gig doing a Costume Quest graphic novel for Oni Press. That in turn got me on as the writer for Rick and Morty at Oni. This all also led to me getting an agent, which led to me selling a series of original books to HarperCollins (maybe I’ll make my goddamn Harry Potter yet).

This was my specific path and obviously everyone’s path is different. The point is that for years before I started doing Nintendo comics, I worked on another comic series that was of equal importance in my personal development as an artist but did nothing for my career, a webcomic I did for several years called Montgrave. Both were important for different reasons, but it was the Nintendo comics that got me noticed and became the launching pad for my career.

I’m not going to get into the ethics of whether or not using corporately owned, copyrighted IP is immoral (or possibly illegal if they catch you) because frankly, I don’t care. Personally, I think there’s a difference between directly lifting someone’s art and creating original fanart of a pre-existing IP, but that’s just my opinion. As a creator of IP myself, I know that I couldn’t care less if somebody wanted to create and sell original fanart of a thing I created but I can’t assume that’s true for everyone. If you do care however, probably don’t do it.

Anyway, I didn’t write this for lawyers. I wrote this for young creatives who are constantly being told that selling fanart is bad and that they need to focus on their own IP if they ever want to be successful. You WILL have to make that transition…eventually. But also, don’t listen to anybody tell you what you should or shouldn’t do to get to that next level. This is a hustle, it’s your job, nobody takes the same path, and you need to do what you need to do to get noticed.

More so than any of its contemporaries, Gravity Falls had the rare distinction of being a show which was clearly meant for kids but still genuinely entertaining for adults—something which can be difficult to claim about phenomenal but increasingly existential shows like Adventure Time. The quality of the show, the wonderful art direction, the brilliant storyboarding, all kept me coming back, but perhaps the most lasting legacy of the show was what happened in the final few minutes of the last episode; summer ended.

TV shows in general, in particular cartoons—even more in particular kid’s cartoons—have long prescribed to the philosophy of the Endless Summer. Time doesn’t move forward, characters don’t age, and most importantly SUMMER VACATION NEVER ENDS. Part of this is a practical decision to save money in production, characters don’t change physically, backgrounds can be reused, but the bigger reason is the overarching logic of Old TV; nothing ever changes. Which worked just fine…well, until TV itself changed.

In the traditional TV model, the model upon which all series were—and for the most part still are—built, people would only catch an episode once or twice. Series weren’t meant to be watched and rewatched endlessly, especially not over the course of one binge watching weekend. But the way that TV works has changed and slowly TV’s catching up. When you watch a series all at once, you want a structure to the whole thing, not just individual episodes. You want a satisfying experience that includes a beginning, a middle and most importantly an end. You want to break the golden rule of TV, you want your characters to grow and change by the time it’s all said and done.

But the golden rule of TV—thou shalt not change—is about more than just the logistics of content delivery. There’s a real psychological cost to having TV characters change, to having summer end, and it’s one that we’ll avoid at any cost, letting shows grow stale in the process. We’ll tolerate predictable jokes and endlessly recycled scenarios just so we don’t have to risk facing the moment when the characters who we’ve come to know so well might possibly betray our expectations. It’s a trap both for fans and creators where neither solution seems like a pleasant one; either change your characters and formula in order to stay fresh, or you’re stuck in an endless loop of stale premises.

Gravity Falls however chose the third option, the one that we rarely see cartoons choose; they simply let summer end. It was bittersweet like all the best endings are, and importantly it seemed intentional, thoughtful. Gravity Falls, we realized at its conclusion, was just a story about two siblings and one perfect, magical summer. It wasn’t a TV series, it was just a story with many small parts. When Dipper and Mabel blew out the candles, they broke the first rule of kid’s cartoons, they changed, they grew up. And the show was over.

The lesson which I think can be gleaned from Gravity Falls is that the most impactful experiences are the ones that come to an end. Kids grow up, people change, summer ends. In telling a story, I believe the most powerful moments are those in which we feel conflicted. The characters are conflicted, torn between wanting to grow up and wanting to stay the same forever, and we as the audience are right there beside them, struggling with the same thing. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if their adventures could go on forever? Wouldn’t it be nice if our own could?