Are You Leading the Project, Or Is It Leading You?
Have you ever felt trapped by what your working on? Who's really in charge?
I walked away from filmmaking for comics in 2014. Though I still remember sitting down with college recruiters and advisors in 2005 and 2006 to figure out what I wanted to study. At seventeen and eighteen, I had no idea what I wanted to do. I was on the backswing of teenage hormones. I was an accused slacker with self-esteem issues developing an internal rollercoaster of depression I’d get to ride the rest of my life. Why would anyone want to have a plan for college? Adulthood? The Future? To hell with all that.
The recruiters had their best interest in mind. But, my parents and advisors had my best interest in mind. They were trying to help me plot course for my future while I was distracting myself with video games, books, and movies in order to ignore the struggle between being considered a disappointment and fighting to disprove that proposition. I loved storytelling. The more I had to confront what I might want for myself, the more I landed on that. I was all right at the arts, and I knew I liked stories. Maybe I’d make cartoons? Or television shows? Video games could be cool! How about making movies? I could get a camera.
Whatever I wound up working on, I didn’t want to pigeonhole myself. If I was too declarative in one field, I might not be allowed to escape it for something more interesting. When my filmmaking days kicked off, and I finally saw the end of the talks with recruiters and advisors, I landed on animation. I could work somewhere cool, maybe. But, the biggest plus was the college I’d signed up for gave me a laptop. That was cool! I’m not convinced that was necessarily the best way to choose a school. But I was eighteen. I still don’t know what a good choice looks like all the time at thirty-seven.
I went through a couple of cameras. My drive to make anything saw me through stop motion into live photography for local bands and concert videos. Eventually, I led a group project on making my first short film. While there’s a dozen newsletters that could come from discussing that project — the ups and downs of creative partners, creative control, and casting real-life love interests — the part that matters today is that I felt pigeonholed creatively. I wanted to make a meaningful no-budget horror movie and found myself making a goofball comedy that became a defining point of my college career. This creative train wreck of a short movie, Filled With Pinecones, had two sequels, animation samples, and a comic book. I’m not even convinced I liked it at the time. But it drove everything. This dumb movie with, “pinecones,” in its name became the thing plotting my course through far too much of college.
I liked radio, which I was involved with. I liked some of my animation classes. I loved figure drawing and painting classes. I loved writing. I loved creating scripts and being behind the camera. But I did not want to be typecast as the guy making beyond dumb content.
Avoiding intellectually vacant content was one of the driving forces in creating Champions when I transitioned to comics. I felt I had something to say, and I wanted my first steps into print comics to be serious. It didn’t mean my sense of humor had dried up, but that I hoped I’d be taken as someone with some gray matter inside my head.
Champions was a huge undertaking that was only made harder by splitting it into a set of issues. I liked making comics, but being on the course of driving a comic book was challenging. How do you get everyone on board for something new, especially at comicons where your neighbors all find success creating fan art? What is success with original content in that environment? It’s entirely up to the artist to determine. And, whether successful or not, not the ship that is a big project may lock you on a course you weren’t looking to be on.
After Champions wrapped, I found myself laughing until I was in tears from comedy I tended to categorize in the “dumb” bucket. Stuff like Space Ghost Coast to Coast, or, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, was making me laugh like I couldn’t describe. I always loved these shows, but they hit different after years toiling over something so serious. I never found myself missing the slop I made in college, but I missed making things that meant less. I’d worked on light hearted stuff, but nothing that meant kind of… nothing. It felt like a path I missed. Even though it was a path I started on twenty years ago. Champions felt like it steered me, instead of me steering it.
I spent most of 2024 afraid to commit to a project. Be it comedy, horror, drama, or otherwise, genre didn’t matter. I didn’t want to find myself being led around by what I was making, especially if I lacked the confidence to effectively promote the project. We can only be adrift for so long before something new rises to our attention. Eventually I started working on the upcoming graphic novel, Fregoli, and the mature-rated universe, Violet 9. The former is more serious, the latter is far from it.
How to promote and approach my original content is something I am working on right now, as my event season picks back up. I realize I am still dealing with the feeling of being pigeonholed. I don’t want a project to necessarily dictate who I am or what I have to work on. But, as I head into a new year in which I have several guest opportunities at shows, I want to be sure I promote better than ever before. I know the content I am rolling out isn’t for everyone, and I don’t want it to be considered all I am, or all I create, but I want it to find its audience.
Whether it’s the growing content of Violet 9, the remaining copies of Champions, or the slowly developing Fregoli and DinoBoy & Rex, I want to show people what I’m made of. I want people who come by my table to know that I have cool pinups and monsters to offer, but I have great content they can follow and collect that is more than just a print. The lesson I am trying to teach myself in this event cycle is that, yes, each product is its own ship to sail. But I am not trapped aboard any given ship. Brimstone Studios is more than one product and one project. Each of these constituent parts are fragments of who I am and what I have to say, and readers should find at least one fragment that vibes with them.
Every time I form a new project, I find myself petrified like my eighteen-year-old self over how this project defines me. I become overly concerned about my messaging and word choice until the concern talks me out of genuinely engaging about the project at all. This lack of sincerity and confidence hurt Champions, but most of all, it hurt my career. Instead of being trapped in the delusion that I need to be like everyone else, I should focus on just being me. Instead of worrying how a project defines me, I should work toward better defining each project and finding ways in which they connect me to potential fans.
It’s a lot of boats in the water, each going their own way and catching their own wind. I can shift from one to another whenever I want. And, if it comes to it, I can scuttle and sink whatever I want. I’m in control of the project, the project is not in control of me.
Today’s Tune
Check out Violet 9, live on Webtoon!
I also seriously full of self doubt. Sometimes I think I’m ok, but most of the time I think I’m terrible. Also I want to watch this short film!