2024: The Road Ahead

Nope, I’m not announcing the next theme of Strange Times. (But it would be a good one.) This is a personal statement. Because if you write it down or type it out, there’s accountability. And I want to be accountable.

A positive side effect of sitting down and assembling the “2023 in Review” post was that I took stock of how 2023 went, what went right and what didn’t. I’ll stand by the statement that I am proud of each and every one of the 11 zines that went out from Phoenix Productions. Whether it was a full color, glossy magazine or an 8-page, digital minicomic, they all allowed me space to be creative, to learn and to grow. In fact, the diversity of content and production meant that I could scratch a ton of itches. I just didn’t scratch all of them at once. 

But laying it all out at once was sobering. Taking everything together made it easier to point out the shortcomings just as much as taking pride in the successes. What did I see? Lots and lots of personal inconsistency. I saw personal productivity come and go in bunches. 

Sure, I was spending most of the 1st Quarter of 2023 recovering from surgery, working behind the scenes on the UFO Awards and painstakingly working through Strange Times 3 with Matt Levin (which paid off, as the zine is wonderful!). But nothing published – at all – until May? Yow. Why wasn’t I drawing? Where are the scripts to show for the time? And those gaps of over a month: My minicomics generally are eight pages long. Why not produce one of them? That would have been easy enough.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a professional comic book creator or zine editor. I’m a hobbyist. I’m also a guy who wants to improve, who wants to produce, who wants to make each new step more confidently than the last. 

I’m also a stay-at-home spouse. I have to attend to the kiddos. That’s my job…that, and managing the household. It makes for variety in every day’s schedule. There’s no consistency. When school starts, I’m running the Dad Taxi until 8-9PM. I might be helping a kid with schoolwork. When it’s summer, I’m making sure that the family is where they need to be (Pro Tip: The school year is easier than the summer!). The crazy schedules keep things interesting, but they also make it a challenge to charge ahead with the zines and comics. 

Then there’s the health thing. I’ve had a couple stretches toward the end of 2023 where I was feeling as good as I ever have, but that fatigue thing I wrote about in Strange Times 4 is very, very real. I still am sleeping a LOT. And when I’m not sleeping, or taking care of family matters, I’m wiped out. Way too many nights have been spent crashed on the couch watching clips on YouTube or bits and pieces of a film. It’s not healthy, and I’ve talked to my doctors about it, but the solution appears to be to ride it out and keep improving naturally. 

New Year’s is a time of self-renewal. We make resolutions, mostly to improve ourselves in an effort to be happier, more confident and more satisfied with one’s life. I know, 99% of the resolutions are of the lose weight/exercise variety, and 99% of THOSE don’t pan out. But I’d like to try for a more modest, perhaps more achievable resolution: I’m going to try to get a little bit of creative work accomplished every day that I’m home this year. It might be advancing a script, or drawing an illustration, or laying out/pasting up a publication…but it will be something. 

I have to put the “that I’m home” caveat in because our 2024 family calendar is filling up fast. I’ll be doing a fair bit of traveling with the kids for events – also, a couple family vacations appear to be in the works. But even with those trips, that leaves a lot of time to get stuff done. 

I can be creative. I can be reasonably consistent. I just need to be deliberate about it. So I’m going to try. 

That’s my resolution as it pertains to life, comics and zines. What are yours?