THE TRUTH IS

I Don't Really Know

There are those who struggle to understand why I lay bare my heart, and expose my underbelly so readily. They will tell me in many different ways to put up and shut up. They will say that I should not beat myself up, and that I’m over-sensitive. And I will politely tell them back that I am, actually, for the most part fine. That I process openly and always have. That I’m not ashamed of my feelings, and am not changing who I am for the sake of another’s discomfort.

That part of being an artist is the raw exposure of nerves, of who we are, and of what we feel.

The sharing of our creative journeys can be done myriad ways. We can package them as straight-as-an-arrow heroic sagas leading to our own greatness, free of any hint of bleak reality. Or we can go the other way, sharing every troubled or troubling encounter, every time we were wronged or exploited, all the gnarled and broiling ways life saw to it that we must fail, whilst we in turn howled into the battering, heartless winds of a forever of injustice!

Neither is wrong or right. They reflect the individual. And over the years I’ve done both. In my most broken times I probably - well, almost certainly - did taint my posts with a faint whiff of doom, the kind guaranteed to send any would-be employer scuttling towards the exits. The kind of self-loathing and doubt that forces its way out unbidden, like a needy troll desperate for any scrap of relevancy. And that’s because there’s no rules of engagement. We go into the world as independent creators in a state of virginal ignorance, wandering blindly into an utterly brutal and unforgiving arena. We have no idea at all how to handle that.

I’ve done the opposite too, and after being criticized for being too open, too honest, too (that compound word again) over-sensitive, I took to just posting the good news. The problem with that, though, is that good news doesn’t actually come with great frequency in anybody’s life, and after a very short time rings hollow and tedious.

So fair warning - if you’re going to tell me to buck up, or feel compelled to instruct me about how to better my life, what I should actually do, and how I should change my ways, then stop reading now. I’m 58 years old and 40 years into this business. I’ve worked in this industry in every role, from lettering, through art, writing, editorial, marketing and publishing to being a CCO and CEO. I know this industry backwards and forwards, from the highest peaks to the lowest of lows. From the mainstream to the indie fringes and back.

And I also know I know nothing.

I recently had a very traumatic personal experience as a result of an accident that I won’t elaborate on because it involves loved ones, and a situation within which nobody was at fault, but huge emotional damage was done to those involved. Life will do that. You should know that we’re recovering and it will be fine, but it was rough enough to give me a stammer due to the shock to my nervous system (it’s getting a lot better, but when I revisit those few dark hours it returns quite readily, or indeed whenever I feel stressed currently) and it opened a lot of old psychological wounds I had long thought healed.

What the experience showed me is that we can bury everything, brush it off, tough it out, box it away in the dark recesses of our minds, and it will STILL find a way out. And it will still affect who we are, and what we do. And that reveals that our misgiving are real, that our lived experience, our traumas, our doubts, our fears, are real. And they have an impact that you should not, ever, ignore.

So when I talk about my frustrations I am not fishing for virtual hugs - though I won’t lie, any and all positive support is a balm and gladly received! - I’m sharing a journey, and my experience of it. When I say I know nothing, it is because every new day throws up new challenges, and even situations that are replicas of earlier experiences cannot be addressed with any certainty that this time we’ll get it right. Because everything, literally everything, changes, all the time.

I won’t paint a picture of self-aggrandizing success and provide a map you can follow so you too can be a comics ‘legend/superstar’ because it would be a lie and there is no map. I won’t pretend my work sells more than it does to affect a pretense of fame and fortune. I am fiscally rich only in as much as anybody maintaining a modest roof over their head is. We lucky ones who can afford to eat, drink, clothe ourselves, and enjoy the odd trip abroad, the odd show or movie or meal out. My labors to date never paid off in that way. I’m no more wealthy that some of my teacher, plumber, IT or academic friends, and less wealthy than many. I’m still paying a mortgage. Our car is a Toyota Aygo that I look ridiculous in, being a hefty man. You can, it seems, lie your way to success. Fake it until you make it. Act successful, they say, and you will be successful. But I can’t, and won’t, do that because there are lies enough in this world, and we need to know what reality is. We shouldn’t mix up the truth of lived lives with the fantasies we create, even if it shatters the perceptions of others.

All that said, I do consider myself rich in other ways. I have wonderful friends and family. I adore my grown children and couldn’t be more proud of them. I have a great love, also, for my oft-maligned home town, Derby. I love my books, the little art I have, and appreciate the work I have been blessed to be able to do, the creations I’ve made that populate an increasing number of my shelves.

But it would be a lie to say I am not also frustrated.

The notion of my great success has been reflected back at me so long and so insistently that I have, at times, made the mistake of taking that as some kind of reality I should be living. And it has the power to suggest that I should have greater sales, greater interest in my work, greater international acclaim. The reality revealed in the number of my own books I can shift tells a different tale. And while I am respected, as far as I can tell, as an artist, by my peers and the industry in general, my reach is not great enough, and my fame is not sufficient enough to easily sustain a creator-owned title I have put my heart and soul into. That’s just how it is.

People will say, and do say, don’t do that for readership, or fame, or money, do it out of love. That’s dumb though, I have bills to pay. I can’t work for free! Some will, and do, claim a kind of moral high ground, claiming their work is done without any desire for reward. Yay! Go you. I wish it was that simple for me! Because what I do is hard, and often it is not that much fun. I do it for the endgame; to tell stories. And often things worth doing are not easy to do. I’ve spent a lifetime working to perpetually get better. That requires effort, and hard bloody work. It is not, and never has been, fun. It can be rewarding, and satisfying, and sometimes it flows out better than other times, but I’ve hated it too. And I would say that is true of pretty much any work done with intent by anybody. Art is not meant to be easy.

But as to why? Why I don’t sell enough to be one of the true ‘mega-stars’, the true legends - such as this industry has?

I still don’t know.

You will no doubt see responses to these musings with answers to the question. I can tell you, with 99.9% certainty, that there will be nothing reported that I haven’t already tried and haven’t already done. I do my best to believe that what I hear about my work is true. That I am considered an accomplished artist, and to some an accomplished writer. I do my best to accept that not enjoying great fiscal success does not lessen my work. (A little aside - somebody looking up my biographical details found me listed on a celeb site with a guesstimated income of $6 million a year. Hilariously far from the truth!) The only people that truly do well have audiences vastly bigger than mine, or film or TV deals, etc.

I mention all this because there is a sense that time will gift us time and resources to make our greatest dreams reality. But my life, much like anybody else’s life, isn’t as straightforward as that. What I do might seem glamorous, but it is non-the-less just a job - even as I reach to transform craft into art. I think we make the mistake, sometimes, of creating false expectations for ourselves, often based on the perceptions of others. We are in danger of creating delusions that may deeply torment us, just because others see us as somehow elevated. But we’re not. We’re just people.

Why some of us get lifted up and delivered life’s great riches is never clear, and has as much to do with luck as anything else. There are many creators I know who deserve better than they get, as much as there are creators who got vastly more than perhaps they deserve. They are not always good people either. It truly is a lottery. And there is almost nothing at all any of us can do to change that - if we are not to become braggards and hustlers first, artists second.

And so, to wrap up - dear creative friends, remember we’re just people. We’re pitched into the light, blinking and exposed, but we’re as fragile as the next person, and worth no more or less. I’ve let my fragile ego at times believe the folly of hollow promises, and been dazzled by hopes founded on our shared delusions. I’ve yearned for the freedoms they promise, the imaginary bedrock of fiscal security and time enough to stop, at least for a while, and to heal. But even for soft-handed artists, life is and has ever been struggle. We should expect no less.

That said, dear reader, don’t take this as capitulation. I’m not defeated. This is realism. I will still strive to make work worthy of a life spent in creativity, that will last beyond me. That isn’t disposable slop. That has the power to touch and move and inspire. I will go forward as I always have. Getting up each time I stumble, until the time I no longer am able.

Page from ‘StarHenge: A Kiss For Atticus’ issue 4.