Nothing is better and nothing is best, we are unhappy, we are unblessed (pt. 2, finale)

(continued from here)

Long story short, we were only able to return to the comic in late Autumn of 2019. Remember, I still needed to actually complete 3 more issues of Protector before diving into a new graphic novel. Of course, I didn't REALLY needed to complete it to do the measly 10 pages of our potential pitch, but I thought: "when do I even get to continue the book, if the pitch gets approved?" (hold on to your butts, folks, this chapter is gonna have a lot of “me thinking” in it). 

But November 2019 came, and I was finally working on it. First starting with a few character designs, then an opening page that wasn't really in the script, but which I needed to define the graphic "mood" of the book, to root it in my own aesthetics (basically by directly connecting it to Malice). It took me a couple of months, but relatively soon, the majority of the pitch was finished. But after that, it took me 3 more  months to drew one more page. And then it took me one MORE  month just to do the next page. All while I kept watching Chernobyl documentaries, kept saving photos and pictures into my reference and inspiration folders. Kept treating the project like it was a real thing. Yet something was slowing me down, and immensely so.

For the duration of the entire fucking pandemic, and up until this September, I've been actively and passively avoiding drawing just ONE MORE PAGE for the pitch. The LAST page the writer really needed from me! And of course, I can blame it on a lot of things; how Protector was poorly treated by the publisher, how much of a struggle getting even the tiniest crumb of promotion for it during the first Covid Summer was, or how the mentioned Summer almost killed the entire fucking comic industry, along with our book (or at least if felt like it back then). How a celebrity athlete and his gang of cronies forced us to change Protector into First Knife just a week before the book was going off to printers, and how much the shortest of exchanges between their lawyers and the lawyer working for Image cost our team.

Also, if you follow my twitter and read my comics industry soapbox posts there from time to time, you probably remember how more than once, while ruminating on the events of last year and the failures of the direct market, I couldn't shut up about superstar opportunists and nepotists of comics industry flooding things like Kickstarter and Comixology Originals with their content, only to then finally move to Substack, securing warm and cozy spaces for themselves and leaving smaller creators in the ditch. And of course, my thoughts and feeling about this constantly recalled my interaction with Matt Kindt (who, wouldn't you know it, was one of the creators colonizing comics Kickstarter for celebrities with his yet ANOTHER pastiche at John Wick!). More and more, my mind kept building weird and unfair connection from all THAT to the hapless Chernobyl project, too.

But really, it wasn't even all that.

Because on top of all that, I had the crippling anxiety about quality of my work, caused by the fact that... the writer was 100% sure that they'll be able to get it approved at Fantagraphics.

Me. A Fantagraphics guy?

The page I needed to draw was kinda important for the story: right after the pages you can see posted here, I was supposed to show the actual nuclear disaster incident - as a huge, scary, breathtaking splash page; and as the time went, I kept ruminating on it: "how would a prestige Fantagraphics guy draw this?" And I'm not the kind of artsy-fartsy person to really doubt myself, ever - I just hate most of the work I do 6 months later, like any normal person. But in this case, I think, I actually experiences what they call "the impostor syndrome". As the time passed, I started to question my own artistic choices from a few months ago. I kept thinking: "Is it going to be one of those nepotism things, too? Is this really a graphic novel-worthy materials we're talking about here?" And in my head, I constantly tried to edit the older pages so that they maybe fit in with 2021 me a little better, kept trying to rewrite the smaller parts of the story that we agreed to change in the future, kept looking to make the project more of an Artyom thing.

What I'm really saying here is, all the misadventures fucked with my head really bad - so much so that at least half of conversations with my therapist nowadays are about my views on work and my own professional image; and professionally speaking,  for the longest time now, I wasn't even sure if I want to BE a part of this industry. And with Covid hitting harder and harder and the Life just Happening, it was safer for me to  put the project, and that ONE remaining damn page, away... without properly talking to the writer, which is probably the shittiest thing I've done to anyone in my multiple years of working in the field.

Anyway, a year of shittiest radio silence of my life later, my conscience was torturing me. Even while staying at the Herzeg-Novi Strip Festival, I keep thinking back to that chain of events, and how bad of a professional I am for doing what I did.

So, I go back home, I rest, I heal a bit, and I e-mail the writer, saying: I know that this is very shitty, I know that the wait is ridiculous, but what if we drop our ambitions down just a little, and salvage the good material we already have by rewriting the script to be shorter? Maybe we go and we publishing it with TKO as one-shot, or something like that  - a Comixology Original, maybe? This is the best way to get us paid, giving you back the money you've spent on those 10 pages. Because I now know, and I now admit, that I can't do this as a full-blown 100 pages OGN. But after a year of denial, I still have huge emotional attachment to the work we've done here, and I hate to see it just go to waste.

But the writer declines. Says they doesn't want to do any more extra work on rewriting it (to which I say that I could try to rewrite it myself, and only if it works for both of us, we would proceed), and they'd rather kill the thing completely or do it later with another artist as it is, than continue struggling as it is now.

We parted our ways at that. And now I wonder if a year or two from now, I'm gonna have another Crimson Flower out there, done by a much more talented and much more reliable artist, just weighing on my conscience.

Everything the writer said and did was understandable, and justified; they wanted to help me out, they spent money on me, they showed endless patience. Yet still, as the result, the whole experience proved some of the most depressing stereotypes about mercenary mindset writers have to employ when collaborating with artists, and the way they see art as disposable/secondary to their "IPs". So now I'm even MORE sour on the whole industry, because these writers/artists relationships are basically the cornerstone of the whole institution, you know? Sigh.

I felt sick to guts with myself for the kind of betrayal I did with the comic and writer's expectations, but I also felt crushed, because all the good work I did just went nowhere. The only thing to I could've done there, it seems, was to break myself into the mold that never felt comfortable. And if - or when -  I do break myself and fit into the mold, for the 5th time in my life and my "career", I will need to sit, wait and HOPE that this time all the months and years of labour will be worth something to my name, not just my survival. Because I don't think I can watch another book of mine fail miserably, or be derailed and sabotaged. How do I find power to do all the excruciating promotional work again, or what is going to give me enough peace with myself to endure a corporate work, one where you don't really need to think about anything? And anecdotally speaking, who's going to protect me from the star athletes, their vanity projects, and their lawyers out for my throat? And is it even normal to feel exploited in the writer/artist relationships?

Fortunately, my feelings on First Knife have nothing to do with this struggle. I still want to do it, I still believe in it (not as a successful mainstream book, god forbid, but as a book that you're going to really enjoy), and hell, after years and years of partnership that has only caused us all grief and grey hair, you KNOW that no one exploits anyone in here, in the First Knife HQ! 

Unfortunately, my productivity, and my actual physical will to work is greatly crippled by the last two years, and it doesn't really matter what caused most of the harm. The therapy helps, the support of this patreon and my parasocial friends on twitter dot com helps, but thinking about any feasible  course of action for 2022 is so fucking scary that I immediately want to wrap up this post.

So thank you for bearing with me, and I'm really sorry for disappointing some of you with this story!

P.S. But hey, at least I still have this neat little sketchbook to keep.