My school mentor, former boss, and friend Shawn Crystal interviewed me last year about my leaving teaching to do comics full-time. He just posted it up, Click the link to give it a listen, or look up Inkpulp Audio on itunes.
If you haven't listened to Inkpulp Audio, they're some of the most fascinating interviews you'll hear with comics creators. Usually craft, technique, influences, that's just setup. Shawn interviews people that he knows about a subject that they're probably just a little uncomfortable talking about, which makes for some in-depth discussions that you don't find in many other comics arenas.
Some follow-up to the interview:
• We did not lose money on the house. We came into the market the month that it rebounded.
• On the custom/corporate comics front, my friend Chad Thomas got us hooked up with Cartoon Commune, and we divide the work up between me, him, and Jason Horn to suit our strengths and speed abilities (I write and do roughs, Chad does finishes, Jason letters and colors). This is a very small percentage of our time and income but it's a nice supplement.
• We have decent insurance. Hopefully we won't need it.
• I've had the chance to work on a couple of shows doing design work since finishing up at SCAD and really enjoyed doing so. I also had the chance to consider moving to a full-time design position on a show for which I have a lot of enthusiasm and, though the idea was very tempting (mostly because of the people involved on the project, folks who I'd been fans of for years), it helped me be 100% sure that what I really wanted to do is comics. I'm still glad to have the chance to work occasionally on animation stuff, but I fretted about it a lot and came out with a certainty of where I wanted the majority of my time to be focused. That certainty is liberating.
• It has been far harder moving away from our friends than we expected, or at least than I expected. Liz and I have always been very reliant on each other, and have never had much trouble moving. This was a much tougher move than we'd ever before experienced, mostly because we were in a very tight neighborhood and Liz and Penny were very much a part of our neighbors' day-to-day lives, as they were ours.
• The comics are coming along really well. That active trying to get better drawing that I mentioned has really paid off. That doesn't mean I'm anywhere NEAR where I need to be, just that I'm a lot better than I was a year ago, which is good because I had kind of plateaued for a year or so.
• With the exception of missing our neighbors and friends, things are really good. But we do really miss them, a lot, and that has been a very, very difficult adjustment.
