Ignore Everybody - MacLeod, Hugh [22]
But often, one needs to have that big adventure before truly appreciating how utterly wonderful all that simple, mundane stuff actually is. Going full circle.
39. When your dreams become reality, they are no longer your dreams.
If you are successful, it’ll never come from the direction you predicted. Same is true if you fail.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE “CARTOONS DRAWN ON THE BACKS OF BUSINESS CARDS” FORMAT
As this book reaches its end, I’m thinking how it’s been over ten years since I first came up with the “cartoons drawn on the backs of business cards” format. And it seems like I’ve only just got them to the commercially successful level I thought they were capable of reaching.
Better late than never, I suppose.
A friend asked me recently, had I known it would take this long, would I have bothered in the first place? I have in my mind this fantasy version of myself that makes reasonable and sensible decisions, more often than not. This reasonable and sensible person, if he existed, would probably have answered, “No. Definitely not.”
But none of this is sensible. None of it ever was. So yeah, knowing what I know now, I probably wouldn’t have behaved any differently. I’m not proud of that; I’m not ashamed, either. It just is.
Was it worth the cost? Not really. It never is. Van Gogh once told his brother, “No painting ever sells for as much as it cost the artist to make it.” I’ve yet to meet in the flesh any artist who could prove him wrong.
Though looking on the bright side, it is nice after years of struggling away in obscurity to have a body of work that you’re actually proud of, one that (a) makes you a good living, (b) exceeds your earlier expectations of what you thought you were capable of achieving as a human being, and perhaps most important, (c) has given a lot of other people a lot of joy and value.
When I was a kid in college, there were very few avenues a cartoonist could take, if she wished to be successful. There was no Internet back then. There were only newspapers, magazines, books, TV, movies, comic books, merchandising, and little else. A world I find hard to imagine now. And besides, I never saw my work as particularly commercial, so even if I did give it my best shot, I never thought it would ever realistically pay off.
So in my last year of college, feigning maturity, I turned my attention to landing a job that would pay my bills upon graduation. From what I could then tell, writing TV commercials seemed to use the same part of the brain it took to draw cartoons, and I wasn’t a bad cartoonist, so I decided to give Madison Avenue a go. It looked like it could be interesting.
Somehow I managed to get a job as an advertising copywriter, straight out of school. Some skill was needed, most of it was luck, but when you’re in your early twenties and entering the serious job market for the first time, you’ll take whatever you can get.
Though I was in the ad industry off-and-on for over a decade, I don’t think about it too much, now. Some part of me has blacked it out. Besides being very hard work, it wasn’t much fun. I was very much in the ranks of what I would call the “In-Betweenies”—that is, those good enough to get and keep a pretty well-paid position in an ad agency, but not good enough to really get ahead in it; not good enough to enjoy it properly. This was the world I lived in, in 1998 New York, when I started drawing the cartoons with a vengeance. And like every other In-Betweenie my age, it was a tiring, stressful time for me.
And then the Internet happened. . . .
Over the next couple of years, yes, I drew a lot of cartoons, but I didn’t do much with them. They were just a hobby. Besides, I had a lot going on at the time, with the job and the New York lifestyle to maintain. Most of my cartoon audience back then consisted of fellow New York barflies that I had foisted them upon.
But all good things must come to an end. One day I found myself underemployed, broke, and pissed off with life