Community collage

Do you even community, bro?

(This is another one of my @comicsworkshop posts. There’s a new comic under it!)

(Jonathan Bennett)

My take on community!

Community has been both everything and nothing for me in comics! And that's okay! 

Living in New York as a young adult, someone read my tarot and my background question was "WILL I EVER FIND LOVE!?!?" (How original, I know!) The "answer" that emerged was that I would find it through making art. This seemed obvious to me, though, as I always considered my most distinguishing feature being my goodness at artness, rather than the usual "being pretty" metric of attractiveness. (Which is funny/sad because looking back, I wasn't even that good at art, but I was freaking gorgeous.)

Perhaps then it was a self-fulfilled prophecy, because I entered the world of comics with equal parts excitement over the work I was making and the BOYS I was meeting! Many (most? all?) women's experiences in the comics world can be/have been ruined by male cartoonists and publishers and fans etc. being creeps or being horribly sexist--and I have certainly suffered that, with devastating consequences!--but my initial goals weren't 100% professional or creative, either. I wanted to meet people who were FUN and EXCITING!

I did a couple of things. I applied to that anthology, like I mentioned before. Getting my work out there. Meeting the editor. She lived with another cartoonist. They both knew a couple of other cartoonists. They thought, "let's get together every week with the cartoonists we know" and they invited me and I went! The first time I went it was a few gals and I told them about this date I went on where the guy took me on a "walk" and we stopped in a bakery and he got us each a dinner roll. They laughed so much at my story and told so many good stories themselves, it made me feel so funny and happy and appreciated. Then they did some gossiping about other cartoonists. I was hooked! It evolved over years with people joining and leaving, and turned into nearly my entire social life. We got together every Wednesday night, but we'd also just get together to draw when we had deadlines, we had Thanksgiving together, table together at shows. I made friends, frenemies, got computer help, inking help, inspiration, all of it.

Alongside the early anthology plan was an idea to go to the MoCCA festival and hand out minicomics. I didn't table, I just went around and met people and gave them my first issue of SPANIEL RAGE. Then I got lots of emails from people saying they liked it! Which was great. And that connected me to cartoonists outside of New York, where I was living.

(I don’t know where this picture or even really any of them are from. I saved a bunch of stuff from various blogs at the time.)

This was before social media. To keep in touch with all of the cartoonists all over the place, a cartoonist decided to make a message board. He made it with his own bare hands! Now you can use Slack or Signal or whatever you guys know how to use, what do I know? We talked shit, discussed comics, but also movies and candy bars, family problems, etc. That became my ONLINE social life. It lasted a long time. It was fun! And annoying! 

It was a scene. And scenes come and go. I wanted to meet vibrant weirdos and I did, but I also met people who just turned out to be weird. Or depressing. Or intolerable online, while wonderful in person. I got older and busy with my life and child and so did other people. Over time, the scene stopped being very compelling to me. My relationship to my artwork, however fraught for so many other reasons, feels better just being my own at this point, if that makes sense. And the internet, as we all know, sucks, and there's not much control any of us seem to have over that. From all of it, though, I made a handful of actual, real-deal friends and I've now known them for decades. I am so grateful for them. Talking to cartoonists reminds me of who I am! 

At this dinner I blurted out, “This is so fun!” And Kevin Huizenga looked at me nervously and said, “Are you gonna be sick?”

And I married a cartoonist, who I met at SPX, who I got to know on the comics message board, for better and for worse! In many ways it's great, because we understand that respective NEED we each have, for time and space to work. It's also bad, because we are both too broke as fuck to provide each other or have that time and space. But that's neither here nor there for this discussion. I'm just saying the comics community has given me a lot.

So for the purposes of this discussion, my suggestions are these:

- Apply to anthologies

- Go to comics shows

- Somehow make a regular thing of spending time with cartoonists in person

- Somehow figure out a way to regularly talk to cartoonists online

- Be or marry someone rich

Hope that helps!

OK here’s my new little thingy.

🦧