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Is Reinvention Possible This Time?

Time for my yearly review of ontological struggle.

E.R. Flynn

Aug 18, 2023

I’m sure more than a few of you can relate to this cartoon.

Ever had to reinvent yourself? What worked for you?

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul

It’s time for my annual existential crisis. I usually just blow it off with the blind hubris that has sustained me all these decades, but this time it seems different.

I think this new dread is due to a lot of factors. Some that are of my own making and some that are out of my control.

It all started a year before the death of my mom in 2019, I had been getting increasingly dissatisfied with my career choices. Freelancing as a Graphic Designer, Digital Retoucher, and Web Developer since 2005 had started to wear me down.

Sure, I made decent money, but overtime clients became more fickle, more parsimonious, and exceedingly, presumptuously wrongheaded.

While moving to Portland, Oregon was a good decision in many ways (less stress, less people, lower costs and far better beaches in Oregon), for my Graphic Artist/Retoucher career it was friggin’ suicide.

I overlooked that the Portland area was a one industry town in regards to advertising. Every Portland agency, big and small, worked like a school of Piranha to mostly chew at pieces of the sporting goods and sneaker advertising doled out by Nike, Adidas and Columbia.

The majority of the retouching business in this town is catalog retouching, done as quickly as possible and as cheaply as possible. If it wasn’t a photography studio trying to carve away your hourly fee for retouching, then it was the damn middle men of placement agencies who were trying to make you work for peanuts on the most monotonous retouching jobs possible.

For a guy who was used to working on lifestyle imagery campaigns for Fortune 500 companies, these Portland gigs made shining Satan’s anal beads on the seventh ring of hell seem like a more preferable line of work.

I also tried getting design and web development clients in the area. However let me spare you the details and just say that there’s a reason a friend and I have given Portland the epithet of “Clowntown.”

Despite all that, thankfully, I maintained a strong base of client’s back in New York City, so my dealings with Portland based work was kept to a bare minimum.

But then the pandemic struck.

Over the course of the last three years, I’ve seen a major shrinkage in almost all design and advertising work. This happened not just to me, but also to designers I know, as well as agencies I’ve worked with across the country. The whole biz took a nose dive.

Seeing this, I opted to start falling back on skills that first led me to art school, which is the desire to once again be an illustrator.

Yes, I know. It was an insane choice for a person who is on the wrong end of a midlife crisis. But heck, considering the insanity going on in the world, my decision seemed almost normal at the time.

After all, being an artist and storyteller is what has defined me from the moment I could first pick up a crayon. It only made sense to fall back on these skills.

To quote the designer and branding expert, Marty Neumeier, these are my “Metaskills.”

In case you don’t know, Metaskills are the five skills humans use to carve their uniqueness: feeling, seeing, dreaming, making, and learning. In other words, being creative in ways that can’t be co-opted by shitty AI image apps, or the phony baloney marketing peddled by companies like Adobe to the untalented, mediocre masses.

To me I figured I could use my Metaskills to figure out what would be my Illustration/storytelling “niche.”

At first, Comics, and more to the point, Humor Comics, seemed a natural fit given my happy-go-lucky, but often caustic and dark, adult sense of humor.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve considered other illustration genres.

Children’s Books - Nope. See the above comment about caustic, dark adult sense of humor. But if you don’t mind little kids needing a lifetime of therapy then I’m the man for the job!

Gaming and Fantasy Illustration - Where in my portfolio of work do you see a Dragon or a sword waving Knight? Oh sure, I may have studied Gothic and Medieval Architecture in college but nowhere did I see any Elves or Hobbits being depicted on all those church archways.

Superhero Comics - Unless DC or Marvel launches a hero called “Sarcastic Old Man” count me out.

Young Adult Graphic Novels - See the above regarding “Sarcastic Old Man.”

Editorial Images and Cartooning - I love this genre of illustration. Unfortunately the collapse of magazine and newspaper publishing, and then cheap editors using damn AI image generators, has doomed that as a viable way to make a living.

Storyboarding - I’d love doing this as well. Now if only there was enough work.

Courtroom Sketching - I love this also however see the above statement about finding enough work.

Technical and Medical Illustration - I’d love to do this. There’s great money in it. Is there anyway I can possibly work a “slipping on a Banana peel” joke into the diagram of an electric motor?

Horror and Mystery Illustration - Another genre I love. I just need to get off my lazy ass and make a portfolio that caters to it. Can I work in an image of Dracula slipping on a blood-soaked banana peel?

As you can see there’s plenty of niche’s to choose from. You just have to make sure you’re carving a niche and not digging a ditch.

Lately though I’ve felt like my comics have become a ditch where the dirt on the side walls is starting to crumble and threatens to bury me.

Part of that feeling may be the fact that after two years, I’m seeing the flaws in my choice of publishing platform.

Substack, while it has a decent community of writers, it has certain problems inherent to newsletter publishing and social media websites: Incestuous User Growth and Algorithms that inhibit growth for those creators who have low subscriber numbers.

Substack gives you tools to grow your newsletter that are better than other platforms like Medium or Mailchimp, but it has flaws that limit visibility. Namely that while you can claim a category of your newsletter listing (for example: Comics), getting an actual listing under that category is inconsistent. Sometime you’re there and sometimes you aren’t. This is due to either an algorithm which boosts users based on popularity, or it’s due to curators picking and choosing who appears in the category. Either way it limits one’s ability to be consistently found. I’ve see this happen to not only my newsletter but also to major humor magazines that use Substack.

The other problem I see with Substack, and most recently with its social app Notes, is that it’s a creative cul-de-sac. It’s akin to an outdoor Saturday Flea Market where only the respective sellers show up. Someone forgot to put flyers up around the internet to let other folks know about the event.

They really need to work on getting more than just Substackers to use Notes if it’s to be any vehicle for newsletter growth and promotion.

These little quibbles have definitely contributed in a small way to my existential crisis.

Overall though, I think I need to reinvent the way I’m approaching illustration and storytelling. Maybe dump comics entirely and focus on a less laborious way of storytelling? Perhaps more audio narratives!

Alas, such is the life of the constantly soul-searching artist.

Bless my wife for putting up with my navel gazing nonsense. She suggests that I focus on developing all the book projects I have in the works and worry less about the weekly comics. She’s probably right.

If anyone understands how to reinvent and reconfigure one’s life, it’s her. In fact my carping about ontological crisis pales in comparison with how many times she’s had to actually change careers. Lucky for her, she’s the queen of Metaskills and really should teach a master class on career changes and life alterations.

I know I’d be the first one to sign up for it.