The Comic
an Essay Recalling the Origins of "Life of Convenience"

I love art. I have always loved art. It's been a rocky relationship at times, but I've always found myself right back where I started, loving art. Since at least the fifth grade, maybe earlier, art has been the driving force behind most everything I've done. It was around that same time that I discovered comic books. I started with the "G.I. Joe" comic, because let's face it, when you're a kid, "G.I. Joe" seems pretty cool. From there I migrated to "The Amazing Spiderman", and then eventually into the other Spiderman titles (there were five running at the time), which have always been my favorite. I bought some early issues of "Spiderman" from a kid in my class and was amazed by the work of artist/writer Todd McFarland, who has remained one of my favorite artists to this day. Other comic artists whose work I loved included Jim Lee ("X-Men"), Sam Keith ("The Maxx"), Kevin Eastman ("Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles"), and Stan Sakai ("Usagi Yojimbo"). A short time later, McFarland jumped ship at Marvel Comics and joined then upstart publisher Image Comics. I started buying his title "Spawn" right from the start, and kept buying them every month until he stopped doing the comic himself. At this point, I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I wanted to become a comic book artist.

The years passed, and I grew frustrated with my abilities and lack of direction in art. Eventually, I gave up on the comic book artist idea and other interests came to the fore. I became interested in writing short stories thanks largely to the works of Lloyd Alexander ("The Prydain Chronicles") and Jane Yolen ("Heart's Blood"). Still later I developed a near obsession with film and screenplay writing thanks mostly to Kevin Smith's films (especially "Clerks" and "Chasing Amy"). And yet, through all of this, I kept coming back to the art, finding ways to incorporate my new interest into the old.

Flash forward to the fall of 1999. I was living in an apartment in Portland, working full time as a janitor (excuse me, Environmetal Services Worker) at Maine Medical Center (MMC), and had just started classes full time at Southern Maine Technical College (SMTC). During freshman orientation I ran into Tim, who I'd worked with several years before. Neither of us had any idea that other had started classes there, it was pure coincidence we'd spotted each other at all. We started hanging out at school, during lunch and between classes (when Tim was there at all). Later on we started hanging out after school and on the weekends, and eventually I became a part of his circle of friends, many of whom are featured as characters in Idle, ME.

At some point Tim, knowing my interest in art and my status as a lapsed comic book fanatic, suggested we put together a comic book. Our friends would be characters (and believe me, they are characters), we'd write the comic together, and I'd do most of the art. It sounded good to me, so I went right to work developing an art style that was simple, repeatable, looked good and, most of all, was fun to work with. I started drawing cartoon versions of all my friends, and the "Life of Convenience" look, a less refined version of the one I use now, was born.

As with most of the ideas I, or my friends, came up with around that time, the comic book idea was eventually scrapped. It was going to be too much work, and would have been much too expensive. I enjoyed the style though, so I kept it in the back of my mind, returning to it every so often just for the fun of it. When the web comic idea hit me, I pulled it out again, dusted it off, and finally put it to some use.

Now, jump ahead to early 2002. It was at this point that I really discovered web comics. I'd seen a few before, of course, but nothing that had ever held my attention for any length of time. All that changed the day Tim showed me a Penny Arcade comic he'd stumbled across on-line (this one, actually). Most web comics I'd seen before had simply been comics intended for print that were being reprinted, or were being tried out online; but Penny Arcade was different. The art was stylized, dynamic, full of vibrant colors. The humor was sharp and more often than not harsh. And each comic was accompanied by a long rant, or discussion, of whatever was on the creators' minds at the time. It was made by a couple of geeks who had a lot to say and didn't care what people thought of them; they were smart and articulate, and it showed. In short, it was a comic that had quality art, humor, intelligence, and attitude.

I became immediately hooked, and spent the next few days reading through the entire Penny Arcade archive. From there I found Nothing Nice to Say, and from there Oh My Gods! and Movie Punks. Before long I was regularly reading a dozen or so different web comics covering such diverse topics as video games, movies, music, paganism, anime, retail, surrealism, life in general, and even comics themselves. All of these comics did have something in common though. By publishing on the internet they had freed themselves completely from the system that had previously governed the publication of comics. There were no deadlines, no editors, no censorship, no set standards except what they set for themselves. They were free to do what they wanted with their creations. To talk about anything they wanted to in any manner they wished. The whole idea of it was alarming and exciting, and I wanted in.

I started thinking about what type of comic I'd do if I did one. The abandoned comic book concept came immediately to mind. Tim didn't seem too interested in doing it anymore, at least on a regular basis - which is about right, Tim's a music person (a damn good one) whereas I'm a writer/artist, and it's probably best that we each stick to what we're good at - so I started developing it myself. In the end, Tim ended up having quite a large hand in things once I got the ball rolling, which is fine by me. It's the people around me who make my life so interesting (to me, anyway), and who provide me with most of my ideas.

As I've mentioned, I have a great interest in filmmaking and script writing. I've written several screenplays, most short, but a few longer ones (mostly unfinished). A few of them have been semi-autobiographical, featuring characters based, however loosely, on myself and those around me. While writing these I found myself constantly going off on tangents, telling stories that were unrelated to the main thrust of the piece, telling jokes that seemed oddly out of context no matter how amusing they were. It seemed there was an endless source of ideas all around me; I had only to pay attention. When I decided to try my hand at putting together a comic strip, it was an easy decision to approach the strip the same way I'd approached the screenplays. The main character would be "Jay", a name I'd used before for characters based on myself, and would include characters based mostly on friends and family. I would set the whole thing in a fictional town I decided to call Idle, and - being from Maine - I naturally placed Idle in Maine.

It did take me a while to act on the idea, of course. First of all, I had to revise and refine the concept. A lot had changed in a couple years, including much what I thought was funny (though not my love of Monty Python!). I spent quite a while refining the art style, designing more characters, updating old ones, and figuring out how it all went together. Technical issues arose, like the fact that I still couldn't be counted on to draw consistently. Also, I'd never quite mastered the art of making a drawing look finished, everything I draw has a very sketchy look to it. After a bit of research I signed up for a Photoshop class at SMTC and bought myself a Wacom graphics tablet. I knew the basics of Photoshop to begin with, so I took to that rather quickly, and the tablet has become one of my favorite way to draw. A while later I managed to obtain copies of both Photoshop and Illustrator, and currently use an ever changing and evolving variety of methods to make the comic.

The next problem I faced was the fact that I knew next to nothing about web pages and how they worked. I went out and bought myself a book, "The Idiot's Guide to Making a Web Page" by Paul McFedries, read it cover to cover in a week, and a few days after that had a simple, but still very real, web page. That was the fall of 2002, since then I've read more books on everything from basic HTML, to DHTML, to Java scripting, to PHP, to CSS, than I even knew existed. There's still a lot I don't understand, and even more that I don't know, but I know enough to do what I do now, and I'm always learning more.

Earlier in my life I gave up my hopes of being a comic book artist due to slowly - too slowly - developing abilities and the competitive nature of the industry. Countless people all over the world have dreams of making art for a living, yet despite this, the actual industry that creates this art is very small. Only the best of the best make it. I had ideas, and the desire, but not the talent, or the grim determination it took to succeed in that kind of environment. What chance did I have? Well now, thanks to the internet, that's all changed. Now I have a platform where I can allow my art and ideas to develop over time. Where I can do what I want, how I want to, with no one to tell me otherwise. I can experiment, try new things, and occasionally fail, and it'll be ok since the only person I have to answer to is myself. And so what if no one cares what I have to say? So what if I never make a penny from my efforts? At least I will have tried. And I'm willing to bet that somewhere out there are people who will appreciate what I do.