Wherever You Go, There You Are

I have a comic that I dreamed up a long time ago called November West that is finally gelling. The first time I bought the domain name November West, I had a corporate job and I was in a lot of pain and had no life.

I was too sick to do anything other than my job and tend to my health, so I proceeded to make a comic ragging on my job. I soon stopped because I needed my paycheck and figured this would be an excellent way to get fired.

One panel on it was titled "I work for The Borganization" with a drawing of a boxy black building, a reference to the cube-shaped Borg spaceships in the Star Trek universe. But also kind of intended to suggest something like "Corporate life isn't so different from working in organized crime."

The difference between corporations and organized crime seems to be that corporations have better lawyers for putting icing on this cow pie and pretending it doesn't stink. I sometimes think if I EVER have a successful business, I'll learn that the state of the world makes it absolutely impossible to do everything by the book in an aboveboard and ethical fashion blah blah blah.

Anyway, the full building where I worked was a long, low-lying industrial building that didn't actually look like a cube. When I began working there, the entire building was one story but industrial scale, so tall for one story. 

I was hired during a boom and my department had outgrown its physical space. While I worked there, they added a two-story addition and moved my department to that addition to give us more space.

If you parked at the end of the building to enter my department in the two-story addition, it did look kind of like a black cube, though the building wasn't really black and not quite a cube, though closer than most of the building.

The building was actually enveloped entirely in mirrored glass such that you could only tell where the windows were after dark. Because it was relatively low to the ground, the mirrored exterior mostly reflected the oceans of asphalt employee parking around it, making it look black most of the time.

The building next door -- also property of the same company -- had the EXACT SAME exterior but was three stories tall and positioned differenly in relation to the land around it. It tended to reflect the sky and the trees and looked like something magical and surreal and futuristic.

So my portrayal of the company was not outright making stuff up, but my generally dark mood was helping to frame my experiences in a particular way and it wasn't a flattering portrayal. 

I was working in the insurance industry and insurance is a form of betting. And it's a form of betting on things like "You bet your life." Or "You bet your health." and I worked at a nicey nice company where they told us to look for a reason to pay. I have heard some insurance companies train people to look for a reason to deny and handle some claims by tossing them in the circular file (trash can).

I've never been able to 100 percent separate my negative impression of the insurance industry from how miserable I was at the time that I had the job.

It just became extremely clear to me that my terrible physical health was coloring my comic into a dark, dystopian view of the world and there wasn't really any fix for how I was "seeing the world" except to get myself healthier, which seemed like it had no hope of happening, so the comic was abandoned for a time in part because it seemed impossible to pull off successfully by any definition of success and seemed likely to get me fired from my job to boot.

The comic is currently in the process of gelling and I have mixed feelings about it. I like it but it seems extremely happy go lucky and child friendly and if that gets traction and then I start adding in darker themes, it's possible I would lose my audience.

People see that happen at times. I heard a blurb once that a guy got rich making angry music about how poor he was and then suddenly had nothing fueling his angry song writing and his career crashed and burned.

Some article about some app that monetized clothing influencers had a line about "You need to stop posting expensive clothes. You got rich. Your audience did not. Those photos aren't converting to sales."

I think about such things a LOT. I didn't intentionally stage off developing this comic -- or anything else -- out of fear of getting successful at "the wrong thing" and then having my success dissipate. 

I was just coping as best I could and things were failing to gel. But they were to some degree failing to gel at times because I felt strongly that stuff had disaster waiting to happen written all over it, so I would pull the plug on things like this comic because I saw no way to make it financially successful enough to be able to afford getting fired over it.

I did substantial therapy well before I imagined doing a comic. I can't prove that I was correct that I would have been fired etc. But I felt that was a very real possibility with little hope of the comic being worth being fired over and if you can look at a business idea and see it's potential for ruining your life and can't really see how to readily monetize it, I think the way to bet is pull the plug.