As of today, I’ve been sharing Nothing Doing online for a year. I have a lot of big feelings about this, and so I’m going to write some of them down, and I hope you can forgive me being overly sincere about my dumbass comic where a sadsack goes on the computer.
At one year, Nothing Doing is the creative project I have spent the most time on in my life. To me, it’s representative of a much-needed change in my relationship to creative work. I couldn’t put it to words until recently but for years I was obsessed with the idea of legitimacy. I thought that being an artist meant making a living off of your work, or at the very least investing yourself fully into it. I spent most of college dreaming about becoming a storyboard artist one day because it seemed like that’s what everybody who loved to draw wanted to do at the time.
In the end, I never completed a single storyboard, or put together anything that could be considered a portfolio, because it turned out that even though the idea of it was appealing to me I hated actually doing it. At some point I switched from studying studio art to graphic design, and after graduating I fell pretty quickly into a crappy production art job that sucked the life out of me for nearly two years. Every day I came home desperate to save myself with some beautiful new portfolio piece that would pull me out of that situation and into something fulfilling. In that time, I finished like two or three projects, total. I could never follow through on anything because I was only trying to make what I thought I was supposed to make to get a Real Design Job.
The thing that fully broke me of this was, essentially, spending all of 2022 drawing nothing but My Little Pony fanart. I had never really drawn much fanart outside of childhood notebooks, and I certainly hadn’t shared any of it online. Suddenly I felt free, like I could do whatever I wanted, and I ended up wanting to draw all the time. Once that wall was down, it wasn’t long before I realized that my desire to be seen An Artist was killing my drive to make things.
It took some time, some conversation and some particularly striking words, but eventually I was able to make peace with the idea that I wanted something much smaller than all that. I don’t work in graphic design anymore; I have no desire to pursue creative work as a career. Nothing Doing is made on a really loose schedule, and if I feel like dropping it for awhile or forever, that’s my choice. It’s not my life, and I’m able to love it because of that. And I do love it! I’m happy to be making this stupid thing, and I’m happy to share it with other people.
All that said, there’s a little more I feel I need to talk about. I first shared this comic online on May 1, International Workers’ Day. There were a few reasons for this; for one thing, I’d already taken the day off work to goof around and it felt like a good time to do it. Mostly though, I wanted it to have a connection to the labor movement and the ongoing fight for workers’ rights. Ultimately, it’s a silly comic strip I make to complain about the weird stuff I’ve had to deal with as an office worker, but at its core it’s motivated by a deep resentment of the ways that we are forced to contort ourselves in order to survive under capitalism.
I’m proud of what I’ve made, but given the real significance of this date I feel that just making a post about that would be a mistake. May Day is a symbol of the working class struggle for justice and control over our own lives in a system that aims to grind us down to dust. It has also, historically, been a day for resistance, as it was in 1971 when protestors gathered in Washington DC to rally against the Vietnam War and were met with a brutal police response.
Today, people across the globe are protesting the horrific atrocities being committed against the Palestinian people at the hands of the IDF. As I was writing this last night, the protestors’ encampment at Columbia University was raided with mass-arrests by the NYPD. In an intentional homage to the event in 1971, organizers in the Bay Area are putting on their own May Day protests to show solidarity with the people of Palestine and take a stand for their beliefs. In the face of all that’s happening, I hope that everyone reading can find it in themselves to do the same. If you’re looking for ways to contribute to the cause but for one reason or another are unsure of what you can bring to the table, I’ve found this article by Dr. Devon Price to be a helpful starting point (though as it’s a few months old, I’d recommend double-checking for any information that may be outdated.)
Thank you for reading, and thank you for listening. I’m going to keep making this thing as long as I feel like making it, and I hope you’ll keep reading it as long as you feel like reading it.
-- HORSE ON VHS 2024
