My Space Marine Chaplain Failed His Fear Roll

A recent post on basically the greatest blog on the planet had me reminscing about the Good Ol' Days, and by the good ol' days, I mean the Days In Which Hot Pockets and Busty Drawings By Frank Frazetta Were My Main Partners In Crime. My friends and I, who for all intents and purposes look like regular Americans now and actually have girlfriends and wives and stuff, were all a bunch of drooling Warhammer Universe fan boys. Sure, we played our fair share of D & D (with Ben "luckily" rolling all 19s for his Paladin), GURPS (I got a 1d20 to the head after accidentally sinking someone's flying pirate ship) and even Champions (with Derek, a "DL" emblazoned on his chest that stood for "Dark Lightning", forever after known as "Dirty Laundry")...but something about those miniatures got to us.

With the fresh breeze of a more prosaic life invigorating my mind, I can step back see the Warhammer Universe for what it is, which is, namely, EXTREMELY complicated. Check out out this page: let me note for total neophytes, that none of these words affect how you PLAY THE GAME at all. They are just exposition, a mere background to give your game more context and texture. This is, in a word - and I say this in the full blush of fanboyism - a bit insane.

Or is it? I've been thinking a lot about cohesive community: my (very mild) success with Robots and Monsters has opened my eyes to a large and lusty community of people that just love robots and monsters: I've gotten emails that ask how a robot would work, or whether two monsters knew each other, or which are "good guys" and "bad guys". This is a bit amazing to me: these...things...are just the random blips in my brain when I put pencil to paper. Born into existence, they are suddenly imbued with people's presupposed notions, prejudices, imaginations.

It's around these Collective Imaginations that societies are formed. Stroll into any TV-show, comic book, or movie specific Con (I recently saw an ad in a trade for - I swear - Arrested Development Con), and it is a vast sea of humanity, all related by a simple common knowledge. It's actually quite charming, that humans seem to just need the tiniest bait of something in common to become fast friends. And the more complicated the back story, the more varied and textured that community is allowed to become. Fan Fiction is a growth industry precisely because the members of the community have outgrown the original mythology, and in order to grow as a community, they need more fodder to chaw on. It is in this fertile intellectual froth that a community shapes and supports itself: a place of belonging, which, as pack animals, we so sorely need. One excuse is as good as any.

IIt is not confined to the otaku set amongst us, by any stretch of the imagination - a full throated football game is a transcendent experience - but I argue that the geeks have a special relationship. A fantasy football team is the palest shade of role playing I know: to truly create a character, a world, a space marine squadron - this is truly the flush feeling of creation. And the the glow of creation is like no other. Allow me a bit of my secular humanism to come through, but frankly, The Bible? Totally God fan-fic.

Which brings me back around to Warhammer: I can't fault those kids ( and adults!) for being so into it. It is a unifier in a way not many things are in this Cold Cruel Modern World, and the background story is an enhancement for such imaginations. There have been moments ( more often than I would like to admit, besides to you, dear blog audience) that I have upbraided myself for not being the next Dan Clowes or Gary Baseman. I lie awake at nights, cursing myself for every failure, begrudging every success of a competitor. These are the nights I am ashamed of the most. It takes a moment like this- that people enjoy the creation, regardless of me, that my egosim fails me: I am but a creator, truly the most humble of roles. It's not me that matters, at all. It's what I make. That is what speaks to people, not myself. It's then that I truly feel thankful. The creation succeeds where the flesh is weak.

Maybe I should start my Space Marine squad back up.

The Love of The Game

I assumed there came a "Bright Lights, Big City" moment in every young professionals life, that point where you actually got an office of your own, you were given the keys to the joint, when some *called you* and offered you a job. I don't know what others thought. If my close inspection as a youth of various movies starring a member of the Brat Pack is any indication, this usually involves a BMW and a lot of shaking of hands.

I don't feel like drawing tonight: my stomach hurts, and I feel uninspired. My insistent focus on that moment above I'm sure does nothing for my gastronomic health. What's more, I'm pretty sure that moment doesn't actually happen. For anyone.

Well, that's not true: there are some extremely lucky or extremely well-connected people, for that What They Want seems to happen all at once. These folks are the people that seemingly float above the morass of the daily struggles of life and expectation and disappointment and false hope, like so many iron-hulled battleships while the rest of us seem to be in dingies made of newspaper.

I am, of course, talking about those of us of the artistic persuasion: I'm always had a keen and very specific type of jealousy for those people who found their calling in more defined realms of the world. I'm sure it's tough to get into Dentistry School, but that's what you need to do if you want to be a Dentist: you need to go to Dentistry School. Then, you graduate, and you're a Dentist. End of rinse-and-spit story. Tragically, there is no school for being what I want to be; at best, there is art school, and I don't think art school could give me what I need. Plus, I can tell you right now what would happen after I went to art school, with all the debt on my back.

For the few things that I am proud of, I can with certainity say that I am indeed a 'self-made man': with a few exceptions, I've not really ever taken money from anyone, or used family connections to leapfrog those who are more deserving of the prize. I don't mean to sound boastful, though it is my blog, and I can say what I like. But it is also a private pride. It's not really something one can bring up at parties, and as we have seen recently, it's not exactly the way the world works.

However, I will say that, as a generational group, we have been sold a bit of a sale of goods when it comes to the hot and heavy romance of what awaits you as graduate from college. Amid all the Up With Peoples, and You Can Do Its, my generation seems to have been vicitms to bit of false advterising, non-malicious though it may have been. It's not the rock star lifestyle promised by our guidence counsellors, who told us to just "Follow your dreams!", that's for damn sure. I am, as I'm sure so many of compatriots are, starting to become especially well aware of what it means to be someone who is pursuing a career in the "The Arts".

What it seems to involve is sacrifice, more hard work than could be possibly be explained, constant failure, disappointment, rejection, self-doubt, along with a few nuggets of just enough inspiration and success to keep you from pulling a Cobain. I guess I can see why the guidence cousellors don't really advertise that. It's not exactly the greatest piece of advertising I've ever heard.

So, what's the big picture, here?

There's always someone better than you? Check.

People who don't deserve it will be more successful than you? Check.

Success never comes when you need it, and it's never as much as you want? Check.

The magnitude of what you're doing never strikes you until you're too far away from it to actually turn it into what you hoped it would be in your head? Check.

And finally, trying to make a living as a creative person is really motherfucking hard?

Aaaaaaannndd....check.

What are we to make of this? As it stands, I can't really change who I am; I can't go and pretend to be someone I'm not, to pretend to enjoy a job I loathe. Frankly, I refuse. There's a lot of talk about what "Selling out" means, especially in this post-post-advtertising era of viral marketing and Jay-Z releasing his songs on Bud commericals. I believe it's much more insidious than that. Anyone can sell a picture or a song to a big corporation; that's not selling out, that's called making living. Selling out is taking what you love to do, putting it in a box, and deciding to go the easy road. It's a selling, in the end, or your interests, and hence, yourself.

So I get to go tomorrow to a design job I'm not really thrilled with, because it pays well, and I work on my comics at night, when everyone else gets to go and have fun, because I refuse to be beaten. And I'm fine with all that. But I think I need to focus less on the "success", and all that implies, and more on what I really like to do.

I guess that's the only thing I can take away from this long, rambling diatribe. I do love to make comics. Love it. That's the only thing that matters. The rest of it can fall by the wayside. I'd do it if I had no readers at all (which is just about true). Which I guess tells me I'm doing the right thing, in the end, after all.

Still doesn't make stomach feel better, though.