The List #4: Start a Webcomic

At the start of 2015, I was working part-time at a library in southern Kansas City. At the time, my job was to sort and shelve materials. I was also working part-time staring at spreadsheets in an insurance office. I would spend the first part of the day at the insurance office, where I would listen to audiobooks and not talk to anyone. Then, I would go to the library and hang out in the stacks, shelving books, and only occasionally talking to anyone. I couldn't listen to anything while I was shelving so, instead, I just did a lot of imagining. One night, I imagined a ghost.

My imaginary ghost hung out in the 800s and 900s because that's where ghosts belong, LBR. Poetry anthologies and history books are total fodder for ghosts.

Around the same time, one of my coworkers at the library was trying to badger me into writing a comic strip for him. It was one of those kind of lame deals people are always offering to small-time artists/writers/musicians where your only payment is "exposure." I was trying to find meaning in my situation, though, and every moment I was thinking, "Surely this is all happening for a reason," so I thought, "Yeah, why not? Maybe that's the reason," and I wrote twelve strips of a comic.

Several months later, I decided that I would use the comic strip myself and start up a webcomic. I worked super hard to get one put together. I did art and formatting for the twelve strips I wrote, I started writing another several and working on artwork for those, and then I promptly ran out of steam.

For the past year and a half, I've had the twelve strips I finished queued up to be released on a blog, but I knew that if I started publishing them, I'd run out and not have anything to continue with, unless I put forth ALL that effort again.

Still, I liked the idea of having a webcomic. My brother created one. (You can check his out here if you want.) And I had done a lot of work to start one. So, I put it on my list.

I think, idealistically, when I wrote "start a webcomic" on my 2016 list, I imagined it looking like Brenna and Jones which was the one I started working on back in 2015. But I never really felt compelled to go back to working on it. So, instead, I considered a few different options.Whatever it would be, it would be good.

I would come up with an idea, try it out, and then stop before anything came to fruition. Then, I decided, what if I didn't worry about making it good, and instead I just made it something. I could try and tell funny anecdotes with quick punchlines in just a few panels. There wouldn't need to be an overarching story line. Rather than stressing myself out over clean lines and digital framing, I could do quick chicken scratch ink-drawn cartoons in a sketch book. Then, I could just take a picture and post it on instagram. My list said start a webcomic. It did not say "start a good, or even halfway decent, webcomic." 

Besides, maybe there could be some charm to chicken scratch.

So, a few weeks ago, I sketched a webcomic and posted it. I called it "Incompetent Kat." This is it:

...The not so semi-autobiographical bit is where my pet rabbit (Eleanor) sasses me with actual human language. In reality, she just looks at me suspiciously, tries to steal things, runs away, and thumps.

The next day, I posted another. Then, the next day, I posted another. All about me, being generally nervous and incompetent, and my rabbit, being rude and snarky.

After I'd been posting them for a week and a half (right now the goal is to post one every weekday), I started to worry I'd run out of material. But as it turns out, it's not too hard to think about jokes about my incompetence while I'm floundering through life. If you want to follow my webcomic, for now at least, you'll have to follow me on instagram.

Oh, also: I've also decided that, since I made the first twelve strips of Brenna & Jones, I'll go ahead and post them. One every Sunday until all 12 are posted. But that will probably be it. This is the first strip: