Labor of Love

After high school my dad studied a trade, automobile repair. He took some classes and worked for several gas stations, getting invaluable on-the-job training. By the time he was in his late 30s and got married, he had his own garage and a reputation for being one of the fairest mechanics around. Where others replaced, he would repair. Where others jacked up labor costs, the bulk of his bills came from parts. My dad loved what he did, loved helping people and figuring out problems. It was tough to diagnose things and as he got older and the cars newer, even more frustrating. At some point the business began losing money, the sad reality that honesty didn't pay looming. With a wife and a young son, and a future of tuition expenses, he made the difficult decision to sell his garage and find a union job with the county working for the police department. It was a good job with great benefits, and benefits are the most important thing to someone supporting a family. He had great hours, working 12 hours a day only 3 days a week, which meant he was home on Mondays and Tuesdays to work with my mom around the house, and help me with homework and keep after me to practice a musical instrument. The most stressful thing at his job wasn't the workload but the clash between his work ethic and that of a union. Once when he was starting out, his supervisor spoke to him about working too fast. The boss would say, “OK, that car is going to take you three hours.” My dad would take a look at what needed to be done, see it was something simple and reply that he could have it finished in about 40 minutes. His supervisor looked at him sternly and repeated, “No. THAT kind of job takes three hours.” Often he'd complain over dinner about these “young guys just sitting around” but he dealt with it. When he retired they allowed him to take all his unused vacation days at the end of his last year, so he was making his full salary up until the official date of his retirement, even though he had stopped working months prior. In the end the benefits and the rewards of being able to support a family and put a son through high school and college made the sacrifices worth it.

There were no careers for my dad's generation. A job was a job, something you did to make ends meet, usually fulfilling some necessary role in society. Mechanics. Plumbers. Electricians. People got jobs because they needed money and society needed their skills. No one went to college to pursue a career. When a friend posed the question earlier today, “So why DIDN'T you draw comics for a living?” I quipped back that I found designing book catalogs “more fulfilling”. The conversation led to actual elaboration as well as a discussion of artist's rights as creators vs. their employers' ownership of their creations.

My dad didn't become a mechanic because he loved grease(despite his stock answer of “do you know how much dirt I ate in my lifetime?” anytime I rewash a dish I don't think is clean or freak out over an eyelash or cat hair in my cereal bowl). But when I decided to major in art, it was because all I did in school was draw. I loved comics, loved creators, and enjoyed talking to artists. I wasn't very GOOD at it and my natural talents seemed to be in the areas of math or music. It wasn't a logical decision, or one motivated by money. I realized that if I was bored all the time in school and doodled in my notebooks, and I would someday spend my whole life working and never have summers off again like when I was a kid, I should spend that time doing something I liked. If I could do something that held my interest AND paid me at the same time, it would be a win-win situation. So I went to school, I made friends with my peers. I marveled at how good they were even as I improved every day. I embraced the wisdom that an artist is NEVER done learning until he or she makes that decision. It's more than natural talent, though that helps. It's something to work at. A color theory professor of mine once told us a story of a man who painted the same fish every day of his life, in various mediums and colors, always striving and never being satisfied.

I was never as good as my favorite comic book artists, but I often surprised myself with my progress. It wasn't noticeable but when I looked at older pieces I could definitely see the difference. At conventions I saw friends who were further along than I struggle for recognition. EVERY comic book geek who could use a pencil wanted to be the next Todd McFarlane or Jim Lee. They wanted the recognition of the fans, for kids to know their names just as they knew the names of their favorite artists. It was a competitive field with no guarantee of a steady paycheck, no promise of job security. I learned my way around a computer with extensive help from a knowledgeable friend and classmate who worked in the computer lab, and concentrated my efforts on graphic design over fine arts.

Art in any form is a labor of love, but doesn't translate well to basic work structures. There's only so many ways a muffler can go on a car, the right way and the hammer & coathanger method. But art is a lot more subjective, and though people who've studied it are experts to some degree, unless they're extremely fortunate there will always be people telling them what to do based on their personal tastes, with no background in font selection, color relationships, and arrangement of positive and negative space. People who've studied marketing or literature or writing who have their own areas of expertise may ask someone to make something red because they “like red”. An artist making his own creations has the freedom to do what he or she wants but when someone capable of firing or reprimanding you makes a request, you can appeal and disagree but in the end, if you can't convince them you're right and why, you'll have to cave. In a way that experience is as frustrating as being told to take three times as long to repair something on an automobile.

After nearly ten years in this field, I've run into every conceivable clash of aesthetics and subjectivity. I nearly wept inside at my last job when the sister-in-law of the vice president, with a background in cosmetics, was put in a position where she dictated the way books looked. She'd sit for hours with the artist I assisted, rearranging hours of hard work on an entire design book, moving pictures around, making big ones small and small ones big, often on a whim. When I finally got out of that place and into a bigger company with more structure, things weren't as bad. Requests would be made by other departments but because we were all on a monitored schedule and had deadlines to meet in order to produce nineteen issues a year, there was a cutoff point after which we could refuse any requests that would make a job late. I soon realized I couldn't do my own thing, that there would always be others telling me how to do the job I was hired for. I was still learning though, and made the best of it. I paid attention to things my supervisor frequently requested when standing over my shoulder, and got in the habit of doing things a certain way so she'd have less changes. This approach had two results, one of which I should have remembered from college. The first was that the catalogs began to look stale, and our marketing department pursued an extensive redesign to boost dwindling sales. The second realization was that no matter how many times someone looked at something, he or she would always have a change to make for change's sake, sometimes changing things THEY had asked for without remembering. That lesson I should have learned Freshman year in college. A professor didn't like the way I had handled a shadow in one of my paintings, but I didn't have time to work on it from one class to the next. When she looked at it again, at a piece I hadn't touched, she remarked how much better it looked.

At some point I had the good fortune to fall into a well-oiled machine. I was placed on a club that sold a lot of the sort of things I enjoyed reading. It was also one of the most efficient team structures I'd ever seen. Marketing people rarely commented on anything other than what the price of a book should be. Editors were mainly concerned with the content of the writing. The majority of art changes came from my boss, and as the months went by and I earned his trust, the requests became fewer and fewer and he left me to handle my job. If there's a downside apart from a heavy workload, it's the lack of credit. I get to work with a lot of famous illustrators and design book jackets. My editor once remarked after seeing one she particularly liked, and lamented that I wasn't allowed to put my name on it. Personally, I'm more in awe of the paintings I receive and I'm happy that the “real” artist is credited—all I'm doing is slapping a title and author over a picture in an appropriate font, basically. There's a little more involved, but not much.

This brings me full-circle back to my earlier conversation about the comic book industry. Those artists, the especially talented ones, have recognition. Fans want their autographs, and mimic their styles in aspirations of being just like them. They learn that secret visual language artists share, and can often recognize one another's work on style alone. The flipside to this recognition is that their work becomes the property of the company they're working for, and may go on to adorn posters, t-shirts, mugs and other promotional materials without the artist getting any additional benefit. Writers may create characters that go on to make money for a company for decades, but not for their creator. Only recently did Stan Lee win his cut of the profits. Siegel and Schuster went through similar struggles right up until their deaths in the ‘90s.

The bottom line, and a lesson which can make or break aspiring artists, is that the only true fulfillment is in your own creations. As long as you work for someone else, you'll often find yourself doing things you disagree with. In the ‘90s McFarlane, Lee and others formed their own creator-driven company, to varying degrees of success. As my father struggled to maintain his own garage, so too did the artists to maintain their own creations and run a business. It's difficult, if not impossible to do both. A lot of artists can reconcile their day job to being just a job, and finding creative outlets on their own. I was very happy with how something I drew at work came out today, but can't share it obviously since it's not mine but my company's. Last week and the week before I slowly began scraping away at my rusty fine art skills. I can't do it every day, and I haven't for years, but I really do want to draw at least once a week, just for the personal satisfaction. I don't know if I'd ever be confident or ambitious enough to start a web comic, but I can definitely understand what would motivate a person to do so. At the end of the day it's not about fixing a carburetor or rewiring a home.

It's a labor of love.