Undeclared

I've been watching the boxed dvd set of one of the funniest shows that was once on television, Undeclared. Man what a hilarious show about life in a college dorm. If you haven't seen it you need to run out and buy it right away!

Just another day of the week flying by and i've found myself getting into comics again and what I love about comics is the art. Sometimes comics can be filled with pictures that fill you with inspiration and release a chemical in the brain that excites and illicits a feeling of warmth and giddyness. Comic books used to be my drug, I bought them like they were going out of style and I didn't stick to the same exact title every week. If I found an issue of some comic that hard artwork inside that I dug I bought it on the spot even if I didn't even know what was going on in the comic. I miss the smell of comics the feel of comics I miss reading comics. I need to run down to the comic shop and just buy a pile and read them over and get excited to start drawing again.

I think the main reason that I stopped buying comics altogether was out of pain. Yeah pain, you see I always wanted to be a comic book artist and never worked hard enough at it to become good enough and from time to time i'd get inspired again, I'd begin to work on a new set of sample pages to hopefully land me a job. Well one day on yahoo jobs was an ad for a comic book artist for a small comic company in Dallas that was hiring. I sent my stuff in and forgot about it.

Two weeks later.

I got a phone call out of the blue while the wife and I were watching television in our tiny one bedroom apartment. I had a drawing area set up on the couch with stacks of comics and pencils and pens and rulers and my drawing board. I had been drawing that very night working on a page of a comic I wanted to start that would no doubt take me about 10 years to complete with my working habits. On the other end of the phone was a guy from this small comic company that I have since not been able to remember the name, He told me he was looking over my sample right now while on the phone with me and he liked what he saw. GULP! Really? "Oh wow, Thanks." I could hear him flipping paper over the phone. "What do you want to accomplish as an artist?" he asked as I stared at my wife who was mouthing 'who is it?' I waved her off. "Well uh, I'd love to become a successful storyteller, I want to do my own title starring my own set of characters and I want to grow as an artist and learn everything involved in making great comics." Long Pause. I think he was writing something down. "I'd like to send you some scripted pages that I would like for you to draw and see how you handle that and if I like what I see I'd like for you to work for us."...

...Wow I could barely breathe, now I knew this was a smalltime operation but that part didn't matter much to me, it was the fact that I was hopefully going to see print, I was gonna get published! Wow I was mentally jumping the gun and I could hardly contain myself, I was excited. "I'll send this out to you and you work on it and send it to me when you are finished." He gave me a number and I turned to my wife to tell her what was up. She was just as excited and the next day I went to work with a smile on my face knowing that I wasn't going to be in this shithole for much longer. I knew that one day i'd be stopping by and dropping off the first issue of the comic i'd just completed for all to see, Hell i'd probably even sign a copy for my dick head manager. Hehe. My best friends were very excited for me and telling me, "See I told you!" I was on cloud 9.

2 weeks later.

I'd not recieved anything in the mail and had decided to call the number. I left a voicemail never to hear another word again. I was crushed.

Was it lost in the mail? Did some other artist come along? Did the business fold before it ever got off the ground? What happened? I will never know.

I stayed at that job for years after and stopped drawing, gone were my dreams and gone was what little ambition that I had. I just quit like a chump. I could've started working even harder to improve my skills and to hopefully show whoever that was on the phone what a big mistake that had made. I could've done research and found ways to expand my knowledge of improved storytelling and perspective I could've studied the anatomy and gotten the human figure down to the point where it was but and afterthought while I pounded out page after page of beautiful artwork. Nope didn't do that. Just quit.

What a lame-o. Just think where'd i'd be now if i'd only kept working at it. That was 1999.

It was my fault really I just built it all up inside and made it out like I'd accomplised something before I even drew a damn thing and I regret not working harder and doing something that always gave me lots of joy and made me feel like I was accomplishing something.

That time is now. Back to the drawing board. It's never too late, right?