TRIBES - All Our Skills Coming Together
I used to think my work was everything. It made me jump out of bed every morning. It was 100% my calling as much as it was my safe space. I was happy to be a recluse if it meant hiding in my self-created worlds. Recently though, I’ve felt a bit… restless. I guess that’s to be expected after 15 years of doing this as a job.
Don’t get me wrong I still adore creating comics, I still count myself immeasurably lucky to have the freedom to do so. It’s still what drives me. I still miss it when I’m not doing it. However, it occurs to me that perhaps I haven’t reached my potential, and that after all this time I really should have. That I’m not where I should be. That I had such high ambitions, and they were maybe too high to actually reach.
I’m not the only one. Over the last few years I’ve noticed a dissatisfaction amongst other creative friends. Friends who are, by all accounts, doing their dream jobs. Who have their own books/games/merchandise out in the world, which is surely a dream realised. They, too, are getting itchy.
The creative industry is a strange one. The successes you thought would make you happy, don’t. At least, not for any length of time. Getting a book published sounds wonderful, but for the majority of artists/authors, you do some promotion, make a few hundred quid in royalties and then watch it quietly slide out of print. Put that against the time that went into making it, and it’s a loss, at least financially.
The key, of course, is building an audience. But every creative reaches a point where that… plateaus. Social media is the most illusory of all media in this respect. I love the people I get to interact with on social media, I’ve come to consider many of them good, arms-length, friends. But I know if I’m promoting something new I’ve created, only a fraction of them will actually buy it. That’s the rule of thumb with any online interaction. And, crucially, I know that whenever I promote My New Thing, I’m only promoting it to people who know about me already. The bubble isn’t growing, the audience isn’t building. Most artists on Twitter are telling each other about their new work, instead of potential new readers.
I love social media, but I fell into the trap of thinking it’s all the promotion I need. Whereas in fact, it can be incredibly limited. Your moment is gone the second someone scrolls past you.
Perhaps this is where my slight despondency has come from, realizing that I’ve reached the edge of the bubble, and not managed to go beyond that. There are certainly things I could do to improve the situation – more interaction in the real world for one (something I’ve been woefully poor at, because I always thought being an illustrator was the perfect excuse to hide away). I also believe that artists should build themselves into ‘brands’, more than just their work. And that each of us needs to build our corners of the internet as if they were our shopfronts. It’s hard to imagine you’ll ever reach the page views of The Oatmeal, or build the same kind of nodding respect as Hewlett, but we can at least try.
There’s more to it than all that though. I wonder if part of the answer lies in collectives.
COLLECTIVES AND COLLABORATIONS
For years, creating comics and books had been purely at the mercy of publishers, and whether they would choose to employ you. The internet did a lot to change that, especially in comics and the rise of independent publishing, as comic artists began to become self-funded, building their own audiences. Often now this is what publishers look for in their artists, someone who has already built their own brand.
Getting to this point though feels near impossible for most. There’s so much chatter online already, so many other great talents, a wonderfully supportive community but again, one which is in danger of selling to itself. What if your grand idea, your character, your brand, reaches its limit and you just can’t reach any more people than you already have?
Collectives already exist in comics. It’s more than just artists building anthologies of their work together, it’s about a select few banding together and forming a virtual studio, a company through which to channel their creations. Big Punch Studios is one such, a fantastic example of talented artists pouring huge amounts of effort into pooling their creative resources. For a monthly subscription fee you receive their work as collected editions, but they go beyond that, even kickstarting a sandwich-building card game. All under the one umbrella of their studio. And all completely independent.
I’ve admired what they’re doing for a while, it seems a really smart way of not only building an audience, but exploring different avenues for their creations with the studio framework as a support. This is what I’ve always felt artists should do, limiting your idea to only the medium you know seems like a self-imposed cage for it.
Collaboration with other artists, too, is another great way to see a project come to life. I’ve collaborated with some really awesome artists before, some projects have worked out (like this great Looshkin animation), some seem fated to never see the light of day.
Perhaps, then, we could combine the two ideas. Collectives and collaborations. Perhaps what we really need to power our industry forward from the inside is to form tribes.
TRIBES - STRENGTH IN NUMBERS
The idea of a tribe is not only groups of artists banding together to work on their ideas, it’s groups of disparate artists. A comic artist, an animator, a developer, a toymaker, and a filmmaker, for example. They come together to form a studio, of sorts, a collective, a creative hub. And then, crucially, they all work on the same idea. So say one of the group has a character they really want to explore, well the comic artist draws up a bundle of weekly webcomics, the animator makes some animated shorts, the toymaker makes a real-life version of that character and the filmmaker films it in the wild, all hosted on the developer-built website.
It’s not just about everyone bringing together their collective audiences. It’s about exploring a character/idea to its fullest, stretching it out through different mediums, building its mythology. And it can easily extend from there. More comic artists could come on board and help create a printed, sellable anthology based around this character. An author could join in and write novels about the character. With the right talent, you could build apps, write songs, create puppets, sell merchandise. You could form a membership club of sorts (as the brilliant Lizz Lunney does with Fun Club), involve the audience, build a brand.
It’s still a collaboration, but it’s also a collective. It’s strength in numbers, in a fragile industry. It’s bonds and connections between creative people to create something bigger together.
And, should someone else in the tribe have an idea, then the other members can join in with that too. A fair shot for everyone. Whether the creator makes the idea public domain, so free for all, or some legality is drawn up to protect each participant’s interests (should the idea be noticed and picked up by a larger company). Whether every artist is doing it for the love of it, or Patreons or Kickstarters are involved to help fund the tribe. The important thing is the coming together.
Remember when Gorillaz first came out and it seemed such a fresh idea, music and cartoons combined as one complete product? Why aren’t we all trying that? Why do we sit on our ideas and only let them live through our own hands, rather than letting them grow and flourish through others?
It requires involvement, it requires trust. It requires more working out than I’ve done here. But the older I get, and the longer I do this, I start to wonder if my own ideas have reached their limit purely because I haven’t let them go any further.
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