Getting started (Part deux)

Staring at my particularly bare site here, I’ve realized it’s harder to get started than I would’ve liked. I have a lot of ideas swimming in my head that I want to see here. I have a lot of stories to tell. I have a desire to focus on drawing and actual artwork as much as possible. And I have a desire to say as much as I can about whatever I can. And now I can’t help but feel like the guy who spreads the mayo too thinly on donkey kong’s butt. Am I being too ambitious here? Should I narrow it down to one thing and just “stick with it” so to speak?

I guess that would make it easier. I would have a better idea of how to go about things on this shitty lil’ site ‘o mine.

When I was a young grubby little outcast in elementary school, there wasn’t much I was good at. I read a lot. That enabled me to escape into my own little world and ignore the fact that people were jerks and assholes and if I wanted to escape that kind of predicament, I’d either have to jump off a building or escape to another country. Maybe a different planet. At the very least another zip code. But then, I managed to discover art in sixth grade, the very last year before I escaped to middle school. Now, middle school wasn’t much better than elementary school for me. Except that I now had a focus and a pastime. Comic books. Drawing. That was my new escape. Only it was better than just reading. I was able to create my own worlds in my head to escape to. And I very happily put them all down onto paper.

Well logically, if you’re going to think about making your own comic book, you have to think about writing, too, right? Me wanting to write didn’t spring up as a natural occurrence from my drawing, though. It sort of just appeared along side it. I remember once that I decided the write the NEW adventures of Tom Sawyer. The audacity of a mini-me. I had a cheap little folder filled with notebook paper. You know, the old multi-colored school folders we used to have way back when, that had the pockets in the covers that you could put things in? I believe that was my first serious attempt to write something. And I do believe that it stunk to all high heaven. But I won’t deny that I had fun doing it. Who knows where that folder is today? Probably discarded in a corner of the world somewhere, filled with the literary gold that only a delusional 13 year old black kid could write about a couple of white boys in a cave.

But the writing itself became just another outlet for me, since the worlds I had built up over the years as a means of escape, somehow seemed to want to actually get OUT of my head, as if they wanted to exist in the world. It was about that time that I began to have a conscious idea of the meaning of what an artist is and what an artist does, and I began to wonder if in fact I wanted to be an ‘artist’ or not.

I carried this all the way through high school, focusing on art courses, drawing in class, writing things when I had the time. Most of it was things that only a high school kid could think were great. And a lot of it was based solely off of the comics that I had read and collected over the years. It didn’t take me long to want to do my own stuff. I would draw the people I knew in class as comic book characters and pit them against each other. It was something that everybody seemed to want to see, and I became “that guy” for a time. Don’t get the wrong idea. I was never popular. I just was able to keep people entertained with what I was doing at the time. With all of that, I was seriously beginning to hone my skill with a pencil at least. I had ideas that I would be a comic book artist one day. Of course when you say something like that, you’re told you better have a back up. Looking back on it, that was the one mistake that I made. I should’ve thrown caution to the wind and done everything I could to make that happen. At that time, working at Marvel or Image Comics would’ve been a dream for me. Right now, I could care less. But right now I also probably would have my own comic book company if that’s how I feel about those places at the moment.

Yeah. I went there. Deal with it.

So I decided to go into graphic design so that I’d have something to fall back on. Looking back on things, I was too young and ignorant. Rather than put everything I had into the one thing that I loved, I meandered about, letting things stagnate. I didn’t have anyone to challenge me. I didn’t have anything to push me forward. And I didn’t have the ability to find those things within myself. The drawing skill that I worked so hard to achieve in high school didn’t take very long to weaken after college.

So now I’m here. A mediocre graphic designer in a mediocre job in a less than mediocre city. And now I’m wondering if maybe I’m attempting too much with everything that I want to do with this site.

Well fuck that.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I don’t care if I’m biting off more than I can chew. I think I’ve spent enough time becoming a puddle of inert goo. And I think it’s okay to challenge myself. Sure, stuff here might not be that great. I might even fail at it. But I think that’s okay too. As long as I can look back on it and know that I actually tried to do something here, I think I’ll be satisfied.