Sometimes I wonder if I've over-tuned my Effort vs Reward Meter. Nothing from work, to relationships, to making comics seems worth the effort nowadays.
Maybe I should try to delude myself into joining the millions of creative folks who are burning themselves out trying to convince the world that their effort is worth a reward. I did that back in the aughts. That's also when I built my Effort vs Reward Meter. It told me that my time was better spent on other things.
But you can't ever fully shake what drove that effort to begin with. Because humans are a messy pile of synapses firing off while piloting a decaying meat suit. That dumb 15 year old who thought the cover to X-Men 205 was the coolest shit ever, and so he is going to make the coolest shit ever too, is still encoded in my messy pile of synapses.
He's constantly at war with the meter. They're in a stalemate
A third fighter has joined the fray. Old Man Time. He's killing them both because he doesn't care.
The artistic masterpiece above is the 15 year old trying to get a feel for the Webtoon format. Old Man Time has already rendered the reference dated.
And Cohost has stretched it to fit. That's a bigger killer than Old Man Time.