I just wanted to wish Image Comics a very happy belated 20th birthday.

Thank you so much for believing in PvP and supporting the strip and leading me to so many personal and professional achievements. I’ve made so many friends and marked so many items off my bucket list because of Image.

Every single Image comics founder, even those who have moved on from Image, have always taken the time to say a nice word to me at cons and be supportive and kind.

Image comics remains the best place for independent comic book creators to break into the industry. I will always be grateful.

Happy Birthday, guys!

It’s always interesting to see how other artists work. I’m always very excited to see photos of another cartoonist’s studio or watch a video of them drawing. So much of what we do is self-taught. But even the stuff you learn in school is handled differently by every artist. We’re all like little snowflakes, aren’t we.

This morning I was working on The Trenches which is a project I collaborate on with Mike and Jerry. I normally draw the strip but last week Mike drew an installment of the Trenches and this morning I was going to reference some of his art. And since we all work out of the same dropbox folder, I had a rare opportunity to open up a high-res PSD file of one of Mike’s strips.

What I found was very interesting.

Mike had one layer for every line of text. And then one layer with all his art. Flattened. My intent was to select and lift some foreground elements from his inks layer to reuse in my comic. But I couldn’t because all the art was flattened. Meaning that there was not a seperate layer for the inks, colors, background colors, textures, etc.

So I called up Mike and I asked him “Do you always flatten your art onto one layer?”

“Yes. I always flatten it. I can’t stand having a ton of layers.”

“What if you need to go back? What if you need to change something?” I asked.

“Well,” Mike respnded “you’re assuming I would be willing to go back and change something.”

Now, Mike claims that this is a part of his OCD. That he has some mental disorder that prevents him from saving a file knowing that it contains tons and tons of layers. He called it “messy” and recounted a time when a client required he turn in a file with layers and it literally required help from a co-worker for him to do so. Later, we even joked back and forth about it on twitter a bit. But honestly, I’m not entirely convinced that this is a part of Mike’s OCD.

The truth is that I can’t stand having a bunch of layers either. Which is why I hide all of mine in groups. I don’t think anyone really enjoys having a ton of layers. You can lose track of them very quickly, it’s a pain to stop and label them, and I have a habit of creating a new layer every time I want to draw a line crossing over another one. It’s natural to hate having a lot of layers.

But I think there’s something else at work here that’s far more interesting than OCD. I think that artists are weird. And I think that we make decisions about our art and the way it’s presented to people to protect ourselves. It’s why I always delete my comic strip sketch layer after I’ve completed the strip. It’s also why if I know I have a difficult artistic task ahead of me, I’ll never broadcast myself drawing the strip. I don’t want to be that vulnerable. I’ll broadcast when I know I can knock it out of the park.

I spent a very short time working in graphic design and I can’t tell you how many artists I met who refused to tell me how they did something in photoshop. They just flat out got angry and told me they wouldn’t tell me. I’ve had artists refuse to send me a brush they created in photoshop because they didn’t want me to use the same brush. For the longest time I refused to tell aspiring cartoonists what font I used. I didn’t want my work diluted, as I’m sure those other artists didn’t want their work diluted by me.

I think that there is something very interesting about Mike flattening all of his art onto one layer. I don’t think it’s any crazier than me keeping every layer I make during the course of creating a strip. I think Mike flattening his art and saving it that way, with no hope of going back is actually a very brave act. Certainly if we were working in traditional media, and Mike finished a comic strip he would not be able to lift the words and balloons off of his inks. You can’t take the color of a canvas to look at the pencil sketch below it. This is what he made. Now he’ll make something else. He’s not looking back.

It’s always so interesting to learn how other artists work.

This week, the National Cartoonist Society announced the creation of a new division award: For best online comic strip.

NCS President Tom Richmond along with input from the rest of the NCS board have been working on this for a few months. And they have enlisted the advice of several sources, including myself in the process.

Eligibility for the award is tight. Your entry must be a comic strip (no single panels or long form comics), it must be at least weekly in update schedule, must have shown a consistent publication over the course of the calendar year, and…most importantly:

“Creator must earn the greater part of their living directly from cartooning* in order to adhere to the NCS criteria that creators under consideration must be either full members or eligible for full membership”

Compare this to the Harvey Awards, which have open voting and where an online comic can submit itself for any category in which the format is appropriate. Thus, Blind Ferret’s new comic “The Gutters” was able to be nominated for several categories including “best new series” and “special award for humor in comics.” The fact that The Gutters is distributed online and not in a comic book didn’t matter. The work was what was most important.

It’s unfortunate. The NCS is easily ten years behind the curve on this, possibly being the last entity on the planet who doesn’t grok webcomics. It’s 2012. Most of the more prominent webcomic creators have grown into micro-media companies, expanding into animation, feature length films and graphic novels and have stopped using the term webcomic completely. More and more content is moving from url based distribution to handheld distribution. And the NCS has just formed their first six-man committee to determine what a webcomic IS. And they’re making press-releases about it.

One of our more astute Webcomic.com members made a very salient point on this subject when he said “The NCS exists to support its membership, not cartooning as an industry.” And I couldn’t agree more. The NCS is placing prestige over prominence here.

Guigar and I have been discussing this subject at length over the phone. We both feel that this move is insult to injury. Brad and I each create a daily feature identical to the features created by syndicated comic strip artists. We do so to a point of being criticized by webcomic pundits who feel we’re too beholden to traditional formats. Yet we are not eligible for the division award for comic strip. Because there is no division award for comic strip. There are only awards for syndicated comic strip and, now, online comic strip.

Brad and I see this division award as kind of a kids table set up near the adult table. A pat on the head. Separate but equal is insulting to US. But that’s our personal hang up and other’s are free to disagree with us.

If Paul McSpadden, one guy, can figure out how to make the Harvey Awards successful and inclusive without compromising the integrity of the name Harvey Kurtzman, how can the entirety of the NCS not?

We certainly live in interesting times. And I wonder if an organization that takes 5-10 years to change the course of it’s heading is even compatible with a group of people who re-invent themselves every 6-12 months. And if not, what does that mean for the NCS?

Time will tell I guess.