But this time, I’d actually put myself out there. Not in words, not in a picture I drew, but my actual self; my face and voice.
When I showed my sister, she said she actually laughed. Not at me, butbecause the video was funny to her.
With that, I knew I’d done at least something right.
It gave me a very subtle feeling of…happiness? No–it was…satisfaction! Yeah, that’s what it felt like.
It was a different kind of satisfaction than you’d get from watching a funny video or eating a good meal.
But that was my sticking point. I couldn’t quite articulate the difference between the two. Between consumption and creation.
What I eventually concluded was that the consumption of something leaves you feeling satisfied in the moment, whereas the creation of something has a longer lasting effect.
To elaborate, once you create something and it’s out there, you can actually go back and look at it as a record of your past self. You think “Hey, I remember when I made that! I was such an amateur back then. But I’m glad I did it.”
With consumption, you quite don’t get that.
What I feel when I consume a piece of content is one of three things. Either:
I just wasted a piece of my life. Goddammit.
I learned something and enriched my life a bit
I enjoyed this piece of entertainment.
Whatever satisfaction (or lack thereof) I derive from that work largely ends when the content does. It only continues when I watch it again, talk about it with others, apply it to my life, or think, “Hey, I remember watching that… (see #1 – 3 above).”
Creation seems to be a satisfaction that keeps on giving; in that once your work is out there, you can look back on it and know it came from you.
And while consumption isn’t inherently negative, too much can ironically leave you feeling empty after a while, with a hole that can only be filled with more content, more stuff.
To me,
Consumption is best placed as the fuel for creation. In the same way that food is fuel for the body.
Creation can provide a true sense of satisfaction that no amount of consumption can fill.
At least, that’s my conclusion until life shows me otherwise!
“Rich cartoonist” is something I’ve researched pretty often.
Characters like Matt Groening (The Simpsons) and Seth Mcfarlane (Family Guy), and Stephen Hillenburg (Spongebob SquarePants) seem to pop up on every list.
These guys have influenced entire generations with their work. They’ve affected millions, so they make millions. It makes perfect sense.
But when I search up this term, I’m really looking for independent comic creators that either make 6-7 figures a year or are financially free (meaning you have enough wealth to live on without working). As the results show up, I often ask myself, is that even possible?If so, who’s already doing that and how can I do the same?
Can an independent creator draw what he wants and make a great living doing that?
I’m willing to bet that the answer is yes. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have dedicated my life to discovering the answer for you.
But I don’t see too many examples of indie and webcomic artists, specifically. I mean, we’re talking about a niche of a niche group as it is, so it’s to be expected. Unless there’s something I’m not seeing…
I struck out the term ‘comic‘creator to just ‘creator‘ because, as I’ve observed over the years, most comic creators are actually more than just classic pen and ink artists. They can have their hands in multiple pies because comics skill translates to multiple abilities: character design, storyboarding, writing, illustration, toy design, graphic design, print-making, merchandising, involvement with video games, movies, and other animated media!
Because the versatility of a comic creator is so great, I had to change the definition in my own head to suit the wide range of ability (read: revenue sources) one could have.
When I first heard that creators of every kind are better classified as small business owners, I knew I had to change the way I thought about money.
At first, I thought all I had to do was create amazing work, and all the money would come. Turns out, that is only a piece of the puzzle.
Wealth, fame, power, (*wink*); these are all things I thought would be taken care of by the manga/anime industry I originally sought after early on in life. I concluded that if I only focused on art and story and NOTHING ELSE, I’d basically “win” at life like I assumed my heroes, Masashi Kishimoto, Eiichiro Oda, and Akira Toriyama and many more, had done.
But when I heard of the realities of the manga industry, I wondered if it was risking my mental and physical health, and years of my life was truly worth it.
At that point, I had to ask myself what does money really mean to me, and how can I use it to achieve what I actually want to do in life? I know I only need enough to be free in the financial choices I make. If I need a new phone for work? I got it. I have medical bills to pay for? Taken care of. I want to travel just for fun? It’s done.
It was this line of thinking that led my search for anyone who had carved this path out for themselves with their own art, or was lucky enough to do so. I found the Ninja Turtles guy, Kevin Eastman, and the guys that do Penny Arcade ( Mike Krahulik, Jerry Holkins) in the webcomics sphere. But their art was quite the style I had in mind so I kept looking.
After years of searching and finding people who were very close or tangentially related to the kind of wealth I was seeking I knew only one thing:
I wasn’t going to find the one embodiment of the person I was looking for with all my specific criteria. I would have to combine everything I’d learned to become that person.
But I’m still green.
I can sit and theorize all I want, but I’m not in the trenches like those who are actually trying to make a living. I haven’t sold too much of my own art or services and my livelihood doesn’t depend on it.
My only question now is, are my thoughts surrounding finance different from the artists I’ve seen?
All I know is, my goal is not to be able to one day pay rent. I’m in this to succeed.
My goal is not to one day draw for an established comic book, it’s to create my own IPs. (not knocking anyone who has this goal!)
My goal is not to buy stuff with my money, but to acquire assets.
I don’t wish and hope for all of this to happen, I’m going to MAKE IT HAPPEN.
But I can’t help but wonder if other artists think this way as well. There has to be a difference in thought that determines one’s success.
I’ll definitely expand on this idea as I come face to face with reality and see how I fare.
Time-wasting enjoyment is fairly self-explanatory. It’s scrolling through Twitter, Pinterest, and/or Instagram, or watching Youtube videos I had no plans to see. That kind of thing.
Then there’s “Life enrichment energy”; the kind with which I make myself do important tasks. Build good habits and create content. This also includes meditation, reading, listening to audiobooks, drawing. I know these kinds of activities will progress my life forward, but they take willpower to perform.
When I should be doing something I know will improve my life, but I’m busy wasting time with some pointless diversion, the frequencies become erratic and occasionally intermingle. As I’ve observed, when the TROUGH of the “Enjoyment” wave meets the CREST of the “Enrichment” wave, a brief window of opportunity opens and I have a decision to make.
Once that moment passes, I’ve made my decision. In cases where the fun of a diversion outweighs the pressure of a deadline for a project, I’ll say “Fuck it. Let’s have a little fun.”
In cases where I’ve decided to make the “right” decision, I’ve noticed that the energy level of the fun I’m having has to be low enough to stop, while my will to do great things in the future has to be high enough to pursue instead. This window of opportunity only lasts 30 seconds at the most.
With the nature of the internet and social media, it wouldn’t be long before I found another piece of content to distract myself with no matter how irrelevant. So once the window opens, I weigh my options and make my decision before it’s too late.
Otherwise, I’m caught in a limbo where I can’t fully enjoy what I’m watching or doing because of niggling feeling in the back of my head that says I could be doing something much better.
My ideal situation; the one I strive for is:
One in which I work and break at the right times and don’t feel bad about the result. I don’t waste mental energy during work periods, and I don’t lose enjoyment during break periods or use them to put off work.
I’ve become more time-conscious lately, with all the work I’ve put upon myself to do. I think more carefully about how I use my time. Especially when my day job takes up 8 hours of it.
*Womp, womp*
I’m thankful to actually have self-generated work outside of my job to do. Otherwise, I’d be lost.
PROMISE I’ll get into more storytelling stuff soon! This is just an idea I wanted to throw out there for your consideration.
You know. Those weird, borderline unnecessary in-between movements that add to the visual appeal of the characters and makes anime anime?
Yeah, that.
Anime Movement (or just Ani-movement)is an umbrella term (I just made up) that encapsulates the different categories of movement within anime.
It’s all the little animation poses and quirks you’ve seen in transformation sequences, flashy attack moves, or how a character gestures and expresses their personality. For this post, I’d just like to highlight one particular aspect of ani-movement that begs the question of its purpose within a story.
Especially prevalent in anime openings, ani-movement is great for either enhancing a good character’s personality, or giving a no-personality character some level of visual interest outside of their design. Often, the more movement displayed that says nothing specific about the character, the less likely it is they have a meaningful personality to convey.
To explain, you ever see those commercials claiming “This is the #1 movie in America”, aka every movie commercial on tv?! That’sfrontloading.
Or those commercials for shows that are obviously limpdick lame, going “See what EPIC adventures are in store for our AWESOME trio of characters, on the next episode of blahblahsomenickelodeondshowblahblah”? (You can just hear the guy’s voice can’t you?)
That’s frontloading.
In many cases, what I call ani-movementis just frontloading. Extraneous, flashy animation of characters to entice you into a show where they really don’t matter.
It’s basically animating a character with all the visual detail and gravitas of a more complex individual, when in context, they’re flatter than cardboard. I don’t care how cool your character moves, or how forlorn your heroine looks with the wind blowing in her hair, or how fast your shounen boy is running towards his goddamn dreams. If I don’t care about the character in the context of the story, no amount of extraneous animation will change that.
That wasn’t the original sound effect for this scene, I’m sure, but it may as well have been.
Oh, what’s that? You mean the creators were trying to play it straight?
Rather than go over the myriad of reasons why that’s just weird, I’ll give you the ONE reason it just doesn’t work:
It’s not effective!
It doesn’t explain anything, enhance the character, the story or the plot. It just takes up 10 seconds of valuable screen time.
And it costs my left nut just to produce 10 seconds of anime!
More importantly, what were we, as the audience, supposed to feel as a result of that action?
Happy? Sad? Mad? These are the questions that the writers didn’t ask themselves, so they left it to the animators to pad out the scene with frontloading. Meaning that they over-animated the scene with ani-movement to compensate for the lack of meaning.
I asked myself, what was the point of animating it like that?!
Was it to show how delicious the food was?
To show how much the girl enjoyed it? or…
Some weird fetish shit.
Based on the actual sounds in the context of the show, my money’s on “weird fetish shit”, but I’m open to the bonus option of
Animator trolling/showing off
For my own sanity, I’d like to think it’s the last one.
This kind of non-descript animation makes me wonder, if they have the time to do all of that just for an eating scene, would it be too much extra trouble to give the movements a point?
Which brings me to mine:
Imagine how much more powerful anime could be if more of the characters’ movements had a purpose to them!
A story purpose, an action that moves the plot forward, or shows a bit of character in between dialogue.
Think of how much more effective that would be for the overall story?
How much more effectively the animators’ time, talent, and resources could be utilized?
I’m not saying to get rid of the flashiness, but to merge it with actions that IMPACT the story!
Perfect examples would be Luffy’s finishing move at the end of most arcs in ONE PIECE (Skypiea, Arlong Park, Enies Lobby), where each ending has great significance to the characters on multiple levels of emotion, plot, and consequences.
Or any fight scene in Avatar: the Last Airbender. The conceptual creativity on display in that show blows most anime super-powered light shows out of the water!
The “90%” is just an arbitrary number, but I think this is symptomatic of a larger problem which I’ll go over in later posts, but I just wanted to put this idea out there now.
Before Violet Evergarden gets too popular.
HAHA! JUST KIDDING. (It’s too late for that)
Purposeful Animation
The point is, a good story doesn’t need frontloading. A good story speaks for itself and then people speak about good work to others.
It doesn’t need flashy animation to get its point across, that is just the icing on top.
This is why you’ll see almost the reverse effect in anime openings with shows that have an actual story to tell. This is not 100% but look back at openings like Evangelion, FMA Brotherhood, Rurouni Kenshin. In these cases, the animation may either be subdued or overt, but the actions are always catered to the character’s roles and the stories that will play out. Good anime know they’re good, so the opening can lay back and let the content of the show do the heavy-lifting.
Compare with most run of the mill anime that have come out in any era. The less content in the show, the more flashy and exciting the opening animation has to be in order to get your attention. You’ll see the same played-out visual motifs, time and time again, only slightly varied in animation style because the animators are hard-pressed to find anything unique to differentiate this show from many others. (Again, not a 100% rule.)
This is why to me, a show like Fooly Cooly, feels so…ALIVE. Each animation of the character has a POINT; an emotion to convey or a joke to tell. It isn’t simply well-animated (which is par for the course in most shows these days),
FLCL is brimming with life.
(And I can only hope that the new iteration can even come close to its predecessor)
If you watch a Miyazaki movie you’ll notice the same purposeful animation, though much more subdued.
The difference between purposeful animation and non-descript “good” animation, is the focus on conceptual execution over flash.
Flash seems almost easier to do, as it doesn’t require as much conceptual thought put forth. It’s like the difference between an anime with dark, complex themes and one with a lot of gore to induce the sense of darkness.
(Then there’s Berserk which has both)
There are ALWAYS exceptions, don’t get me wrong. This is just my opinion on a general trend I’ve noticed over the years.
JUST DON’T COME CRYING TO ME NEXT TIME A HYPE ANIME PV WITH GREAT ANIMATION, TURNS OUT TO HAVE A LAME STORY.
