Ceaseless Fables of Beyonding

My desire to be liked is waging war against my desire to be honest, particularly in what I draw and create. This is the central conflict for me much of the time. 

I am slowly coming out of a summer-long period of creative emptiness. I am out of practice and filled with self-doubt, because simply put, my work isn’t selling and I have been working construction and odd jobs most of this year. This would be fine if it was cutting the mustard money-wise but it isn’t. I owe people all over the place and I feel like shit all the time. I have no personal support structure; the only communication I have with other artists is parasocial. Oftentimes I feel trapped. I always feel like I can’t finish anything, either because I don’t have the time, or because I feel worthless as a functioning artist, and that I’ve wasted my life chasing a pipe dream. 

I’m not fishing for compliments here, I’m being real. Just a few years ago I had a system in place where I was coming up with new ideas every day, and every week I had at least one full page drawn. I’m just barely back in the game with Ceaseless Fables now, and only because I’m doing it in black and white, on unfamiliar paper, which has thrown my technique off temporarily. That prized “aha, I’m actually good” feeling after completing a page is vapor. It’s like I’m pretending my heart is still in it. I look at my past work and feel like I’ve lost something. 

I really screwed up trying to temper my output to “modern attitudes”. Creatively I am adrift. Nothing inspires me anymore; on rare occasions that I do have new ideas, I second-guess them by pondering whether or not they’ll be profitable. That’s fatal and it’s not how I used to operate. I create work that I like and hope that other people will like too. But now I’m in this constant battle with myself over how best to spend my time. I can’t even afford to get the wi-fi turned back on at home; I’m at the public library like I’ve been for a couple months now. As far as a space to express my ideas, it sucks ass. Everything sucks ass; my dwelling, the town I live in, the pigs who eat food and use their cell phones in this library. The library itself doesn’t suck ass. 

I feel sorry for myself all the time and no one wants to be around me. Okay. I get it. I have friends and acquaintances who would rather do anything else than hang out with a pill. But no one understands that I have lost the ability to creatively express myself that I developed over three decades. Working in my bedroom, as much as it sucks, is fine if I have an internet connection. If not, I’m just some loser wasting time playing at being some sort of “artist”. Not to mention my eyesight is going and I literally have to use a magnifying glass to read my laptop screen, or draw fine details in a cartoon. It’s a serious morale killer. 

Any time I attempt to convert the miseries of my everyday existence into comic form, I  become embarrassed and give it up. Like I’m just making myself more unfuckable than I already am. Typically I resort to putting these miseries into the lives of characters I’ve made up, but then we’re back at the barrier where I feel like I’m wasting time drawing comics no one will read. Again, I’m not fishing for compliments. No one seems to read the comics I came up on, either. It used to be considered a sign of sophistication if you enjoyed books and music that existed outside the mainstream. Nowadays you just get treated like an out-of-touch asshole. I’m really, really tired of it. 

I want a steady income that is commensurate with my level of skills, talent, and ability. Until I get that, I will never be “happy” or “satisfied”. I also refuse to temper my work to any sort of outside editorial guidelines or standards. If I felt it was necessary I would. I look up to guys like S. Clay Wilson and Ivan Brunetti. Their finest output came straight from the gut and spleen. Were Bill Hicks still alive, he would be a pariah in today’s media. I don’t understand why being uncompromising, a quality that has bore me the most artistic fruit, is such a deal-breaker in the 2020’s. Being uncompromising as an artist was once no sort of financial obstacle. The best comedy and art came from the surliest renegades. Now unless something is astroturfed into inanity, it may as well not even exist. Well, fuck that. Fuck being any part of that whatsoever. 

The encouragement I have received from you folks means a lot. It’s literally the only encouragement I receive. I sure as hell don’t get any from people in my everyday life; quite the opposite actually. 19 years ago I was a guest at the yearly festival at NYC’s Museum of Comics and Cartoon Art (MoCCA). Two years before that I was a guest at Atlanta’s DragonCon. I have no interest in “starting a second career”. I put everything into life as a cartoonist, for better or for worse. If I was alive to do so in the 1940’s, I’d have a bigger house than anyone you know. In the 1960’s, the world would be my oyster. In the 1970’s, I’d have a support system of publishers and cartoonists that would keep me in the black until the 21st century. That’s how much I have to offer. I literally live to form new ideas and create comic books. If I cared about anything else, I’d be doing it already. 

I feel a little better having purged all this. Thanks for listening. Of course I need money, worse than usual. I am fucked. Depression Trigger Numero Uno is not being able to make enough money. Why don’t my comics sell? Why don’t I have more patrons? I’m brilliant. It doesn’t make any sense. If a thousand people sent me a dollar every month, I’d be set. 

My PayPal is anderson72pod@gmail.com (Mike The Pod). Again, thanks for putting up with me.

I’m at the public library again, although I may have internet when I go back to the apartment. I am so sensitive to noise that I am wearing earplugs that I typically use for construction. Hey, it’s a public library; where else would people bark at each other and incessantly crack gum? I’m 51 years old and I’m tired of constantly pointing out the millions of ways people annoy me, It’s their fault. Not mine. I was raised in an era where kids were struck for being obnoxious in public. It was a better time in every conceivable way and anyone who tells you different is lying or stupid. Practically everything that sucks about modern life comes from the fact that about a billion people should have had the taste slapped out of their mouths as children. Almost everyone in the 2020’s acts ignorant and entitled and I’m long since over it. 

Imagine spending every single waking moment of your life stressed to insanity and aggravated. Imagine having to trick yourself into being able to stand other people, every single day. Imagine having no choice but to live in a town where the mayor and comptroller are on the news because they openly hate your skin color, and they caused five police officers to resign for that reason, leaving your precious “mOsT dIvErSe sQuArE mIlE” even more of a dangerous shithole than it already was. Imagine having to spend time around supposedly intelligent persons who couldn’t care less about the matter. Imagine working a laborious, dead-end job because the country you live in constantly points out how much they hate you and how worthless your life is to them, up to the highest political office. 

The attached video is something I’ve been working on for, if I’m being accurate, about two years. Normally it should have taken a fraction of that time, but for a multitude of reasons, the most crucial being a lack of internet (which makes the monthly Adobe Animate subscription totally useless), but also the fact that for five years I’ve tried to operate out of a 10′ x 8′ eighty-five degree bedroom situated above one or more women who, in the past, have jabbered for eleven hours straight at outdoor volume. Even working construction for eight-hour days in 90 degree weather isn’t helping me make rent. I’m not stupid; I can tell when the deck is unfairly stacked against me. I owe hundreds of dollars to other people, and with the way things are with people in this country and others, I have no confidence that life for me will ever improve. 

The video is 30 seconds long. So much time passed between conception and completion that there were periods where I forgot the project even existed, This is the only way I have been able to function without sublimating to a nefarious corporate agenda. Do not fool yourself into thinking that the world we currently live in is receptive to independent thought and ideas. Without question it is the opposite. I suffer because I refuse to toe the regime’s party line. Anyone who says different doesn’t remotely have the balls necessary to be a real cartoonist. 

Thirty years ago, if I were somehow able to fabricate the above animation, I’d be at least a grand richer. You tell me why I shouldn’t be mad at the world right now. Literally the only people I don’t currently hate, aside from family and close friends, are the people who’ve supported me in the past few years. Without them/you I’d have given up. I HAVE NO ONE ELSE IN MY LIFE WHO ENCOURAGES ME. NO ONE. Naw man, I get lectures about how I should just work a regular job and how I just make things harder on myself “trying” to be an “artist”.

Meanwhile, look around and tell me how many independent creatives you see enjoying success right now. The answer is zilch. Now that everyone fancies themselves some sort of armchair-crusading socio-political butterfly, independent humor and art are either dead or censored to death. Check out The Simpsons, Family Guy and South Park in 2023; they all suck shit. I won’t waste words pointing out the responsible political ideology; NO ONE CARES. The adherents to said ideology are hypocrites who lie with impunity and literally get away with murder. I’d sooner sit on a grapefruit knife than engage in their pusillanimous mockery of “discourse”. Their form of debate means one thing only: either I submit, or they insult and condescend and prop up enough straw-men to choke a hay-baler, They only tolerate ideologies that don’t threaten their own (as far as they can surmise with their limited intelligence). They are the proverbial hogs on ice, and as far as I’m concerned they can die there. 

So yeah, for all intents and purposes, I’m done. That doesn’t mean I quit, it means that sooner rather than later the money will dry up and they’ll win. It is inevitable. I lead an existence that by description is more of a punishment than any kind of artistic career. There will come a time where I will have no means to do anything, I can’t make it any plainer than that. I can’t even maintain my eBay store anymore, unless my roommate has been able to pay to have the internet back on (this is month 2 of no wi-fi), because I haven’t been able to pay for it since June. I was charged for an Amazon item I couldn’t return because it is impossible to access the Amazon website away from home to print the necessary label. Not that I could do it at home; my printer no longer works, so that’s “Taps” for my eBay business, unless some miracle happens. Ha ha ha.  

Maybe tell your friends that their beloved corporate creature comforts will be around long after they will, whereas I may not even make it to 2024. Pretty much no one listens to me as far as I can determine. It’s very tiresome. Hey; how come cartoons/movies/comedy/art/every-single-aspect-of-entertainment is/are so terrible? 

Gee whiz how would I know. It truly is a mystery. 

Thanks as always for your support. It’s all I’ve got aside from my health and my hamster.