Have you tried just making comics?

Let’s assume you want to “break into comics.” Of course, you may not want to, which is fine. You might have other personal goals in mind. Hopefully what I’m about to say will apply to whatever it is you hope to accomplish.

I get asked “how do I break into comics” all the time. The answer to this question is pretty simple, although it’s rare that anyone likes it when they hear it.

“Have you tried just making comics?”

I know, it sounds snarky, but you would be shocked at how often the people asking me how to break into comics have never actually made one. Ever.

I was equally guilty of this behavior prior to launching PvP in 1998. I dropped out of college in 1991 and got a day job at a sign company. At night and on the weekends I worked on submission packages for newspaper syndicates (at the time, that’s how you became a comic strip artist).

I spent five years doing this and I never completed one submission package. I never sent one off. I went through a ton of useless motions that I thought made me a cartoonist, without ever realizing all I had to do was make a comic.

PvP changed all that for me. When I was offered an opportunity by Mpog.com to get paid for a regular updating comic strip I jumped at the chance. PvP was something I threw together without much forethought. I took a comic strip about elementary school teachers I had been working on and converted it into a comic strip about people working at a video game magazine.

(here’s a comic from that old strip featuring a proto Brent and Skull)

Working on PvP was very different from working on my submission packages. Unlike my submissions, I didn’t care if PvP was good. It didn’t need to be good, just good enough and that wasn’t hard to produce. The people I was making it for were pretty pleased with anything I gave them, even if it was a lame joke, poorly drawn or a little late.

Now here’s the crazy thing: The ONLY reason PvP had a chance to succeed is because I didn’t care if it was good or not. I knew it wasn’t good. But I didn’t need it to be good to get paid. This wasn’t the next Peanuts or Calvin and Hobbes. It was something stupid I did on a lark and the money was great and I got to say I was a professional cartoonist. So I just kept drawing them.

PvP developed a following. People loved the characters and the gags. I had over 1 million pageviews each month and after moving the strip to the UGO network (this was back during the dot-com boom of the late 90s), it earned enough money to allow me to quit my day job.

Success happens when opportunity meets preparedness. I was well into my intial run on PvP when the opportunity to move to UGO.com presented itself. I was able to make my dreams come true not by trying, but by doing. I did it all with a comic strip I never even attempted to make good.

Breaking into comics is pretty simple. You just make comics. But make them. Set a reasonable goal (I usually start by suggesting completing a simple five-page story) and reach it. Then set another goal. Then another. And keep going. Don’t worry about anything but getting it done. Don’t look back. Just look forward. Keep going.

Brandon Sanderson was giving advice to some aspiring writers and he told them that their job wasn’t to write a great novel. Their job was to make themselves good enough to one day write a novel.

If you don’t love making comics, even if they aren’t very good comics, then you won’t make it. Period. You have to love the process. That’s the goal. That’s the secret. That’s all there is. It’ll never be good. It’ll never be perfect. It will always and forever just be the last thing you drew.

Once you accept that, everything will change, and you’ll have broken into comics.