by Paul Rainey
(Escape Books, 2016)
Dear Paul,
Thanks for the copy of part 5 of There's No Time Like the Present which I enjoyed as
usual.
The creative life is an on-going process of discovering whether a) being dismissed out-of-hand
as inherently worthless, b) being accepted but ignored as virtually non-existent or c)
lionized as the latest Great White Hope is the perception that most matches the consensus
view. This changes over time but always exists quite apart from you and your work. At
the end of the day, all that can really be said is: "I have an audience for my work". So
you produce the next thing for that audience. Ultimately Tom Spurgeon will be seen as
the first person to see through your scam or he will be seen as one of the few that doesn't -- and never did -- "get it". Whichever one proves "true" or "truer" you will still just
have your own audience to consider.
Try not to take any reaction very seriously and try instead to improve what it is that
you're doing as you’re doing it. Make work that you like progressively more by
eliminating the things you dislike about your work and emphasizing a refining the things
you like about your work. The rest will pretty much take care of itself, as you're
discovering.
Thanks again.
Sincerely,
Dave Sim
From "Dave Sim's Collected Letters 2006", a Cerebus Archive Kickstarter reward.
1 comment:
Spoke to Dave Fisher on the phone on Friday and he's hard at work on a full report on HOW he thinks we need to do the COLLECTED LETTERS project. At the moment, he has all of the scans that Rollie did of multiple years in the 2000s. One of the things that's slowing him down is that it really makes sense for him to do a specific adjustment on ALL the letters and then leave his computer to do that. And then do another adjustment on ALL the letters and then leave the computer to do that. Got it.
So, the original plan to go "year by year" has been modified to, instead, offer 400-page $20 digital "packages" (Dave is "guesstimating" that 1989/1990 will be one-and-a-half packages).
So there are still several questions. One of whch is: "How many of these is it sensible to offer in one Kickstarter?" The Pledge Partners have definitely expressed a preference for "Simpler". The more packages you offer, the less simple it gets (both for the person Pledging and for fulfillment of the Pledge, which will be Sandeep's job), so I'm thinking, maybe, three? And it will be an all-digital Kickstarter (again keeping it Simple: mixing digital rewards and Portfolios just complicates things).
I'll keep you all posted as we work through the details.
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