2022 – Year in Review

2022 has been an eventful year personally, professionally, and artistically. For this blog, I’m going to stick to the art.

In January, I had some nice reviews. One for my book This Wasn’t the Plan and another for Lounger.

In February, I put Lounger up as a Kindle book.

In an emotional sense, these things were positive, especially the reviews which showed that people understood my work. In a practical sense, none of the things above created sales or brought in new readers. At least not in a way that I have been able to measure.

The most important, and disturbing, fact of the year is that I started and abandoned five projects. Five. That has never happened before.

First, it was the short story “Art*ificial.”

Then it was Callisto 7, which I had planned as a long story.

Then it was The Tower.

I also tried to develop two YA stories. One was going to be called The Incident at Orphan Hill.

The other, which I finished more of, was going to be called Into the River.

In each case, I abandoned the story because I didn’t like the look of it and lost faith in it. I think this is partly due to Covid and recent events, but mostly I think it’s due the years of little to no readership and publisher rejection.

I think it’s important to understand that while I get good reviews, I send my work out to reviewers in order to get those reviews. And in most cases this is the only feedback and readership that I get for my work. I have been doing this a long time and that’s where I stand as a comics artist.

I have many emotions about this, but I don’t want to belabor them here. At the end of the day, I want to keep creating comics. But the larger purpose of that endeavor is something that I’m going to have to renegotiate with myself.

I’m still not sure what this means going into 2023. On the one hand, I want to up my productivity and web presence. But on the other hand, I am getting really tired of trying to bring awareness to my work and coming up short over and over and over again. So maybe I’m just going to focus on comics as a personal practice.

But, as 2023 begins, I am still working on “Hands.”