I find this fascinating. Not the comic itself, but its existence and its self-perceived import.

I’m doing some ads for my sites, which is how I came to notice it, the referral logs said I got a few hits from it. I take a look, and okay, it’s of a certain class of comic where objects are put together and text is put around it which some people find entertaining. I scroll down to the associated blog post.

Two things about micro-story:
1 – Just because Devil can look like a red dot DOES NOT mean he was the red dot from when they went to Japan. it’s just coincidence.
2 – I think I could have done another two strips of just Baron taking off hats to reveal other ones. I have to move towards the end though. Ah well, maybe another day.

It just struck me as so self-important that I had to keep reading. And actually let me stop here for a minute: I’m not trying to put this guy down, and I’m not saying that I’m doing anything great myself. But basically I come into a comic cold and see some rough shapes arguing about something, and then the blog entry essentially tells me that this is NOT to be confused with what happened back in the previous episode (like some regular readers might expect!!), but instead understand this is an ENTIRELY DIFFERENT idea going on so just accept it and we’ll retcon the Wiki page later if we have to, and if only there were more space to fill in the story, but unfortunately there’s only so much Internet and we’re not really sure it can contain all the labyrinthine plot twists that these filled auto shapes really deserve.

So, it struck me as self-important, which as I say I’m not trying to attach any judgment to that, but I’m having a mental disconnect at this point. And as I go down the text of the post, my disconnect continues to grow until it gets to be about the size of my own blog entry that I know I’m gonna be required to write about this later. He says he just got back from SugoiCon, which was the end of his convention year, and it’s great to have the support of his fans, but not only did he come back energized and excited, but he now has a plan for kickin’ it into high.

I look up and see I’m looking at #695, so yeah, anything with that kind of longevity is probably going to gather some sort of attention. I click around his quick links a bit, just to kind of get a sense of what the comic is…but I’m not really sure I am. As I write this his last is #700, admittedly quite a milestone, but his post for that one nearly reads like an Oscar acceptance speech.

Sometimes I guess I wonder why and how I’m failing. It’s an unfortunate habit; I tend towards envy. My head likes to compare my life to other people’s lives and remind me I’m doing it wrong. And since I don’t really connect with people that much, sometimes I lack context. But I’ve been opening up more in recent years (if nothing else, saying this at all in a public forum is proof), and it’s helped. And a quote on Lie To Me that I saw the other day has stuck in my head a bit: “Why do people always think they’re the only one with a secret?” It’s a reminder of what I’ve learned a while ago and have to keep relearning: everyone has problems, and nearly everyone wishes they had it better.

Not that that should prevent me from trying to improve my life, but at least it doesn’t mean I’m alone. I guess I’m still measuring my life by comparing it to others, but if nothing else I’m understanding there’s a vast majority of people to whom I haven’t been comparing my life, who probably don’t have it much better. Debb had True Life on TV the other day, and there were stories of people living out of their cars, selling sex for cheap to get through the day, et cetera. And it reminded me that, yeah, my life might be pretty dull, but at least it’s not a wondering-where-my-next-two-meals-are-coming-from sort of excitement. Sometimes I’m sort of vaguely unsatisfied with how my life’s going, but I get to ponder that dissatisfaction while driving home from my job, drinking my Starbucks, on my way to do the happy It’s The Weekend dance with the woman who loves me. Maybe my life’s not as adventurous as it could be, but I don’t even properly comprehend the amount of shit my life has avoided.

So then this guy with the shapes comic. I guess I won’t say my comic’s better, but I will say my own comic appeals to me more. Ah hell, I guess I’m trying to be polite and avoiding saying that I think I’m more talented than him, but it’s true. But he’s clearly more tenacious than me, as I got to around #190 of my own comic before I realized it wasn’t going to magically whisk me into the sort of popularity and praise that I’d hoped. And really whatever I think about his talent, he has engaged fans, he’s going to obscure comic cons, he sells things, and so on. But really the difference is that he’s putting the work in, and I’m not, and it’s pretty much up to me whether I am willing to make things happen.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 19th, 2009 at 10:09 pm and is filed under Pointlessly personal, SpinnWebe. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.