Let me at 'em!

I’m ready to be a comic artist. I’m ready for people who aren’t in my immediate circle of friends and family to read my Bubbles & Bicycles comic strip. I’m ready for them to laugh and love me.

I started drawing comics last January, almost 12 months ago. I drew them in my work notebook. And I drew them mostly for him. He was traveling the world for his job and we were long distance lovers. To introduce him to my world I drew the comics, crudely scanned them in and sent them off. I drew him mushy ‘I miss you’ comics and ones that showed us happy in the future. Other than those, the comics were simple stick figure renditions of my life.

I started adding to my e-mail list a few people at time. Sometimes they asked to be added but mostly they didn’t and I just started to send them.

Then it got serious. He broke my heart. And I drew it exactly as I felt it. He interrupted my life, opened by chest, pulled the heart out and silently dropped it, stepped on it, and disappeared. It was the first comic on white paper and the first one with a bit of color. I went and bought a big sketchbook for final comics and a tiny one for ideas. I carry the tiny one with me always. It’s where I jot down the ideas and figure out how to draw people with ponytails and calculate my spacing. I also keep the list of 20 people who are my subscribers.

The next step was buying bubblesandbicycles.com and working on a web design. The process kind of stalled there but the comic writing didn’t. Now it’s almost the end of 2010 and I’ve got 34 pages in the big sketchbook filled. Reading back over them it has become a diary of sorts and it’s fun to read.

This morning instead of doing work at work, I read my daily web comics and started reading two more. These people may be real artists. They draw more than stick figures, in color sometimes with computer programs. They call themselves cartoonists. I want to be their friends and I’m ready to go up to them with my sharpie pen and notebook and show ‘em what I got!