News of the New Year, 2021

Well folks, the New Year is here. I'm at my desk at 5:00 am, too sick to stand in front of a machine for 10 hours (don't worry, it ain't 'Rona...I don't think...) but too uncomfortable to go back to sleep, pondering as I listen to Mandy's cat lick itself. I like mornings because they're quiet, even the surprisingly heavy traffic on our corner is somewhat dampened; winter mornings, chill and snow-softened, have a special melancholy to them, where I'm alone with my thoughts in a very small, cozy way. The perfect time to reflect on the challenges and triumphs at the turning of the year. The Holidays (should be capitalized: THE HOLIDAYS) are finally over; we heave a collective sigh of relief. The midwinter hubbub, always bizarre, took on a new surreal quality in 2020. PSAs about staying home and staying safe are followed by barrages of holiday commercials, COME TO OUR STORE! BUY BUY BUY!!! But stay home, keep your mask on, don't gather in large groups BUT COME ON DOWN TO WACKY ERNIE'S!!! STAMPEDE TO SAM'S OUTLET EMPORIUM!!!! But stay home. Wear a mask. Please, for the love of God, quit being selfish and stupid. But Mr. Surgeon General, sir, that's going against our training! Individual rights, man! And those sale prices! I'd personally heave my shuddering, feverish carcass over a pile of plague victims just to get that tasty new Playstation, sir, and you can't tell me otherwise! Thanks for the warning, Jack, now unlock the door so I can tumble into Best Buy. I'm not going to talk about The Election. It's over. Heave his ass out on the curb. Get on with life. My immediate family is okay; sick, obviously, but not COVID-sick. We've been lucky. My folks are good too, and my brother and sister. Extended family is okay. Friends, too. I only know one person who had a confirmed case of COVID, my coworker, and he pulled through, thank God...the plague lurks around the edges of the shop I work at, and of course there are rumors, but so far the buffer of living in a small town has kept us from the worst of it. The flip side, of course, is that you get idiots walking around without masks, basically daring King Covid to descend like a black bird and snuff us out...but I guess I'll take it. So long as idiots still have breath to spout their idiocies with, we haven't been completely choked out. On to comics! My favorite subject. Though the cancellation of all those conventions was a real downer, Blind Alley Comics has been using the extra time and money to do what we do best. We had a Kickstarter to fund The Die Kätze Collection; the campaign was a flop, but hopefully we generated some interest, and we're still planning a limited print run in February. I have The Human Cannonball #10 in scripts, and it's a long one, so hopefully I can get that done by April; Joe has The Strange Adventures of Bone Boy #9 in the works, and I dare say he might beat me! I'm doing an awesome page of alien spaceships for him. We've also been working on a super-awesome, super-top-secret webcomic project together...all I can say is that it's definitely peak Blind Alley, the culmination of our thirteen years of working together. As far as our collective mood, I'd say we're...getting along. We've had pretty horrible luck trying to get our company off the ground, and we're hoping 2021 will change that. We know our comics are solid: the art is awesome, and we can match anybody for storytelling; the problem is getting them in front of eyeballs. The pandemic has certainly hurt this prospect, with the shutdown of conventions and comic book retailers. After over a decade wrestling with this problem, I've concluded that the key to a product's popularity is...popularity. Not quality, usefulness, or entertainment - simply that there's a mysterious groundswell of people consuming it, and that induces other people to consume it as well. Not "hype", that's just a company talking up its product (Quibi, anyone?); it's more like a spectral switch that gets thrown, and for whatever reason two or more people decide to give the product a try, quite at random, and because a "trendsetter" likes it for some unknown reason it starts popping up everywhere. Maybe we need to get our products in front of trendsetters? Is that the way to do it? Celebrity endorsements? That sounds like a recipe for heartache. As artists we're top notch; as salesmen, we just don't have that lack of self-awareness needed to hawk a product. Part of our problem is time and energy. We say a lot of, "I wish we had someone to do X, Y, or Z", so that we could focus on churning out content instead of doing the social media thing, and the sales thing, and the accounting thing, etc. so on and so forth. We wish we had a team. But so far we haven't found anyone we can really work with. At any rate, the fear is that we'd have to turn into managers, directing herds of people to do X, Y, and Z, and still not having any time to work on our comics. It's a Catch-22. And hiring a company manager holds its own dangers, since as artists we'd have a tendency to just let them run the shop, and then there's a danger of being squeezed out. The more you delegate, the less power you have over your company and your product. So yeah, that's what's going through my head right now. I do think 2021's going to be our year, but it's not going to be easy. The question is whether we have the drive and the wherewithal to make it happen. I believe we do. We have the creativity and the drive, and now it's time to find the people that are going to help us make our dream a reality. So hold tight! Here comes the New Year. Stay safe, everybody - stay home and wear your mask. And if you get a hankering for great comics, check out our store. Rick Out.