Author: Kelci

1. The Neighborhood: is there a lot of crime there? How close is it to all the important stuff like grocery stores and your workplace? Are your neighbors nice? Are they old or young? Do they have lots of parties?
2. The Rent: This is exceptionally important. Not only how much it is, but what utilities are covered on there (water, sewage, trash, gas, etc)? I’ve found that most times, rent covers everything but electricity or gas, and you’ll have to call the electric and gas companies separately to work out a plan to get any. If you find a place that has rent that covers electricity or gas, be sure to double check and ask.
3. Parking: especially for those of us with cars or bikes, is there a place to park them? You don’t need a garage unless you absolutely want one. It’ll help, though, if you can keep your car close to your apartment. Are there other places to park, like parking lots in front of the building? Does parking get full quickly?
4. “Not Metro Approved”: I came across this quote a couple of times in different listings, and if you don’t know what it means, here’s what I know: in the Sandusky, OH area, “Not Metro Approved” means it’s not low-income housing. THIS IS GOOD. The only people who get low-income housing are people on welfare or who are otherwise people you wouldn’t want to associate with because of drugs or something. If you find a listing for an apartment that says, “Not Metro Approved”, it’s usually a good sign. Still don’t discredit listings that don’t have that. Just take a good look at the neighborhood and the apartment and talk to the landlord.
5. Washer/Dryer or Laundromats: I have been warned that to find an apartment with a washer/dryer hookup is exceptionally rare. If you can find one, and it’s in your budget, GET IT! Otherwise, see if there’s a laundromat close-by. (As an aside, if you can hang-dry your clothes, do it: not only does it save you quarters, but it saves energy and your clothes themselves. Those lint traps you see in dryers? That’s all the lint falling off your clothes when you dry them. That’s right: your clothes are falling apart in the machine. Hang-drying them will help make sure your clothes last longer. If you have to machine-dry larger things like jeans, towels, or bedsheets, that’s fine. Those things are sturdy enough to withstand dryers.)
6. Your Budget: The most important, and this was something my mom told me (and since she rented apartments for years before she got into home-ownership, I can trust her on this): Your rent, including gas and electric, should not exceed how much you make at your workplace in two weeks. So let’s say I work at a job that pays $8/hour and I work 40 hours a week. In one week, I earned $320, and in two weeks, that’s $640. So my rent then, including gas and electric, should not exceed $640 dollars. AT ALL. If you stick with this system, it’ll work like this: If you work a job where you’re paid every other week, your first paycheck of the month can cover rent, and your next paycheck of the month can cover stuff like saving it back, groceries, and stuff like phone or internet bills, as well as fun stuff.

Not gonna’ lie, I’m in the middle of a pickle. I have been for at least two months now.

See, I work as a caricature artist at an amusement park. It’s seasonal employment, so I would usually work until school started up again. For the last three years, I enjoyed my job. True, there were the occasional frustrating customers and rainy days that ruined business, but I loved what I did. I felt like I was bringing joy to people, and that meant something to me.

Then came this summer. My third year of doing this job. I’m graduated and out of school, so I could stick at this caricature job longer.

I’m starting to think it might have been a mistake.

Staying as long as I have this season made me really hate my job. I hated the customers after a certain point because they would complain about my drawing or say I drew their kids’ teeth weird or (this last one happens far more often than you think) start a line that would only end an hour after the park closes.

There are other reasons, too, but suffice to say, I was really starting to not like my job.

My friends and family keep saying, “But you’re being paid to draw! It’s what you love to do! And you’re making lots of money out of it!”

This is different.

For one thing, at this job, I’m drawing things that I don’t see myself drawing in one year, let alone five or ten. Caricatures is a skill, but once you develop a good sensibility of it, there’s not much else to learn from it. It’s a field that stalls after about two or three years because you know all the tricks, and the only way to get out of the funk is to break off of whatever company you work for and start your own business. But that’s a business growth, not really an artistic one. I feel that, at this point in my caricaturing career, I have learned everything I need to learn, and there’s nothing new, no matter what the veteran artists say.

For another thing, because I’m bored with caricatures, it’s obviously not what I love to do. What I genuinely love to do is make comics, telling stories through pictures. Comics never gets old for me, and even if I feel like I know everything, someone (this time around it’s my editor, Michael Marcus) will come over and remind me how much I still need to learn. That fires me up! I love not knowing everything in comics because I love to learn and I love to draw and keep drawing and achieving! I keep trying to do better in this field because that’s what I want to do. I want to make the best comic I can!

I don’t feel this way about caricatures. Especially at an amusement park, the mentality is more like, “Find customer. Draw them. Tell a few jokes. They pay. Move on to next customer. Do this in less than five minutes.” Lately, I had the good fortune to draw caricatures at an art festival, which felt different in some ways, but the set up only differed by a few degrees: “Customer approaches. Get them on waiting list. Draw them. Chat with customer to make them comfortable. Give them sketch. Move to next person on the list. Do this in less than five minutes.”

However, and I hope you let me indulge in a little aside here, drawing caricatures at an art festival is an entirely different game to drawing at an amusement park. In fact, I’m really tempted to leave my amusement park job and draw caricatures solely at art festivals. The crowds are different, for one thing: art festival folks tend to be more understanding of the artist and make less demands than amusement park crowds (“Can you draw copies of this sketch”ers and “can you draw a family of 9″ers, I’m looking at you). Plus, art festival crowds tolerate your personality quirks more. I sang a song about Nilla Wafer Top Hats for a 13-year-old girl at the art festival and people loved it! People at amusement parks tend to give the hairy eyeball more often than not.

That being said, caricatures still feels like a process, and it’s a process I’m not sure I want to do day-in-day-out for more than four months at a time. I could barely tolerate it after three. And it’s a process that doesn’t lend itself to improvement over time in any way.

For those of you readers who say I’m getting paid well to do this, you’re wrong. I’m being paid EXTRAVAGANTLY WELL to do this job. Trust me, I’m sitting on more money now after four months of working than I have ever earned in any job before this.

But here’s the thing, and my friend Casey made a good point of this last time we had lunch together: You can work a job that gets you lots of money, but what will you do with it? You can’t buy happiness. Trust me, you can’t. I might have all the anime I could ever want to watch and buy whatever food and clothes I want, but that just keeps me wanting more shit. I DON’T WANT MORE SHIT. I WANT TO ENJOY WHAT I DO. While I have made more time to make comics, I feel like now my job is preventing me from working on my comics! I miss being able to brainstorm story ideas while at my work place and getting paid for it!

Ultimately, that’s why I want to leave my caricature job and work somewhere new. I’ve worked in libraries, and I’ve worked as a janitor, and I am honestly comfortable with getting either of those jobs until I get my comics off the ground and in the hands of publishers or readers. Working as a librarian or janitor suits me well: I work independently and get my shit done, but I have the ability to think as I work and I get to think about my stories and my comics. Neither of those jobs pays very well compared to working as a caricature artist, but I know I’ll be happier. That’s what matters to me.

I said earlier in this blog post that I was in a pickle. Maybe I’m not in so much of one now, since I got these feelings off my chest, but it’s still a pickle: should I work a job I loved before and now barely tolerate to keep getting good money? Or should I leave for a lesser-paying but more satisfying job?

Especially with student loan bills coming in soon? I haven’t started getting them yet, but they’ll be starting around November. Those are an entirely separate panic attack.

I’m not too concerned about if my current employer find this blog post: I already made my concerns known to them. We’ve worked together to an extent to alleviate my boredom with the job, but my managers and I are both well-aware that this job as a caricature artist is only temporary. At most, I’ll be at this job until the end of October, and then I need to go somewhere new.

So….This blog post just turned into a giant emotion dump. Blurgh. Please forgive me.

No, comics on phones will not replace books.

There. I figured I should start this kind of post with the answer first, and then pull a Quentin Tarantino and tell about how I came to this conclusion.

It starts with a personal tale:

For my birthday last week, I upgraded my phone–At long last!–from a dumb-phone to a Motorola Razr. It’s fabulous.

As I was playing around with the apps, I discovered I could get Comixology on it, and better yet, I could download a preview issue of the fabulous “City in the Desert” by Moro Rogers, the newest comic from Archaia (nobody paid me to say this. Honest).

So I downloaded the first chapter of “City in the Desert” onto my phone.

At first, I was hesitant to because I’ve been rather adamant about keeping comics in physical form. I’m weary of webcomics more for technical reasons, and I’m personally biased to get actual books because I like their physicality: the weight, the new book smell, the page designs, the immediate reference for when you’re drawing and you want to see how the artist rendered this particular detail to use it in your work…

But I tried the comic on the smart phone.

And I liked it. That was what surprised me.

It’s a different experience: because phones are small, the comic can only be read one panel at a time, so it creates an almost slideshow effect. The panels transition well, plus it can zoom on particular details, and the speech balloons are actually readable. Thankfully, the art of “City in the Desert” is simple in style, and so it’s not cluttered on the screen at all.

It was fun to read the comic on the phone. It would certainly help pass the time when you’re stranded at a laundromat or something.

I think that’s the difference, though, between comics on phones and actual books.

The comic book can vary in numbers of pages and not have any severe consequences. Comics on phones, however, by nature, should be kept short: longer works take up more data space, take longer to download, and tend explore literature and art, where as comics on the Razr and such are usually there to help pass the time. A comic on a phone that tries to get into territory like “Maus” would have a hard time working on the phone, I think, because longer and/or more serious works require a little more emotional investment from the reader. It’s hard to emotionally invest in a comic that you can flip through effortlessly on a phone. It’s not that it can’t be done, it’s just that it would be difficult.

Also, there’s the issue of page design.

On a phone, you can’t see the layout of a page because it’s displayed one panel at a time. If there is a larger panel or, rarely, a full-page spread, the phone has to take it in chunks. This is a problem for a comic that likes to have fun with page layouts, or construct page layouts into a particular pattern, like “The God Machine” by Chandra Free, or “Asterios Polyp” by David Mazzucchelli. The meaning of the page design can be lost if you only read it one panel at a time in these kinds of works.

I think, however, comics on smart phones are viable. It’s an area of the comics field that should be explored a little more. Maybe, with enough tinkering, I can be proved wrong about the assumption that phone comics can’t be taken seriously as art and/or literature.

I just don’t think that comics on phones are going to replace actual books anytime soon. As long as there are comics that want to be longer, larger, thicker, and have weightier themes, there will be comic books and graphic novels.

That’s just my opinion, anyway.