Carlin Cottam

In the previous post, I discussed pursuing creativity as a grown-up. Especially since the pandemic, I have rediscovered the need to be creative. This need to create has driven me to do some awesome things! I’ve finished a novel, I’ve started several other novels, and I’ve been pursuing my love of comics through reading and creating.

The comic book has been an exciting pursuit. Not only does it make my inner child super excited, but it’s felt great to stretch those drawing skills that I had previously left to gather dust on the metaphorical shelf of things “I’ll get to.”

The Dark Side of Creating

However, there has been a darker side in creating. My fellow illustrators will understand when I say that social media has felt like a big part of getting my work out into the world. I have seen other creators reach incredible numbers on their social media accounts. This has led to successful Kickstarters, book deals, self-publishing success stories, and so forth. My social media accounts, however, have not had the same love affair with high like numbers and high followers.

I’ll be the first to admit that I am still learning and developing my artistic skills, but online success has eluded me. Honestly, this is not a complain-a-post. This blog is all about seeking creativity and I have found the darker side of creating is when you start creating just to feed your social media accounts and not for the fun of it. But there is also a moral to this social media complaint that is such an important lesson to creators: Nothing is wasted.

Create First, Market Later

When I came up with my original comic book character RX, I got excited. This was a comic that I would have loved to read as a kid! This was the kind of comic that sci-fi nerds young and old would have stumbled upon online one night and wanted to read all of it! This was creatively fun! This got me excited to draw and excited to write!

Then things changed.

As mentioned in the previous post, in college, I took a writing class from Brandon Sanderson (yep, some shameless namedropping again). In one of his lectures, he said something that stuck with me. He said that you need to create for yourself first. Create, draw, or write the thing that makes you excited. Once that creation is finished, then turn on your business brain and try to get that project some attention. Market your work after you’ve allowed all of the creative juices to do their job.

Sound advice. And remember this is the guy who set a new record for the most money raised on Kickstarter. He knows a thing or two about marketing, but he also makes a great story first.

After a while, I started to feel that is not what I did with RX.

Feeding the Social Media Machine

It was nerves, probably. I started to get overly concerned about the future of my RX comic and I became overly concerned with social media algorithms and “getting attention.” Hey, those aren’t bad things. I’m making a new comic (more on that later) that I hope gets attention and gets me jobs and money. It would be great! But the difference with my RX comic is that I started to lose the fun.

I worked hard on my RX comic, but the taste became sour. I designed a bunch of characters and wrote out several mini-scripts.

It is important to note here that I think my drive to create RX waned because of two things:

1- The feeling that I needed to create for social media and that attention from my various platforms proved my concept.

2- The story wasn’t quite there yet, but I kept pushing it to ” get something out there.” I took it out of the oven too early.

Nothing is Wasted

Even with all of this, nothing I created was a waste.

Several of the characters I’ve created for this comic strip I like! The world I created, though it is currently going through some rewrites, is the world I want to keep exploring!

I rushed myself in hopes of getting those likes on social media, but by doing so I sacrificed the fun of creativity!

But again, I say, NOTHING IS WASTED! I grabbed those scripts I made and those comics I drew, taking the best parts of each of them, and I’m leaving them in the oven until they have that perfect golden brown.

While I was in the middle of this creative frustration, I rediscovered a small, six-page comic script I wrote years ago. It’s a different story than RX, but it had a lot of the same themes that I wanted to hit. That six-page comic script has been thrown into the Kitchen Aid with the best parts of my abandoned RX comic. I’m excited writing stories and scripts in this universe and I’ve found just as much excitement in drawing designs for this story and script!

Seeking creativity as an adult has been all about the fun for me. When I am creating something I love, I lose track of time. I wake up excited to jump back in!

In Conclusion

Remember, let your creations fully cook until they’re done, and know that no effort is wasted.

Keep the joy alive as you seek after creative pursuits. Keep creating for the fun of it!

A Look at What’s to Come

I’ll break down the origins of this new comic I’m working on and how a nearly ten-year-old script was the creative boost needed to save the good parts of the RX universe while at the same time creating something new.

Also on the horizon is an examination of the importance of comic books during World War II. In my previous post, I mentioned that I wrote a research paper about comic books for my history degree. I’m going to post my favorite bits from that research paper here because why not? I love making comics and I love talking about comics!

Until then, my casual reader, let’s get creating!

Post Credit’s Scene

For those interested, here are the thirty-something panels I made for my RX comic. Despite losing steam on this project, there is stuff that I still love that I made here. I was experimenting with digital brushes a little bit and made something that–though incomplete–I’m still proud of what it taught me and where it brought me. Enjoy!