Ridiculous Opinions #302
Continuing from last week’s “The Story of Maurice the Beaver”…
…Those sketches above? They weren’t anything that I thought they were going to be. There were half-baked and not really all that good. You can probably quite clearly see that I had no idea how to draw a beaver. One does not draw beavers all that often, so my knowledge of beaver anatomy wasn’t so great.
There was one thing that I did know, however, and that was that I needed simple drawings. Part of that was because I wasn’t a particularly good artist, so the simpler I made my drawings, the better off I was going to be. But it was more than that. I have theories about design and part of those theories rest around the notion that design should be simplistic. Most anyone can do a quick drawing of any of the Peanuts characters. They’re simple, clean, and easy to remember. If I asked you to draw an X-Wing or TIE fighter from Star Wars, most of you would be able to make a simple approximation of that. And if I asked you to draw a rudimentary Superman symbol, you’d be able to do that as well.
It’s because of this that I felt that the Maurice designs should be simple. I didn’t want something complex. Thus, despite those early drawings, I decided to make Maurice have a flat head and triangle-shaped body. It made it easy for me to draw and it made him pretty much instantly recognizable.
So, I did what I did and created a beaver with the intention of running him for President. In my original work, I didn’t want him to be offering direct commentary on the notion of what was happening in the real world. That came later. I simply wanted him to present issues that mattered to him and the animals that he served. I’ll be the first to admit that Maurice’s early look was entirely cribbed from Opus the Penguin from Bloom County. It may sound like nonsense, but I really did not realize that I was doing such a thing. I think that Opus was so embedded into my brain (he is tattooed on my shoulder, after all) that it just came out. I did almost two-hundred strips having Maurice semi-naked, but with Opus’ bowtie and collar. I can pretend that it was an homage (and a deserved one at that), but the truth of the matter is that it was simply an accident of the subconscious, neither intentional, nor without blame.
In fact, I would venture to say that Maurice and Tony have also been cribbed from Calvin & Hobbes, in that Maurice is to Calvin as Tony is to Hobbes; one being the pure, unadulterated id of what it means to be a person, while the other is the rational and thoughtful counter to the unbridled impulses of the other one. The comics are not about the same things, but the characters are certainly echoes of things that were done better in the past. I respect those comics immensely, so if anything that I do has even an inkling of the talent that went into the originals, then I’ll accept it.
In the beginning, I did every Maurice comic in black and white, using the pencil tool in Procreate. I did them all that way because that’s the only way I really knew how. There was a certain charm to them. My lettering was by hand. It was the lettering that almost killed me.
After a while, I developed a bit of a pattern with what I was doing. I used to try to write Maurice comics in the moment, where I came up with the comic idea minutes before I actually started drawing them, but that grew tiresome after a little while. I would end up sitting there in a panic before I was supposed to draw something. The ideas always came, but those ideas were hard-won. I would sit there, getting stressed about the whole thing, wondering if I should just give up on what I was doing. It was making Maurice tiresome.
And it was because of all of this stress that I thought, “I’m going to make 200 of these strips and be done with it.” I powered through the whole time with a goal in mind. And a lot of the latter half of the 200 were done during Covid times and the George Floyd protests, which meant there was a weird atmosphere in the air. Sometimes my strips would reflect that notion, but at other times, I would try to avoid it. Strange, strange times. Eventually, I would finish those first 200 strips and then go on about my business, thinking that I was done with Maurice for good.
And why shouldn’t I have been done? I only posted the strips on Instagram and I was getting ZERO traction there. Even though Instagram seemed like the perfect format for a comic strip like Maurice and even though Maurice was formatted to be presented on Instagram, it just wasn’t connecting with an audience. Basically, Maurice was a lot of labor for no real audience. I thought the strips were funny! Why wasn’t anyone reading them?
Well, there were a LOT of reasons, but one of the major ones was simply the fact that algorithms would limit how many of my comics other people would see. Sure, there’s the simple fact that a lot of people probably didn’t even want to read my comics. That’s fine. But there’s also the fact that an algorithm can arbitrarily limit the amount of people that can see a post. If a computer (which is, by itself, an arm of a corporation) can dictate what people can and cannot see on the internet, that’s a problem for creators.
And we, as creators, have somehow been bamboozled into producing an endless amount of free content for these monolithic tech organizations that care absolutely not a whit for the rest of us. And it isn’t limited to creators. Anyone who posts on the internet has basically become an unpaid service provider for these corporations. I suppose the deal is that they provide the platform, but considering they hook us in with the platform and we get the artificial high of posting on the internet and getting likes based upon what we post, a symbiotic relationship starts to form.
This relationship runs its course after a little while when Big Tech no longer needs its users, even though the users desperately need Big Tech. That’s when things start to go awry. These companies soon have their user base, so the focus shifts to its shareholders and they start to pry away the very benefits that lured their users in in the first place. The users become the neglected party, replaced by the shareholders who demand a maximization of profit. The service becomes more and more crappy, but the users still need the service. The corporation benefits.
You’ve probably heard the term enshittification, which was coined by Cory Doctorow in his description of this process. It is a made-up term, but it describes something very real when it comes to how corporations treat their customers. This is true for artists.
One thing that I discovered as I created Maurice was the way that artists have been, for lack of a better term, enslaved by these corporations to constantly churn out content. They lure us in with likes and upvotes and the distant prospect of actually making money off of our creations, while never actually delivering on that promise. I suppose that there are plenty of people out there making money off of their creations, but they are a very small fraction of the people who are creating for these companies on a daily basis.
Many people might balk at the term “enslaved”, saying that these artists could go elsewhere at any time. Perhaps the better term would be addicted. The famous saying is that the first hit of crack is free, and that’s what social media is in this day and age. Once you start getting those likes and once you start attracting an audience, one certainly does not want to give any of that up because of your “principles” or “values”. You want that audience there! All the time! And if a lot of them are giving you $2 to $5 a month to see your comics on a platform like Patreon, you’ve always got the promise of making a living off of your art dangling in the future. And like a carrot on a stick, you keep running towards that ever-elusive dream, where these tech companies keep changing the game on you and forcing you to adhere to their standards.
You don’t have control over the algorithm, but they do. Your views could spike and then dwindle for weeks, but all you can think about is that spike in readers, hoping that you’re going to get back to those super-high highs. But the corporation is muscling you. You’d get more readership if you advertised. You’d get more readership if you interacted with more people online, or made more friends, or posted more frequently. Keep working for them so that maybe, just maybe you will eventually be rewarded. This has been the game from the beginning and continues to be the game, but with diminishing returns.
So, with all of that said, why wasn’t Maurice getting any traction? There’s your answer. All I did was post online in a place that was more geared to actual pictures and self-promotion than comics. Instagram was not the place to make anything happen. I had to go someplace else.
Eventually, I did, and things changed…
To be continued next week!