I left the webcomics world a year ago today. I still don’t quite know how I feel about it.
The TMABB site is still there, still showing the goodbye entry, still advertising the book that people finally stopped buying a few months after the end. I don’t load the site very often, but it’s never easy when I do. I miss it, even despite how much I hated working on it half of the time. It’s sort of the way you miss an ex.
The whole thing is still incredibly disappointing for me. Webcomics has always been a pretty tight community, and I guess I just really wanted to be a part of it, to be known. Part of me still does. Tee-mab was simply not succeeding, though, despite my best efforts.
I was trying! Really! But two years of giving it a solid go without seeing any significant growth in audience? If it was going to succeed, it would have after the first year. I stuck it out longer than I should have, though, because I wanted to be really sure that things weren’t going to turn around. And they didn’t. I mean, okay, at least I broke even on the book, but I only printed 15 copies. So I quit.
The good news is, my life has gotten a lot better in the last year. My weekly routine is now basically free of stress. I’m making real progress on my current big project, after having stalled on Ultimate Epic Conflict Advance!. My fiancee and I have managed to build a homebrewing blog that pays for more than its share of my Dreamhost account. I have a fiancee. So things are totally better now. Quitting proved to be the right decision.
There’s just still a lot of guilt. I still have the story in my head, but it looks like it’s never going to get finished. I hate that. It’s a really good story, I swear. I’ve told it to a select few people and they seemed to like it. We were about six months away from the most awesome-sauce plot twist ever when I quit. You’d've loved it. You would’ve crapped your pants and it would have smelled like feces.
Maybe I should have quit sooner. If I had realized the strip was failing before I used up all of my energy on it, I would have had it in me to at least close out the story.
I hope I can revisit TMABB some day, give it a full blown do-over from square one. For now, though, I have more potentially lucrative projects that I want to give my attention to.
Wow. Has it been a year already?
As one of your more-or-less loyal readers, I was as shocked as anyone when I saw that last strip. I still want to know what else you had planned for our heroes. Hell, I even made my own Eugene the Sock Puppet sock puppet this past February without realizing it! I was working on an idea for a video series about a guy who goes insane from perpetual unemployment. Once I realized how close I was to violating your copyright and feeling dirty that my subconscious had stolen your character, I was forced to shelve that project for the time being. But I digress…
You know I’ve always been a fan of your writing. You are that all-too-rare combination of creative neurotic and anal perfectionist, which always results in a body of work that your fans like more than you do. I sincerely hope you do give fiction another go, be it as a comic, or prose.