the terror of the flames

Recently I ran out of art to give away so starting last month a randomly selected $1+ supporter would win a sketch of their character of choice. Last month James won, and here is his sketch of depressed character #10 which will be going out in the mail today. Thank you so much for your support everyone! This will be a monthly thing on Patreon so please stay tuned.

 

 

Last week was a good week for depression comix as the Patreon page passed over 100 supporters, and on DepCom Tumblr 16 thousand followers was passed. I should also mention that a couple of months ago the WordPress.com version of depression comix was featured in Freshly Pressed and since gained over 1000 new subscribers on WordPress.com.

This is really in thanks to all of you for sharing this comic. Whether it be sharing a link on Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, or on other social networks and bulletin boards, many of you are using this comic as a shorthand to describe things. This means I have to describe it better, and I know I haven’t reached the point where I’ve really cut through the B.S. and really found the words to describe it. But I think I am getting closer, and obviously I wouldn’t have made it this far without you too.  Thank you!

I have to admit I am still learning, but luckily I have learned from my mistakes with previous webcomics and I believe I am doing better this time around. It certainly feels more successful, and I’m a lot more enthusiastic about this comic after 250 strips than I was when I was doing Sexy Losers. But here are some things that I learned this time around that have helped me a lot.

 

1. One of the worst sins is a missed update.

When I first started doing Sexy Losers I aimed at doing a weekly strip. It certainly seemed manageable, and something I could do on top of a full time job. But after some time I had problems maintaining that pace. There were times when I felt the idea wasn’t good enough, that left hand didn’t look quite okay, or just something that stopped me from completing a strip. Sometimes I had the blank page in front of me and couldn’t think of anything that I thought was worthy enough to put on it.

When I let one update slide, it became easier to let the next one slide too. And the next. At that point the momentum was gone and the motivation necessary to restart my comicking engine just wasn’t there. And when I did start, it was a lot harder to do than when I was following a schedule. Soon the comic’s update pattern changed from “weekly” to “whenever a comic is finished”, a really bad sign.

But it just wasn’t from my viewpoint either.  Readers would expect updates, but when none follow they get frustrated and stop checking. After a few cycles of the comic fluctuating from regular update to no update, they just gave up.

There aren’t any positives when it comes to a missed update. In the beginning with depression comix I missed a few updates, and even then I had problems getting back into the frame of mind necessary for it. For the past two years I have not missed a single update, even when I went to Canada for a month and didn’t have access to a scanner. I just prepared what I needed because I knew how important a regular schedule was. Because of that, it feels like I’m riding a wave of momentum which in turn makes it easy to motivate myself. And if that hand doesn’t look right, fukkit, I’ll just make sure to draw a better hand next time.

I always knew in my heart that the missed update was bad. With the benefit of hindsight, I can see how bad it was. I can say depression kind of derailed my ability to update a few times but even if I couldn’t post a strip I could have posted a sketch or something just to let the readers know I’m thinking of them. Anything. Just don’t miss that update.

 

2. Advertisements on your site is a Big Ugly.

Since the early days, I always thought that advertisements were a necessary evil. Especially when I was looking for free hosting, every place that would host me demanded ads on my site, and I would rarely, if ever, see a dime from that. Basically, in order to get my comic in viewable space I would have to let others put their ads in my site. J-List was the only one who ever paid me, and I am grateful for that (but I had to decline after a while because the income was messing with my taxes in Japan).

When depression comix started taking off I felt it was time to get it on its own site. Naturally I would have to pay for hosting, and to offset the costs of hosting I naturally thought of advertisements on the site first.

It took me a while to get Google AdSense going when they claimed depression comix was pornographic because of one image with nudity. I removed that, and soon I was swimming in AdSense bucks, or so I thought.

The advertisements were terrible and at times distateful considering the subject matter. When I saw a diet ad on the page of a comic concerning an eating disorder, I knew it was time to end it.

I also tried other advertising attempts like affiliate ads but they did not have any affect.

There are many problems with advertising. The ads are generally flashy and dynamic and do not go well with the layout of the site. And unfortunately you need to put them in prominent places or no one will click on them. So you spend time moving them around to figure out how to make people look at them instead of your comic. Then there are people with ad blockers so it’s a waste for them too. And to top off matters, occasionally an ad will have some kind of malicious code and Google blocks your site.

In my honest opinion, the best move is to move from advertisements to reader-supported. Making the decision to remove all advertising and ask for help from the readers was a much better idea. There are a number of ways of doing this and Patreon is probably the easiest and most sensible. I have never regretted doing this and it has made me appreciate readers even more. depressioncomix.com is a very simple and calm site without the ads, and nothing interferes with reading the strips. And the direct support I receive gives me lots of encouragement and motivation. I feel like I’m working directly for the readership now, and that’s exactly the place I should be.

 

3. Delete and forget what you don’t want to read.

This is a hard one to learn and I’m still learning it. There are people on the internet who are filled with toxic poison and will dump it all over you if they get a chance. I’ve always been a person who is too sensitive for their own good, and everything gets to me. This is motivation killer and it derailed me several times. Instead, nowadays I just ignore it or delete it. I know I have to take care of my mental health first, and I know that arguing with strangers is not the best way to do that.

 

4. Sharing is caring

Back in the olden days I tried so hard to stop people from copying my work. I messed with HTTP_REFERER, I cut the comics up into little jigsaw pieces to be reassembled online, sent messages, and did everything I could to keep the work on my site. It was a source of anger and frustration when I would have rather been making new comics.

I gave up on comics for a while, and that was one of the reasons. Why do something that someone will just steal?

But I remember someone linked me The Pirate Bay, and in it was a torrent of all my work. I should have been angry, but instead I was incredibly flattered. Wow. People want to share this? People care enough to continue reading it???

Since then I’ve had a completely different outlook on it. Now everyone shares, and one of the things I can do is make the work easier to share. By uploading depcom onto different networks, I increase its visibility and readership. One can read complete depcom strips and archives on Tumblr, Twitter, deviantART, Pinterest, WordPress.com, and Facebook, without needing to visit the depcom site even once. With Sexy Losers you had to visit the site but with depcom the comic comes to you. And that’s a better way to do it because you’re appealing to convenience – you become a part of people’s online routines automatically. And the comic is more likely to be read that way, and it’s more likely to be shared since it’s only a simple click away.

But the cool thing is, since I eliminated advertising on the site as a source of revenue, there is no reason for me to try to get people to come to the site anymore. If I had ads, I would need the readers to directly visit the site more and I would be hesitant to allow sharing on social sites. Some solutions to problems become solutions to other problems too.

 

5. Readers are wonderful.

It took me a long time to appreciate the readership because I didn’t know how to reach them properly. I couldn’t separate the rare troll from the vast majority of kind people and there was a price to be paid for it. I was too sensitive, too reactionary, too angry. I fucked up and alienated a lot of people. Now I’m supported by those readers. I’m not going to fuck it up again. You are incredible and it is my humble duty to do this for your smile.

 

Thank you everyone!

Today I found out something rather special. The word fap made it into the Oxford English Dictionary, a word introduced with its current meaning in a comic I drew 16 years ago. However, the comic it appeared in faded because of depression.

Drawing funny comics was something I enjoyed doing. I drew them ever since I was a little kid, continuing through school and including University, where I drew a dark humor strip called “no name comix” which the editor just hated.  When depression kicked in again in 1997 I started drawing another comic called “A Heart Made of Glass”, an autobiographical comic about my failure at life and love.  Halfway through the second issue, my depression receded and the comic became irrelevant, and I started drawing funny comics again.

But depression ebbs and tides. The self-confidence problem, all my self-doubt and self-hatred remained unchecked, and soon the grey cloud enveloped me again. It drained me of motivation and energy, and my weekly schedule became impossible. I had an idea book and during these times all the ideas I had seemed no longer worth pursuing, not good enough to finish. Occasionally I’d find a way out of the mist and draw a series of comics before falling back in. The cycle continued for over a decade, long periods of inactivity with brief spurts of activity.

At first, people asked me what was happening with the updates. I suffered from carpal tunnel syndrome, something that still affects me when I use laptops for too long. It seemed like a reasonable excuse, a physical injury preventing me from drawing. I wouldn’t have to talk about the real reasons, and become another “sad artist” who complained about an illness that many questioned was real. I didn’t want to be that. I didn’t want people’s sympathy or mocking. Blaming my inactive spells on carpal tunnel just seemed the way to make everything go away.

That was the big lie. I lied to so many people, complaining about my hand when it was really my mind that was in pain. It allowed me to not confront my real problems. It became more dangerous because I was also trying to convince myself too. And this allowed depression to run amok until I was actively planning my destruction, safe in the knowledge my depression was secret and no one could stop me from carrying it out.

So I guess what I want to say is beware the little white lies we tell ourselves. Depression is real and we need to get help. We can’t make excuses for our behavior, burying our true problem so that it can manifest itself in the dark unhindered by the light of truth.

Now, I see that the work I did has some small impact. That’s amazing and I’m glad to be here to see it. Maybe it’s a good time to shed the light on the lie that made me end my dream of being a comic artist.

If anyone questions why I still do a comic on depression, it’s because I’m still continuously in awe at how it can destroy you. It starts with the lies that we tell so that we don’t seem weak to ourselves and others. Please be careful.

This post may bore people, but in the next little while there will be some changes in the depression comix site and things may look weird for a while.

The reason
For over two years now, depression comix has been hosted on a WordPress site. This was so that I could get control over it’s presentation, and also get ad revenue (an idea junked when I saw the kinds of ads I was getting). I went through various themes but eventually stopped at Elegant Themes, and their remarkable Divi theme. For a long time, I was happy with this set up, with Divi I got a nice clean minimal site, and I was able to make some modifications to it through child theming and CSS to make the comics look good with appropriate navigation.

During this time, Divi went though a couple of upgrades, but nothing that really affected my site.

Until last week.

Divi 2.4 struck, and a lot was changed. It really only affected the front page of the site but it shrunk the images and the layout looked weird. An upgrade should not mess with things this much.

However, I do pay for support. So I went to the support, opened up a ticket. But because so many tickets were being opened, the support staff was overwhelmed, and tickets were being lost in the chaos.

My first ticket received a response. “Use regenerate thumbnails”. Done, but no effect, I replied. From my reply no further response was met. A day passed. I opened up a second ticket.

This time, I was given some CSS to make my site return to normal. It kind of worked, but the posts were no longer in order and the last row was broken up into two rows. I replied, and this time I got a response. Add this CSS he said. I did, but no effect. Again, when I replied, there was no response from elegant themes and I was left hanging.

So my experience is that at some point, a ticket gets ignored or forgotten. As a paying customer, I’m not happy with this. Unfortunately, there’s a bigger problem here and that is theme lock.

Divi tends to add specialized formatting code to posts and pages. This makes it difficult to change themes because if you do, these formatting codes become visible and show up on the site as gibberish. This is what is known as theme lock: when it’s difficult to change themes because the theme has changed the data to make it incompatible with other themes. So basically, elegant themes had me between a rock and a hard place.

I could place more and more tickets in the forums, repeating my problem again and again until a solution is found. But I think I don’t want to deal with this. If I continue with elegant themes I will get locked even further, all the while worrying that another update will break my site.

Or, I could bite the bullet and switch themes, and make sure in the future in don’t do anything that locks me into a theme or company again.

My work cut out for me
So in the next little while, I have to switch to a vanilla theme like Twenty Fifteen. Then I have to remove all the Divi code by hand. Then build it up again so it has the same look and feel as the old site. This is going to take a lot of work, and I have to admit I am unhappy it has to be done.

You see, I’m going to Canada next month, and I was going to have a head start on comics so I can continue to update while I’m away. But this is important too.

So I apologize for any worked on the site and the lack of navigation options. Many of the navigation options are because of plugins I built, so that part at least is safe.

On Elegant Themes and Theme Lock
Definitely a cautionary tale. I really liked the look of Divi but the updates and the support are forcing me to look elsewhere. And although I didn’t think theme lock would be a problem, it ended up being one.

After this, I can’t really recommend Elegant Themes unless things change, and instead of focusing on the theme they really need to focus on the customer. If I have two tickets lost in support hell I’m probably not the only one.

Patreon is a service that makes it possible to support creators of artistic endeavors on the web easily by rewarding them when they produce. I started on Patreon back in August and it’s been incredibly helpful to me, allowing me to keep the site ad-free and allowing me to free more time to create this comic on a regular schedule.

Up until now there has only been one incentive, the $2.00 incentive where I upload snapshots of work in progress. Now there is another incentive, the $1.00 incentive where every month, a piece of art is raffled off to those who contribute more than $1.00 a strip (Those who contribute more than $1.00 will also be entered in the monthly draw). The winning supporter will receive a piece of original art A4 sized on Kent paper (Kent paper is a thicker paper intended for manga art. I use it because it holds ink better than normal paper) sent to them via Airmail from Japan. The first piece of art on the raffling block is the finished inks for illustration #7, and the raffle will be held the beginning of May after contributions are processed.

I am really sorry about the self-advertising tone of this message and I know you’ve all been incredibly supportive of me and this work. I’ve never sold my own work and although I want to, it’s hard to get across the feeling that it really isn’t worth that much. But if I raffle it off, I can take a step towards that goal of feeling that the art I do is worth something to somebody without asking for what it’s worth.

Thank you for your time companionship on this road to recovery.

Clay

We’ve now reached a milestone of 75 supporters on Patreon! Thank you very much for your support everyone, and I’d especially like to thank those who have made one time donations on PayPal and the other donation methods. Thanks to you, I’ve been able to reduce my real-life workload and ensure that a new strip comes out every week.

Thank you again!

This post is three weeks late but I wanted to wish everyone a better new year. Unfortunately we seem to already be pummeled with war and death in the news. Humanity can’t seem to get a break, I guess.

I should say I’m moving next month to a much bigger place. I’m currently living in a tiny but overpriced apartment in one of the suburbs of Tokyo, but I just put in the notice and will be packing things away. I’m going to try my best to keep the update schedule unaffected, with new posts Saturday (Japan time). There might be a problem with lag time between providers but I’ll do my best to make my move as invisible as possible. I feel I have to give a warning, because with a comic like this I will get very concerned E-mails if I don’t post regularly.

So if an update doesn’t happen, I’m okay! If you have me on twitter (at @depressioncomix for depcom posts or my personal one at @claycomix ) I’ll make a short notice there. If you have me on Patreon and you’re signed on for the $2.00+ support, you’ll know how far I am with the latest strips.

Anyways, I hope things improve. It feels like the New Year goodwill has already vanished completely.

Recently in the depression comix Patreon, a supporter mentioned that it was really brave of me to draw in public. I’ve been doing that for so long, that it hasn’t struck me as weird in a long time.

Here, in Japan, it’s not actually unusual to see someone doodling in a coffee shop. I do it as well, and the majority of depression comix has been drawn in various coffee shops. There are a number of reasons why I do this. One, the coffee is better. Second, there’s a certain atmosphere in a coffee shop that allows me to be more productive, including the lack of distractions. Third, it never seems like no one cares anyways, especially, as I said, others do it too.

But this is not something I just started when I moved to Japan fifteen years ago. Those of you who are familiar with my earlier work might be surprised to know that the THIN H LINE/Sexy Losers was first drawn in a cafeteria. I was with a few of my drawing friends at the time, and we put down this comic together. Our group did this a lot. We would find some public place, dominate a corner and draw comics. If you go through the archives of SL, whenever you see a jam strip with a different artist it was probably done in a cafe. Yes, even the first SL tentacle monster strip was drawn in a bar in Waterloo Ontario, a comic that later helped influence Ghastly to start his own (and in what goes around comes around, a few years later he helped draw another SL strip in a Toronto bar with Tang Ho, Bryan O’Malley and I).

Maybe out of some kind of nostalgia I still do this, although it’s no longer a group of friends but myself. I have a lot of fond memories of the people I drew with, people like Jen Chan, Robert DeJesus, Bahn, l0cke, Eisu, Aimo, Space Coyote… I miss them. My depression made me lose them, and it nearly took the joy of drawing these little comics with them.

But here I am, over fifteen years later drawing these comics with a pencil case full of stationery still doing it. Maybe it’s a kind of tribute to them. Or maybe, it’s because there is one small joy that depression can never ever take away from me, and that could be the anchor that may very well save me.