Steve Tillotson, master-maker behind Banal Pig and other great comics recently published a statement to on his blog, stating he was going to take some time and rethink his strategy for making comics. In part, he wrote:

i’m going to take a step back from everything for a bit, not worry about the scene and what other people are doing, and try and recharge my appetite for this lovely genre which still hasn’t seen its potential realised. i’m probably gonna do a bit more drawing for drawing’s sake […] and soak up a bit of proper culture, not just off tweets and blogs. Anyway, i’ll still be knocking about, not completely out of the game but maintaining a respectful distance. Hopefully, i’ll be back in the not too distance future with more news of my epic masterpiece, or maybe this post will be the epilogue to this creative endeavour….

I have to say I’ll be following his lead. After speaking with Steve and others at Thought Bubble, I realised I’ve become a little too entrenched in online blog/twitter worlds, always watching what other people are doing and feeling either inadequate, or uninspired, or frustrated or whatever. In doing that I’m not really learning my craft/exploring what I want to do; I’m being crippled in the space between what I am (artistically) and what I think I should be (publicly). There’s no money in this game, and if I want to make something important that really makes the toil worthwhile (which I do) I need to give myself some space to think about that.

This isn’t a hiatus: I’ve got a bunch of (late) #30dayscomics to post here in the next week or so, the (probably final issue of) Escapologist to do, and so forth. But it is a note here to suggest that I’ll be trying to rethink how my relationship with comics and my life works. I need to work on things for the joy of them, not in the funny place of pressure I put myself in. I’m still learning my chops and doing it in public ain’t always easy. My aspirations are still firmly committed to the medium; my academic work is providing me an opportunity to engage with comics; I’ve got comics to make; I’ve got an exciting secret project on the go that is about comics and me.

But I also need to just think a bit harder about what I’m doing in relation to the rest of my life, how I can just enjoy making comics again rather than seeing them as a struggle to be as good as everyone else, or to be understood in a market that doesn’t always get it.