Am I the Patron Saint of Lost Causes?!

Comic books, rock music, emergency medicine. Maybe hopeless is how I like it.

¹This blog is kind of a triple decker joy-despair club sandwich…

First, let’s follow up on a great comic convention in New Haven, the Independent Comic Creators Convention (IC3). A whole show devoted entirely to indie comics; no rewarmed Marvel/DC IP at that show, no sir. The only basic requirement is an idea and output of an actual comic (at least one, hopefully). Room after room of of weird ideas. No editorial gatekeepers telling us what we can and can’t write, draw, print, staple, sell, or hand out for free. The only barrier is getting the thing made, which is hard enough as it is. What a beautiful concept, 150 people who are making the things they want to make. Thank you, show runner Matthew Sardo for making this show happen it and holding it in my beloved little home away from home, New Haven. If I do just one show per year, which is about my average, it’s going to be this one.

It hit me half way through the show that for just one day, the Student Life Center at Southern Connecticut State University might physically contain the single biggest collection of people + their realized weird ideas in the country, or maybe the world. I was proud to be there at my own table, selling books to strangers who wanted weird, wanted surprise, wanted stories, wanted new, wanted DIFFERENT and didn’t care if they knew who the hell I was and were glad that my characters weren’t in the latest Avengers movie. Seeing a hall full of people like that makes you want to keep going.

Even better was this guy, Danny.

He came up and said “You probably don’t remember me…”

But I did. At IC3 last year we met at my table, he’s an aspiring comic maker just starting out. We had talked about how to get a comic written, drawn, made. I have a book, By the Time I Get to Dallas Creator’s Edition, where my script sits side by side with my artist's (the great Juanfran Moyano) pencil drawings. It’s an intimate way to see the electric moment where words become pictures. I’d showed it to him and gave him a discount on it (it’s a pricey hardcover, man, can’t just give that away.) Well, since we met last year he’s been going for it, and now he’s in post production getting the pages of his first book ready for print. His eye lit up when he saw the Creator’s Edition on the table and said “This book is my Holy Grail!” He’s been using it as his model for how to write his own scripts. Goddammit, that made the day worth it.

Then it happened again…

Same story with another young aspiring comics maker, Jinyree. We met last year, I gave him advice and some of my floppy books for free. He came back, this time with the artist he’s working with, Lauren. Together they’ve got a book out digitally on Global Comix with 4,000 reads. He thanked me for the inspiration, and he bought some books this time. We talked about how writers and artists communicate, about layout challenges, about how to decide who sets the panels, the camera angles. We talked as people who are making the things we have in our heads, finding our ways.

Ny’s first illustrated story is here for free, check it out:

Jinn Force Affect: Blue

The veteran artist at the next table shook his head as these guys came by. We agreed that my strategy of giving away books to kids and waiting a year for them to come back as customers was not a rapid growth strategy. True, but whatever.

But then a little more reality hit.

The next visitor was a young woman and her parents. She’s in high school and applying to art schools, hoping to make a career as a visual artist. I was encouraging, but at the same time I could see the trepidation in her parents’ eyes, and rightly so. I was sitting there as a comics maker, but I’m also a father of teenagers, and I knew exactly what those parents were thinking: how the hell is she going to make a living at this? I didn’t say what might have been obvious, that the vast majority of the creators in that room were not making a living with their comics. Or what might be less obvious, that the country’s primary comic book distributor, Diamond, has recently gone out of business, and the model for getting comics books to readers is a chaotic mess. Also I’ve heard tell of a new fad called AI that is cornering the market on soulless (but with extra fingers…) artwork and making human art an extravagant luxury. Yes, making comics is a wonderful thing, but as a career? Gosh mom and dad, I’m not sure what to tell you. I started to feel a little bad, encouraging these kids to do a thing that is so hard and expensive and rarely successful. Are comics a lost cause? For making a living, they just might be..

Then there’s my other hobby, rock music. Believe it or not it was quite popular for decades, you can look it up. It is still played in the occasional bar or small club, and there are practitioners who pass down the tradition by word of mouth and Youtube videos. I just spent a day at a rock club, the venerable Midway Cafe, playing with a bunch of bands for a cancer research benefit. It was a blast, nothing beats it for pure immediate gratification: three chords and the truth, as the saying goes. Rock still has its people but it feels like a legacy genre, like blues and jazz. Lost cause? No, but not a growth industry.

And last and possibly least, there’s my day job as an emergency doctor that makes the comics and the rock possible. In the emergency room, this year has been the lowest I’ve ever felt, which for a Covid veteran approaching 20 years of practice is saying something. Routinely we have 25 patients waiting for beds in the hospital, 20 patients in the waiting room waiting for a bed (or a hallway gurney, or a chair) in the ED. Not enough nurses to bring them in, no way to care them. Gridlock, while people suffer, and I can’t help them. This isn’t a design flaw, it’s a feature, it’s how hospitals choose to operate now. They’re all losing money, it’s just a question of how fast. It’s not that the system is broken, it’s that there isn’t one, not one that is centered on patients anyway. And yeah I pretty much knew this when I committed to emergency medicine almost 25 years ago, but I always assumed things would get better over time. Whoops.

But there I am with fresh faced 4th year medical students rotating in the ED, looking to learn, looking to me for inspiration and advice. Gotta say, it’s easier to give advice to the comic book makers. No one sues you if you’re late making a comic book (well, yet, anyway) but they certainly may if they stroke out in my waiting room before I can even see them. I’m out of ideas, I won’t be the one to solve this problem, I’m just a grunt. Lost cause? Many of the ER docs and nurses I know are actively looking for ways out of the ER, so yeah, it’s feeling that way.

And yet.

When I’m actually taking care of patients I feel good. Bizarrely, some of those patients after waiting six hours thank me and ask me if I’m okay working there. That gets me choked up. Despite everything, I can still be a doctor for people who need me, and I’m not ready to quit that, yet. Especially now with the economy being dragged into the dark ages…

So, where do we stand?

• Comics: a long haul, an expensive labor of love, but if you stick with it you might be lucky enough to make a comic book, and that’s pretty damn awesome.

• Rock and roll: hard on the back, it might be the same old thing but I don’t care—hit a crunchy chord while yelling into a mic and it’s about as alive as you can feel, so give me more.

• Emergency medicine: condition critical, it feels pretty desperate, but despite it all, I can still take care of patients who need me, and that is why I took the job.

So I don’t know, maybe I am the patron saint of lost causes after all. I looked it up, of course there are already several saints for general and specific lost causes, but none of them for the combination of comics, rock music and emergency medicine. If I can just manage a few miracles maybe I can hire an artist to design my saint’s medallion…

Comics Update

Slowly but surely, it’s moving. I’m a few pages in to the rewrite of By the Time I Get to Dallas #6. The script I’m revising is 10 years old and basically needs to be rewritten, but writing new is more fun than revising anyway. I’ve got a packed spring schedule so getting it done in the next two months per my internal schedule will be hard, but I’ll shoot for it nonetheless.

Pain Chart

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