Ah, the identity crises of yore!

I’m on a cusp of some kind, folks. A creative discombobblement of uncertain duration has me thrown off-stride. Once I’ve completed cover art for a print version of my webcomic series "Mark the Art Guy," that Adobe-commissioned venture will begin receding into the past. It’s been a challenging commercial endeavor, and Adobe has deep enough pockets to have made it rewarding. But it’s been a real time hog as well, commandeering the lion’s share of my working hours ever since I was invited by a charmer in the software giant’s marketing branch to undertake it back in March of 2006.

That was roughly a month after this blog went online. Since then, as fate would have it, I’ve enjoyed an uptick in freelance opportunities on top of the long-running Adobe gig. That’s been a welcome change from the previous several years of comparative drought, so don’t take anything I say about its ramifications as a complaint. Between the payments from Adobe and the fees from other clients, I’ve been able to take comfort in better bank balances for a while. That’s been an unfamiliar sensation.

There’s been a downside to that income boomlet, though. I’ve had frustratingly little control over my own time, which means that the "real" part of being an artist—"following my muse," to use a term that has a grandiose ring but nevertheless cuts to the bone of my tender psyche—has gotten short shrift.

And now summer approaches. That almost always means a slowdown in freelance assignments, so unless something unexpected crops up the way Adobe’s proposal did last year, I’ll have at least a temporary increase in thinking time accompanied by a rise in anxieties over (a) money, and (b) my future.

Some of my time is already booked, of course. I will be leading a two-week comics-creation workshop at BArT, a charter school in Adams, beginning next Tuesday, and there are a couple of other personal projects-in-progress await completion. But hovering over everything is my need to find fresh ways to earn a living even as I toy with freeing my beleaguered muse from her cage—a cage I’ve been forced by circumstance to leave her pacing back andf forth in in for so long it hurts.

Freeing one’s muse! That sounds like a Good Thing, right! Artists should do that kind of thing.

But that muse of mine is one flakey dame when it comes to helping me earn a living. Allowing her to roam about my battered brain, free as a bird, can be emotionally harrowing unless I go whole hog and truly give her free reign. Then she gets spoiled by freedom (don’t we all?) and throws a tantrum if I show any sign that I have more cage-living in mind for her. The bond between her soul and mine runs deep, and I know from experience that forcing her back into hibernation after allowing her some time outdoors will be torture of a high order for both of us.

The ideal situation, of course, is to be paid sufficiently by some publisher, sponsor, or patron (dream on about that last one!) while taking whatever path my muse wants me to take for however long is required. That actually happened in 1990, when DC Comics contracted me to write and draw Stuck Rubber Baby. It had happened before that in 1983, when The Advocate signed me up for what became a nearly six-year stint drawing the Wendel comic strip series.

But it hasn’t happened often during my decades of professional cartooning, and there’s no particular reason to think that it’s going to happen this summer.

Which leaves me wondering: should I be spending what time I do have available at this juncture composing blog entries for free?

It’s hard to know. Color me uncertain.

Even more gratifyingly, rather than sitting quitely in Ithica pondering his comics in solitude, Stephen shares his observations regularly in his blog Attempts (which I’ve just added to my permanent blogroll because, well, it’s so reliably interesting).

Anyway, this Thursday Stephen chose to expend more than 4,000 words describing in incredible detail how a single page from my graphic novel Stuck Rubber Baby works. Here’s a direct link to his analysis.

Furthermore, when you visit Stephen’s blog you’ll find that this is but a single installment of a massive project that’s been underway since March. It’s called "100 Great Pages." and so far Stephen has given the Frug treatment to pages by Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Paul Chadwick, Robert Crumb, and other similarly distinguished creators. And many more installments are clearly in the pipeline since, y’know, his take on page 131 of Stuck Rubber Baby is only #11 in the series! (Stephen invites his readers to nominate their own favorite pages, by the way.)

A final note: This isn’t the first time that Stephen has cast an eye on SRB in his blog, I’ll mention in all immodesty. Check out his November 28 entry for a lengthy description of his experience teaching my graphic novel in the classroom, or my own December blog post describing his blog post. And for any of you who’re scratching your heads thinking, "What the fuck is a Stuck Rubber Baby, anyway?" I’ve got a whole section of my web site devoted to the book.

Yes, Amazon.com carries it, in case you’re wondering….

Or "in romance." Or at least horny.

Well, whichever term applies, they are all (along with many other similarly hormone-driven youths who are depicted by assorted artists in a range of fascinating drawing styles) sharing space now in a brand-new, full-color, 368-page anthology from Tim Fish’s Poison Press called Young Bottoms in Love.

Many writers and cartoonists had a hand in YBIL’s successive tales during its online run, but the gay romance comics series as a whole was the brainchild of cartoonist/writer/editor Tim Fish. And fittingly, Tim’s own keenly crafted comics dominate the book’s aesthetic landscape. He drew the book’s cover art (shown below, along with one of Tim’s cute-guy-just-popping-out-of-the-shower drawings) and he either wrote, drew, or was the sole creator of many stories within it.

Dr. Len Radin, the Drama Team’s director, tells me that launching a contest to name the mascot is high on his to-do list. I’ll let you know how that comes out.

That’s my cartoon version of Doc being photographed below, of course, as those of you who’ve seen my snapshots of Doc in previous blog posts will immediately realize.

Eddie’s mom Evelyn, being only 94, felt like hitting the road anyway. So with Harold’s blessing she has been spending the week here in Massachusetts with Eddie and me. She says the relatively dry New England air is great for her arthritis.

Evelyn was seven at the time. Her mother, back then, was keeping food on the table by rolling hand-made cigarettes for a living. This was an illegal enterprise for which Eddie’s grandmother spent several days in a Warsaw jail, says Evelyn.

Staying put wasn’t a viable family option for the long term, though. Soon after this photo was snapped she and her brother and mother would be crossing the ocean to America.

I can see her point. Under circumstances like these, instruction manuals clearly should be part of the package.