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Drawing conclusions

So it could be if you’re eighteen years old and thinking about going into comics you have more choices because you’ve got those three plus the comic book/comic strip scene. But it’s also possible that the comic that you’ll make a career in doesn’t even exist yet! You know it’s possible at the age of eighteen that by the time you’re twenty-four you’re going to be doing comics for mobile devices! And that market right now is just a zygote. [Laughs] You know it’s nothing but a baby — it’s a zygote.

So all bets are off. But the greatest enemy of aspiring artists are the 10,000 other aspiring artists. And the tremendous skill that they’re bringing to bear on the world. I’ve never seen so many talented young artists, you know, in all my life. I think we have probably ten times as many really talented young artists in 2006 as we had in 1996.

…In the new book I kind of ridicule the notion that you can break into comics as if comics were some fixed industry with a location and all you had to do was find it and crash through the wall and then they would have to give you a job (laughs). Instead I compare comics to a moving freight train that never stops at the same station twice. You just have to be ready to leap! Just leap and grab and ride it!

It’s very exciting. The one upside of attempting to become a comics artist is that if you fail — as most will – just as most fail in Hollywood, as most fail in acting, as most fail as musicians — but if you fail, you still have a tremendous skill set. You have an arsenal of skills which still can be useful in many many many fields. Because in order to try to become a comics artist you need to learn to become a director, actor, set designer, photographer, writer. You know? You have to understand design, graphics, and body language, facial expression, costumes — all of these things. The power of imagery. And what creative field doesn’t benefit from that knowledge?

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