Carlin Cottam

Like so many before me, I set goals and dedicated myself to posting every Friday to show my work in real-time as I created a comic.

I did one post.

Oh, how I wish this was a blog to announce that even though I didn’t do regular updates, I have a finished graphic novel. But it’s not. I haven’t finished a graphic novel.

And honestly, that’s okay!

My desire to make a comic hasn’t dwindled. As you might have noticed in my blog’s tagline, I’m a stay-at-home dad. I love what I do, but learning how to make time for myself, has been a challenge. In recent months, I’ve been better at making “me time” to pursue my comic book dream and I hope that this blog will start reflecting that.

For now, I want to give a proper introduction to who I am, specifically, my story as it relates to creating comic books, and the importance I’ve found in pursuing creativity as a grown-up.

The First Comic Book

Comic books and I go way back. The first comic I ever saw was I found inside my elementary school library, a collection of Captain America comics! Superheroes weren’t new to me, thanks to cartoons. In the early hours of Saturday mornings when only my brother and I were awake, we’d put the volume of the TV just loud enough that our little ears could hear without waking up our grown-ups and teenage siblings and take in the spectacle of Batman the Animated Series. However, this Captain America comic struck me with its primary colors! I begged my mom to read it to me and I was introduced to a new world of storytelling.

That year of school, I checked out the Captain America book on the regular, much to the chagrin of my mother who thought the images were, in her words, “interesting.”

The Red Skull terrified me. Captain America’s shield in combination with his costume thrilled me. 

This led to being the first of my siblings to grab the “funnies” from the Sunday edition of our newspaper, even beating out my father to the paper. “I get the funnies next,” would often be heard, as my first-grade reading level took its time deciphering its texts.

I’d search through my brother’s copies of Nintendo Power to find the one or two glorious pages of a Mario, Metroid, or Zelda comic.

I owe a lot to that Captain America comic, and whoever in that school thought to order it for the library.

My First Comic Book

In my small town, comic books were scarce. Only a handful resided in my local library, and the area’s first comic book shop wouldn’t open until I reached my early twenties. But this lack of exposure did little to deter my love of these stories told in sequential art.

Alex Ross and Mark Waid’s Kingdom Come, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen, and Alex Ross’s Marvels were among the very few tomes my library had on its shelves. I poured over these volumes again and again.

Then, come sixth grade, I started a Comic Book Club at my school and started creating my own comics!

The rules of our Comic Book Club were simple: Make comic books and include the word “star” in your comic book “company” name. I’m not sure why I required the second rule, but rules are rules and we followed them with glorious gusto!

I am so happy that most of those comics from that time survived! The joy I felt upon completing my first comic can still be felt at this present time.

As the years went on, I drew on and off. In grade school, I told everyone I wanted to be a computer animator, and I drew and drew. By high school, I had convinced myself that art wasn’t a viable career, so I focused on other things. However, I still drew comics for my friends. Creating one comedy, superhero comic that had a “following” in my sociology class. Sadly, it seems that none of those comics seemed to have survived over the years.

The College Years

Then college came around. Again, the unfortunate–and untrue–belief that art and creativity don’t pay, convinced me to avoid all of the majors that I would have loved. Eventually, I began pursuing a history degree, something I loved as well!

Comic books snuck themselves into so much of what I did in college. One of my biggest research papers for my history degree was all about the influence of comic books on the soldiers of World War II. Comics’ influence over me never died.

Two very important moments happened to me in college that changed my belief in the pursuit of creativity. First, I took a fiction writing class from (cue shameless namedrop) Brandon Sanderson. That class taught me to find the time to write fiction, even if I was too busy with college. A lesson I’m still learning today.

The second event held just as much meaning even if the teacher wasn’t an award-winning author. On a fiction writing assignment for her class, an adjunct professor left a very encouraging note. She commented that there was something in my writing and that I shouldn’t ever stop.

That was it, but that one comment meant still means the world to me! I don’t remember that professor’s name, but her comment will always be with me. When I’m at my most discouraged, I think of that little note. The kindness of teachers reaches beyond the years they teach and is so important to their students. Thank you, adjunct professor, wherever you are!

Those two moments in college helped me to make space in my life for creative pursuits.

Pandemics and Pursuing Creativity

As I am nearly a decade out of college and, as I mentioned earlier, a stay-at-home dad, I have learned and relearned the importance of having my own creative pursuits.

Creativity, comics, fiction writing, they’ve all been with me for a long time. When I was a school teacher I created an art unit where my students created comics of their own! I even scored a job in marketing and SEO because an idea I shared for a comic book idea delighted my interviewers. However, the understanding that pursuing creativity enriches my life has been a more recent lesson.

And a lot of that lesson was learned during the pandemic.

What a thing that was! Sheltering at home had its own set of hardships, but I also found myself rediscovering the need to be creative. I started drawing more regularly. My love of reading returned and I joined online book clubs. I started seeking out new comic books and novels to read. Then one day, my wife surprised me with an iPad and an Apple Pencil. With these new tools and the brilliant Procreate app, creating had never been so accessible!

Recent Creative Pursuits

The pandemic’s creative pursuits gave me a new drive to make a comic book just as my sixth-grader self would have wanted.

With the Apple Pencil in hand, I hit the design process hard and came up with a sci-fi comic that I hoped I could produce on the regular.

A new character was born! RX was a sci-fi marine ready to jump into battle, and I was so excited to be making that sixth grader happy!

And then it all fell apart…

I got so excited I decided to blog on it weekly. However, soon after that post, I found myself stumbling atop my own creation. There is zero shame in creating something to sell to others, but I found myself putting undue pressure on myself and RX.

Every Web Toon success story I read about made me dread what I was creating. I rushed to get something published on social media. Then I started reading about the dreaded algorithm and started making things to feed it.

RX though created out of pure joy, became a social media employee.

Story became secondary.

Fun became secondary.

I started creating for the wrong reasons. 

Case in point, I could tell I wasn’t loving what I created because I kept taking these panels I made to fit perfectly in a social media post and found myself recutting them and redrawing them to make comic pages.

Working on RX started to become exhausting. I created quite a bit in the world of RX, but it just felt like it was missing something.

So I stopped. I reevaluated the story I was writing, and I stopped posting on social media just to feed the posting machine.

I will post more about my lessons learned from RX next time, but my work on RX taught me that nothing is wasted. My creative pursuit that took the form of RX taught me so much and gave me that fire to keep making comics. I’m taking what I learned and trying again!

Creativity and Today

That brings us to today, my casual reader. I’m still drawing, I’m still writing, and I’m still trying to share that journey with others.

Will I blog my journey every week? Hopefully. But more importantly, I want to use this platform not just to create my work, but in the hopes of inspiring others to pursue their own creativity. Pursuing creativity as a grown-up has been valuable to me. It boosts my mental health, it gives me something to look forward to, and it’s super fun!

In the meantime, get writing, get drawing, or get whatever-ing it is that gets you creative, and come join me on this ride!