Here's the link to the latest comic page.
My last post was titled “Taking a Short Break”... Boy do I have egg on my face after that one.
So what’s been going on since I last updated this comic and entries in this blog? Well in short I’ve lived a lot of life. I thought that my career was going to move in a different direction and I thought I was going to be settling down with a woman that I loved. To also be brief about that, both of those things ended up blowing up in my face. This was followed by a lot of depression, debt, and scrambling to make money. I did a lot of thinking about what made me happy before all of those life changes happened, and it brought me back… Here.
So that’s why I think this post should be about staying on course.
Maybe you were, or know someone who didn’t know what they wanted to do with their life. You maybe had some sessions with your guidance counselor at school on what direction you wanted to go. Maybe you switched majors a few times in college, or you stayed in one job for a number of years and they realized that it didn’t fulfill you and opted for a career change. Well… I can tell you honestly from the bottom of my heart that I WAS NEVER THIS KIND OF PERSON. I always knew from a young age that I wanted to tell stories. Since drawing was one of the only things that I got positive reinforcement on growing up, I thought that would be my vessel for doing it.
I knew I wanted to spend my life making comics, and while in retrospect I feel like I didn’t do a great job expressing it, I desperately wanted guidance on how to do that. While I don’t want to point fingers and blame this or that, let's say that American education (especially Catholic school education in North West Ohio) seems ill equipped to properly guide a boy who says “I want to make comics for a living.” So much of my post secondary school education life was spent fumbling around between graphic design, fine art, and creative writing majors and minors. There was a lot of pressure to pursue a college education when my highschool years were coming to an end, but nothing I ever did really felt like I was getting close to my goal of “Making comics.”
In the 2010’s I decided I needed a break from academia. It was also at this time that I took notice of independent comic creators who started putting their comics online which led to making a print book once a whole project was completed. So that’s when I started this site and had one of the most productive art making periods of my life. Then came the pressure to make money from my art work, and I totally caved to it. There was a commission I took on that I was unprepared for that took huge amounts of time and effort to complete. I wanted to get back to this comic, but it kept being shelved since that “wasn’t making me money”. Life continued as I moved out to live on my own, I got a different day job, I got a girlfriend, and with all of these things happening, Streets of Galsha sat on the shelf longer and longer.
As mentioned in the beginning of this, a lot of that stuff in my life is gone now. It’s hard not to feel lost when a lot of attachments you spent years forming get severed. So I looked back at what I regretted most, and that was dropping the ball on continuing this webcomic. So now in the year 2023 I’m going to pick up this ball, or baton, or whatever sports accessory best suits this metaphor and continue to see Streets of Galsha until the end (Well maybe until the end of The Three Tomes, then I’ll assess if I want to dedicate more years of my life to this series.)
So I feel like the biggest takeaway from these life experiences is that; No one has your best interests at heart except for yourself. People might give you some well researched or well founded opinions on what you should do with your art or career, but those people will never truly know what your wants, needs, and goals are. I think we should all give our internal wisdom a little more credit. Maybe we do have a lot of pressure in our modern world to make money and optimize every aspect of our life towards accumulating more of it, but if you have something that gets you up in the morning and that you’re truly proud of, then good lord do your best to have your life center around that. You’ll be doing better than everyone else who’s just making due.
Until next Sunday,
-Tim
My last post was titled “Taking a Short Break”... Boy do I have egg on my face after that one.
So what’s been going on since I last updated this comic and entries in this blog? Well in short I’ve lived a lot of life. I thought that my career was going to move in a different direction and I thought I was going to be settling down with a woman that I loved. To also be brief about that, both of those things ended up blowing up in my face. This was followed by a lot of depression, debt, and scrambling to make money. I did a lot of thinking about what made me happy before all of those life changes happened, and it brought me back… Here.
So that’s why I think this post should be about staying on course.
Maybe you were, or know someone who didn’t know what they wanted to do with their life. You maybe had some sessions with your guidance counselor at school on what direction you wanted to go. Maybe you switched majors a few times in college, or you stayed in one job for a number of years and they realized that it didn’t fulfill you and opted for a career change. Well… I can tell you honestly from the bottom of my heart that I WAS NEVER THIS KIND OF PERSON. I always knew from a young age that I wanted to tell stories. Since drawing was one of the only things that I got positive reinforcement on growing up, I thought that would be my vessel for doing it.
I knew I wanted to spend my life making comics, and while in retrospect I feel like I didn’t do a great job expressing it, I desperately wanted guidance on how to do that. While I don’t want to point fingers and blame this or that, let's say that American education (especially Catholic school education in North West Ohio) seems ill equipped to properly guide a boy who says “I want to make comics for a living.” So much of my post secondary school education life was spent fumbling around between graphic design, fine art, and creative writing majors and minors. There was a lot of pressure to pursue a college education when my highschool years were coming to an end, but nothing I ever did really felt like I was getting close to my goal of “Making comics.”
In the 2010’s I decided I needed a break from academia. It was also at this time that I took notice of independent comic creators who started putting their comics online which led to making a print book once a whole project was completed. So that’s when I started this site and had one of the most productive art making periods of my life. Then came the pressure to make money from my art work, and I totally caved to it. There was a commission I took on that I was unprepared for that took huge amounts of time and effort to complete. I wanted to get back to this comic, but it kept being shelved since that “wasn’t making me money”. Life continued as I moved out to live on my own, I got a different day job, I got a girlfriend, and with all of these things happening, Streets of Galsha sat on the shelf longer and longer.
As mentioned in the beginning of this, a lot of that stuff in my life is gone now. It’s hard not to feel lost when a lot of attachments you spent years forming get severed. So I looked back at what I regretted most, and that was dropping the ball on continuing this webcomic. So now in the year 2023 I’m going to pick up this ball, or baton, or whatever sports accessory best suits this metaphor and continue to see Streets of Galsha until the end (Well maybe until the end of The Three Tomes, then I’ll assess if I want to dedicate more years of my life to this series.)
So I feel like the biggest takeaway from these life experiences is that; No one has your best interests at heart except for yourself. People might give you some well researched or well founded opinions on what you should do with your art or career, but those people will never truly know what your wants, needs, and goals are. I think we should all give our internal wisdom a little more credit. Maybe we do have a lot of pressure in our modern world to make money and optimize every aspect of our life towards accumulating more of it, but if you have something that gets you up in the morning and that you’re truly proud of, then good lord do your best to have your life center around that. You’ll be doing better than everyone else who’s just making due.
Until next Sunday,
-Tim
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