Holding your first printed comic with your name on the cover in your hands is one of the best feelings in a creative life. But before you go down that road, there are a few questions you need to answer honestly — because making comics requires something I call creative endurance.
This episode is about an important Long Road Question: why do you want to make comics? Not because any answer is wrong, but because your answer shapes everything that follows — how you approach it, what you're willing to sacrifice, and whether you'll still be on the road a year from now. I also talk about the passion tax — the price you pay to do any creative endeavor in time, money, effort, and opportunity cost — and the three viable paths to actually making comics happen.
Oh, and to increase the level of difficulty, I recorded this while holding my seven-week-old son. Because I was on baby duty and the Long Road doesn't stop for nap time.
This is also my first attempt to start identifying relevant terms/concepts to build a shorthand.
A glossary of sorts.
Let me know if these are helpful and I will include more of them!
🎬 The Long Road is a weekly vlog about staying in the creative life. 📖 Substack: https://substack.com/@boochomatic
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There is one skill — uncomfortable, unglamorous, non-Instagramable — that separates working writers from people who stay stuck wanting to be one. And if you don't have it, no amount of passion will save you.
The moment someone hands you a check for your work, the work changes. Writing on spec is freedom. Writing for hire is something entirely different. When you write for yourself, you're the final authority. The second a project sells or gets optioned, someone else has skin in the game.
Getting general meetings in Hollywood — what people in the industry used to call the water bottle tour — sounds like a win. And it is. But when I finally got in those rooms, I made five mistakes that cost me real opportunities. Nobody coaches you on this. Your reps prep you, but they can't live it for you.
Most creative careers don't happen overnight. They happen slowly — over years, sometimes decades — between kids, jobs, and a thousand detours you didn't plan for. I've been a working writer for over 15 years, but the journey started almost 30 years ago.
