The People’s Publisher

I love you, more than I love technology…

But still I love technology…..

I was watching Napoleon Dynamite on T.V. last week, and the wedding song that Napoleon’s brother Kip sings to his new bride brings a tear to the eye, doesn’t it?

I’m not sure if I can say I feel the same way though. Dont get me wrong. Working for Zeros2Heroes is the first time that I have truly been part of a global creative team. Connected by the internet, the penciller, inker, colorist, writer, editor , and letterer all live in different cities, different countries, heck, other continents. They never have to meet or even talk on the telephone. I can do my job unshaved, unshowered, or totally naked. I might be naked right now. This is pretty fun. And it’s all possible through the magic of computer technology.

Comics are inherently unstable. We oscillate between reading them literally, and looking at them at art. Unlike illustrated books, in comics, the lettering merges with the visual illustrations, growing and shrinking and morphing as they visually describe sounds and voices. Some find this instability distracting, and comics have been criticized as being a “bastard” art form, neither literature nor art.

As well, the internet as a device for creating comics is also inherently unstable. Never mind system crashes, software glitches, finicky modems that need to be unplugged and plugged, data loss, and all that. When everything is working beautifully there are so many ways to go about working on the internet it can be overwhelming.

There are other people’s blogs and posts to read, galleries to look at, reviews and articles on other comics, as well as all the emails to read and reply to, online chats, all of which could however loosely be described as work. For a bibliophile like myself, having near infinite access to information and images on the same screen where I am supposed to be working leads to looking up at the clock “5 minutes” after I sat down to check my email, and find that it’s 2 in the morning and my girlfriend has gone to bed 3 hours ago. This is why many writers have gone back to using electric typewriters or “bare-bones” word processing software and no internet on the computer that they work on. It can become so distracting that it becomes impossible to get any actual “work” done.

So, while this fantastic technology make the work possible, paradoxically, this very flexibility it makes it more difficult at the same time. So, I now set myself a time limit and schedule email, dashboard revisions, and blog posts just like a regular office job so that I don’t spend all of my waking hours in front of a screen.

Back to work…