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The Grind/Side Hustle/TikTok/Celeb-lit vs Comics

Hi everyone I've just been reading these two articles, one via bluesky and one via Neill Cameron on twitter (you probably already know Neill's comics work, if not go and find it because he is really very very very good). It's interesting where artists and creative people are right now in terms of trying to make a living from their art. The Vox article, about the hugely pressured "Personal Brand/Constant TikTokker" phenomenon, talks mainly about music but a lot of visual artists are hitting the same walls, but concluding that this is just "a thing we need to do to get paid. Get hip to it, grandad!"

Neill Cameron's piece (paywalled but you get 1 free article per month) talks about Graphic Novels/kids comics being a new feeding ground for celebrity dilettante children's authors, as he refers to them - Celebrity-Author Apex Predator. And how actually kids comics made by people who have spent decades making comics are doing pretty well thanks to publications like The Phoenix. (Full disclosure, Neill Cameron is employed by The Phoenix).

I found both of these quite thought provoking and hope they're conversation starters . It's never a popular thing to ask out loud in a public space or on an in invite only server, but there is a big unspoken truth at comic cons and meetups around the country, we seldom talk about it because it would possibly, momentarily, break the magic spell of those Artistic Community Spaces if we acknowledged it, but I suspect many of us in the comics making sphere do not make all of our income from our art. My own distant hope is to one day have a fair chunk of income at least come from comics. Currently I make a decent living as a Product and Design Manager for a kids entertainment company, so there are time pressures in my life that reduce the time I can spend drawing.

But looking at these two articles I do wonder, how possible is it?

[daveturbittcomics]

Now LIVE! The pre-launch signup for my kickstarter campaign, for "The Squire's Dog 1992 #1"

Moving back to her mother’s middle England hometown from well-heeled Putney has been the shock of Kirstie’s young life, torn away from her friends and the settled secondary school life she loved. As she flails around trying to find her place, an ancient local ghost story is being written anew, and it seems to have been on her trail for a long time…

For fans of M.R. James, The Stone Tape, John Carpenter, the Cure, the Evening Session or Hiyao Miyazaki. This is the first issue of a continuing series. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/thesquiresdog1992-1/the-squires-dog-1992-1?ref=7h6dx3

The Squire's Dog 1992 by Dave Turbitt is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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Kelvingrove in Glasgow is an incredible place and was my favourite place to go for a day out when I was younger. If you’ve never heard of it: think of your favourite museum of one type of thing, like natural history, and then keep adding bits of other museums onto it, like mideaval armour, egyptology and art. They really have a bit of everything! I think because it seemed like it contained the entire world, I wanted to go again and again. And they had a gift shop and a café, of course, and being a kid those were very high on my list of reasons for going. Empire biscuits at Kelvingrove! Such a simple thing but they blew my mind and they were the jelly tot on top of the whole trip. But probably the thing that made the biggest impression on my malleable brain, on my early visits, was the first thing you see when you go in through the heavy polished wood revolving doors: the main hall. I was sure it was the biggest space I’d ever been in, the columns seemed to reach up forever to the enormous barrel-vaulted roof, and from those hung huge pendulous lamps. I felt as though I could fall up into it and never stop. And then a musician began to play the giant church organ at the far end of the hall and a huge tsunami of sound, terrifying and wonderful, rolled out through the whole building. The whole effect was incredible, it said to me, “you’re about to experience something incredible in here”. If you ever find yourself in the West End of Glasgow, I can only urge you to go.

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An oldie but a favourite of mine. SuperBatBat, a hero for our times. Created by my son and me. Any resemblance purely coincedental.

[daveturbittcomics]

It is 29th September, 1992, in an English town. It is 3.48pm. This is the beginning of the story of The Squire's Dog.

The Squire's Dog 1992 by Dave Turbitt is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

[daveturbittcomics]

😂 (Cry Laugh) was a short comic I made in 2019 for Catford Comic And Zine Fair, inspired by a giant paper mache head I made for Halloween that year. Below, you can see me wearing the head at the fair, I kept it on most of the day. It was December though so I actually stayed very warm. In light of twitter going down the tubes, I feel like this comic - pondering where our endless culture of sour jokes has got us - now reflects something quite real. Can you survive the "marketplace of ideas"? Can any of us? I'm still pleased with the drawings I did for these pages, even if they are still quite rough. I completed the pages in under a month so that was good going for me at the time, so some details were fudged.

Another favourite memory from that day in Catford was my pal Kieron, a proponent of hand crafted books and techniques like stitching and riso printing, taking one of my hand stitched copies and saying to me "shall I just staple a load of these for you". Laugh? Reader, I "cry laughed".

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My friend Marcus Harben asked me to collaborate with him on a comic, that we completed shortly before he died. We went quick and silly, and the humour is all his. Weird Things That Happened When I Got The Fucking Cancer by Marcus Harben and Dave Turbitt is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.