I’ve talked myself into buying a record player. I have one in mind that I want to get today. I read around about them first, make sure I get a good one since it’ll be with me for a while. As it turns out, they’re a more expensive market than I expected. The Internet seems to have two types of articles on them: People who are really into vynil who recommend you spend $400-600 for a “basic starter unit” (without factoring in speakers), or general product hucksters who will tell you which of the crap versions at Target they like best. I’m a newbie, I clearly don’t know a lot about how these machines work, but is it that hard to find people who both know a lot about turn tables and know that “budget conscious” can’t exceed $200? Like, I want to say that collecting vynil can’t be a rich person thing, but even then, it’s not actually rich to have $600 to spare on a good record player. We’re all just that much poorer now than we were a generation ago. The system trying to keep us all poor and funneled into streaming platforms so they can rent every part of our lives to us sucks, you know? So I’m getting a record player. It’s good to own things.
Making this current comic, I’m thinking about the page in a different way than before. When I’m reading, the sense of time, the scale of the page, doesn’t always register exactly. The whole book is all one experience, you know? Making one now, it occurs to me how much time I have to fit into every page. Moreso than in previous books, I guess. A one-shot zine feels less stressful that way, because the whole story is there no matter what; with a series, I’m thinking about how different chapters will compare, stuff like that. I’m also thinking more about what I draw, and how many words will be on the page, both of which affect the amount of time it feels like a page is. If I don’t add enough, will it be too fast? How can I be more detailed on panels that people should linger on? How long do I want this page to be? I don’t have a lot of answers, and I’m not on a track to make too many revisions to the story at this point. I have as much as I wanted and felt I needed in my plan. In the future, though, I’ll be scouring other books and making test sheets and whatnot to figure out how other people get as many words as they have on their pages. I’ll probably have to figure out how to draw a bigger rough so I can draw things that’ll end up smaller at a comfortable scale for the level of detail.
Last night, I went slower with my drawing, and eventually realized it was because I was intimidated by a crowd shot I have to draw next. A sea of faces, mostly new and many that won’t appear anywhere else. It’s a lot of little decisions, a lot of things to keep track of. I had an idea of how to do it that I think will look nice, so I’ll get started on it today. I mean, not that I couldn’t figure out how to draw a crowd of people standing around. I have this vision for something more metaphorical. In general, I’m thinking more about how I draw backgrounds. I want more non-literal stuff going on. I am going to get better at drawing backgrounds literally, too. I have this fascination with patterns and visual games as backdrop.
I guess it comes down to me wanting bolder and more dynamic imagery overall. I’m hemmed in a bit by my format, in that it’s a zine that can’t be printed to the edge. That means I’ll always have a large gutter around the outside, which means thin or no gutters between panels and drawing figures over panels, things like that, won’t always look as good, certainly not as a standard. I don’t want it to look like an expansive, wild thing locked in a quarter-inch white prison. I’ve heard that it’s possible to change settings on at least some at home printers so that they will print to the edge, so I’d like to explore that before future projects.
I also realize it’s been a while since I made my sellable version of Bet Your Sweet Bottom and said I wanted to take it somewhere. I have been slow walking that. Other than enthusiasm and promises I made to myself when I interrupted the previous project to make it, I went straight into this zine series because it gave something I understood and wasn’t scared of to focus on. While I want to bring more books to a table in the future, I don’t want to wait that long because I lack confidence in what I made. You know? I need to buckle down and figure out where I can go and what I need to do to sell that book. I just feel so in the dark about everything. And who knows, it could be that I have more than one book ready by the time I table simply because you have to register ahead of time, and my opportunity at this point could be that far in advance. I should have been more serious about looking earlier, if going with one book was my goal.
It’s just so overwhelming for me. There’s so much knowledge and so many decisions. I operate on an emotional delay, and I know from experience how much worse for my experience it is to jump into something too fast because I assume it’ll be good in the end. With new experiences, like selling a book at an event, I have no metric for how much time I need to prepare. This is also something that I can’t help but think is a portent of my entire future in comics. What if I don’t sell any? If I go there alone, pursuing my dream, and have nowhere else to put the pressure? It’s a scary enough thing that I’m having trouble taking the time to convince myself that I can handle it. I mean, I’m going to be doing this no matter what, so in a way it doesn’t matter if I’m scared. If anything, it’s just a sign of how important this is to me, of how much I care, and thus need to follow through. If I sell none, then I’ll just have to go try again somewhere else. I’m already planning to lose money on this endeavor. It’s just an important step to me, to take my book somewhere myself and sell it to a stranger who saw my book and wanted to buy it. Even one that I can see in person would mean something to me.
I’m also just like…I have to pay sales taxes somehow, right? How does pricing work? How do I do bookkeeping to make sure I’m paying the right people the right taxes? If it’s all cash, can I just not tell the government I sold anything, and get away with it for more than a year? Of course, that would mean no online sales, so it’s not really an option.
Weekly Art Blog 8/3-8/10/2025
Life in the Gutters 