How Can I Succed In Comics

Feeling the fear and doing it anyway is one of the secrets to achieving any success. All the stuff you have to know to create a comic is intimidating. Bringing your ideas online, add to the complexity. Now you have to deal with computers, software, websites, etc.. on top of comics. So how do you cope with these feelings? To put it simply, do it anyway.

Look at it this way, you suck, and I think you suck. I know this without having seen what you've done. If you really do suck, now you've got nowhere to go but up! Instead of giving your brain time to imagine and dwell on what I think, keep going. Your brain will fabricate almost innumerable ways you will fail, and it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.

Action destroys the energy of fear, and motivates you into a definite outcome. By stepping up and taking action, everything you do begins to destroy the fear, as your actual reality is vastly different to your imagined one. The imagined events in your head are always ten times worse than the actual. Ok, so I stole this paragraph from Tony Robbins.

The must-read-for-inspiration rejection story is Todd McFarland's (I'm sure I don't need to write a biography here). Todd knew EXACTLY what he wanted to be when he grew up, and at the point he felt baseball was a wash he got serious about his art. He targeted editors he liked and began sending them FIVE sequential pages a week. Every week. And he was rejected... a lot. BUT! What it did was PROVE to the editor this kid could keep up with the schedule, do the work, and turn in something that resembled a quality product. When the editor needed a fill in for an issue, he gave Todd a call who simply did what he always did... turned in five pages a week, every week. The only difference was the editor didn't have to write the rejection notice any longer. Kurt Busiak's story is quite similar, but as a writer.

THE most important thing in comics is doing the work on time, every time. The question you need to ask is whether a rejection (a personal rejection) is enough to hold you back. If it is, then you would never have survived in comics anyway, and that's okay. But if it's NOT, then quit reading the diatribe of a bunch of forum posters who have nothing better to do than psychoanalyze YOUR issues and get back to work.

About the Author

Jeff Knooren is the creator of SuperUnit5000 - In 1995 I decided to dig a secret tunnel to my bathroom. While digging this tunnel, I met a guy named Dean, but he wasn't much of a conversationalist. He sold maps to my bathroom on some "bathrooms of the stars" tour. I dream of one day owning my own tater-tot farm.