Burning a Resource (Or How I'm Leaving Twitter)
Hey again!
Yesterday, I drew and posted a little comic on my various socials (reposted here) about how I'm gearing up to officially shut down my Twitter. And I want to talk a little bit about why it isn't an immediate thing that I'm doing, and some thoughts I've had on losing what has ultimately been a really valuable resource in my personal and professional life, particularly in light of how it has gotten people jobs.
Why am I Leaving?
The long and short is I can't ethically stay. I find Elon Musk to be detestable as a human being and wish him nothing but ill-will, in the same way that he uses his money and resources to push ill-will upon the world. And under his reign--because he certainly treats it as a kingdom--the site had gotten a lot worse in a bunch of ways. For months, people have been describing the overall site's decline into far right views and activism. You can see all the problems of greed and bad business sense at work as so many functions have gone offline or been shunted to only being accessible behind a pay wall. There're increasing problems of the user experience--I know someone who has basically given up on Twitter because the site makes them "verify their identity/that they're human" multiple times a day, and then directs them to the Twitter Rules, without any sort of guidance on how any rule that Twitter has may've been violated. And, yes, there are a lot of services that I've elected to use despite having compunctions about them, but that's uhh... living in a capitalistic society and having to make decisions on how far you're willing to flex and while that's not a morally great feeling, it's part of how we have to exist at the moment and being cognizant of the decisions we make around these things is an important part of navigating further use. And this point, I am not going to keep using Twitter.
Why am I Staying?
That all said, I'm not leaving this exact moment. I'm not sure of my exact exit date. By the end of 2023, certainly. But I have a few things I'd like to wrap up before I go, and I want to briefly walk you through them.
First off, let me just say, this is also very highly influenced by my age. I am of the age when I have never worked at a company that didn't have a social media presence while I was there. I watched in real time as platforms like Twitter and Facebook became a regular part of business--through promotion and connections--and how that was added to workflows as I was coming up. I think a lot of the people who've had an easier time detransitioning from socials are folks who were not trained onto it from a young age. But that's not my case and I want to make sure that the business and personal aspects of my life that have been entangled in Twitter are compensated for in other ways.
To me, the most important loss that will come from this is of community. And that's why I've continued to stay above all else. There are a lot of folks I'm connected to on Twitter that I don't have connections to other places. Functionally, I like Bluesky a lot. I'm about to hit 1000 followers, which all told, is pretty good. I have over 4 times that on Twitter, but I would guess a significant portion of that difference is not on Bluesky because it's invite only. And while I may have connections here and there on other platforms, they're pretty diffused and I am not using most of those platforms regularly enough to actually know who all is where. Like, despite everything I just about Bluesky, it's my second largest platform above Facebook (not counting the IDW Sonic Squad page), Instagram, and on anything else, less than 100 people are set-up to regularly see my posts, and that makes the way I use social media harder to do.
And the primary way I do use social is to find and connect with creators and help promote their projects. So, this week, I'm setting my Twitter up with scheduled posts and through whenever I deactivate, I'll still have my posts going out about new projects that are important to me and to the people who worked hard on them. I think their work deserves whatever boost of recognition it might get from my social presence there.
In the coming weeks, my other big project will be to get as much contact info as I can. I have found so many artists that I really like on Twitter and I want to be able to reach out to them when I want/need to. I want to make sure my friends and I exchange ways to communicate outside of this. I'm taking this upon myself because that's, I dunno, my role? Editors tend to be the ones to reach out when we have a project. So I want to make sure I'm doing my part of be proactive about keeping that up.
Finally, I want to make sure that I'm not completely out of touch with the other personal and practical parts of Twitter. I follow Genshin Impact because I think the game's fun. I frequently get updates on it through Twitter and should probably make sure if I want to continue those updates, I'm aware of how to get them otherwise. I follow journalists and sex workers and activists and unions and smart people whose thoughts I don't want to lose and dumb people who post real funny and just like... my friends and I'd like to make sure they aren't lost in the ether either.
How We Collectively Move Forward
Earlier this week, Becca and I got to do something pretty cool and talk to a class of sequential art students. If you were one of those students and are now reading this, hi! But we were asked to attend to give sort of a really cumulative look at working in comics from the point of view of an editor who has been at this for a long time and from a working freelance artist who does a lot of tabling at shows and indie work and is also still looking to get in and start doing work at bigger companies. As part of that, we talked to the kids about the advantages of tabling at and attending cons and how to go about meeting editors at shows and generally, how best to get the attention of an editor.
One of the things we talked about was with Twitter becoming less of an option, one of the more accessible ways to get on an editor's radar is going away. Not that editors like to be cold DM'ed necessarily, but as someone who has found a lot of talent through specifically Twitter and who recognizes that interstate, much less international, travel for cons is expensive and taxing, it sucks to lose that resource. And that's compounded by a lot of other resources going sideways--like, DeviantArt and ArtStation and some of the other art sharing sites have become hotbeds of AI theft bullshit and were full of NFTs before that. Some of the other potential social sites that could be used to promote your art like Cohost or Mastodon or TikTok are not always the best at discoverability or a good match to how you interact online (I don't really use any of those platforms). It's tough.
As has been said time and time again, it's neither fair nor particularly productive to have a significant portion of your work day be crossposting a million times and places and slightly different formats hoping to have your work hit where and when it needs to. Making comics is often a 2nd shift job, or a 4th & 5th shift job as you're trying to do more consistent work--be it a day job or non-comics freelance, plus caring for a family of some sort, plus the act of making art being a different job from the act of promoting it being a different job from the act of actually running an independent business to do all these things.
My only real solution is, y'know, collective support. On my own website, I have a Friends page with links to the sites of people I like and have worked with or like the work of. I know that the Cartoonist Cooperative has a talent database of their members. There's a fairly new Adult Artist Webring. One of the best things I think creators can do with their peers is equivalent exchange projects--be that getting blurbs from or having your friends/peers post about your new project on their platforms, exchanging promos of projects on Kickstarter updates or just reposting each other's stuff, making ad swaps so if you have an indie project, you can put an ad for your friend's thing in it. I think other people should of course have Friend-type pages on their websites, and I am always appreciative when an artist reaches out or declines a project and recommends some other folks they know. It's a major part of how things build in this industry and how we do maintain connection outside of social media spheres.
And, from an editorial perspective, one of the things that's really tough to navigate sometimes is how welcome you are in some of these spaces. I've mentioned Discords before, and while they can be a really great communal resource to the artists in them, there are a lot of very regular, valid reasons why artists might not want an editor in that space. So it does have to be considered and measured where and how folks are presenting themselves to get that visibility and traction.
My last thought is y'know do try your hardest while also, again, accepting that this is a ton of work all the time and is often done on top of other work, to figure out what makes sense for you to reach out to people. If you aren't able to go to cons and meet editors, or you're only able to go to cons where you don't think many editors are attending, how do you move forward? Well, maybe your solution is to do a lot of anthologies that have a mix of talent involved and might get some extra eyes on your work because it also includes people who are known names that editors follow. Maybe your solution is to get an agent who can send your work out to editors on a regular basis and let them know when you're looking for work. Maybe your solution is to get a hold of cool comic and zine shops and see if they'll do consignment on your books, even if you aren't local, because they're local to where publishing is. Maybe your solution is to look up if a company has a talent director/scout type role and to reach out to them, rather than editorial directly. There are alternate ways to both social media and cons to get your work in front of hiring folks eyes, thought they also require a bit of leg-work and luck.
Because I've talked about it a lot, here are the other places you can find me online.
Bluesky
Instagram
My Website
Patreon
Tumblr
Buttondown
Linktree
I am on Cohost, Mastodon, Facebook, and LinkedIn, but don't really use them actively, so not linking here.
You can email me, though I ask you please follow my rules on the contact page.
If we know each other, you can ask for my Discord handle or my phone #.
Until next time!
What I enjoyed this week:
Blank Check (Podcast), Solve This Murder (Podcast), One Piece (Manga), The Archive Undying by Emma Mieko Candon (Book), Reverse 1999 (Video Game), Joe Pera Talks with You (TV show), Witch Watch (Manga), Freakazoid (TV show), Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Troy Little's graphic novel adaptation), drawing a little comic and generally trying to do a little more art to go with my writing, when the cats do understand their new litterbox.
New Releases this week (11/8/2023):
Godzilla Rivals: Round Two (Editor on most of it)
Sonic the Hedgehog #66 (Editor)
Sonic the Hedgehog: Knuckles' Greatest Hits (Editor)
Sonic the Hedgehog: The IDW Art Collection (Editor)
New Releases next week (11/15/2023):
Godzilla Rivals: vs. Mechagodzilla (Editor)
Announcements:
If you'd like to have me on your podcast, Twitch stream, at your convention, signing at your store, talking to your students, whatever, feel free to hit me up via my contact page. To those first couple things, sorry a few podcasty/Twitch-streamy things have been delayed. We've been having some headphone/mic technical issues, but that should be fixed soon.
Wanna support me? Visit my webstore, my Patreon, my Kofi, or my eBay. And you can always visit Becca's portfolio/shop/Patreon/Twitch streams too.
It may feel futile as all polling already shows we aren't being listened to, but email, call, or fax your representatives to demand a ceasefire in Gaza and the stopping of a genocide. There are also plenty of places to donate your time and money.
Pic of the Week:
Enjoy a little comic about leaving Twitter.
