Ups, downs, and MPD

Or: being a different person everyday to put up with current times

For those of you who don't have my cell phone number or don't follow me on social media: the heart surgery went well, I feel good, I'm back home and back both to a “normality” (whatever that is) feeling and at the same time a very strong feeling of estrangement. The estrangement in concrete becomes - for example - being able to walk and take more than three steps without feeling a very strong pain in my chest. Or being able to climb stairs upwards without fainting.
Very normal things for most human beings, incredible achievements after years of being restricted in movement. You'll forgive me for rejoicing at such small stuff that is taken for granted by most people.

Meanwhile, in the real world, we have quickly gone from “Trump won the election,” to “Musk and Bannon make Nazi salutes” to Trump signing executive order to dismantle U.S. Department of Education and trying to Fire Federal Trade Commission Democrats, while a future of even greater economic inequality awaits us (this was not hard to imagine), while liberal Americans are either incredulous or terrified or furious. My usual suggestion: look at Italy’s past. We have had 20 years of Berlusconi. The trick is that easy: make continual statements that outrage you on issues on which he will sometimes make life more difficult for everyone, but which will often be invalidated or backtracked on. To avert your attention from the fact that he is taking taxes away from millionaires. So his fanbase (sic) keeps voting for him believing his promises and believing he is on their side. That's it, don't think there is really anything else.

Meanwhile (again), in the entertainment world, acute (and less so) articles piled up about the fact that YouTube is bigger than any online platform, and if you follow Simon Owens or Ted Gioia, I don't need to explain to you how a flood of journalists are abandoning traditional media, creating their own business, and getting paid subscriptions in less than a year that allow them to make a living. That we are in the “creator era” seems pretty obvious to me, while I had not thought, as Axel Fiacco suggests, that we will soon reach a balance between “old entertainment” and creator output.

I was already saying in July 2023 that the only way is DYI. The landscape is going in a direction that confirms my prediction day by day.

[Of course, I get the impression that all this applies to creators and journalists, and not to those who - I'm oversimplifying here - are “simply” storytellers]

That is: open a Substack, make a podcast, crowdfund the pilot of a cartoon or that comic book you really wanted to do--there's nothing else to do, that's the future. For those of us who are not A-listers, work will increasingly become “that thing,” DYI will not be a momentary fallback waiting for the “breakthrough.” We have to go back to an idea that I would call punk if it weren't for the fact that there is no subversive charge in being 100% independent to create entertainment. And if we are approached, through eventual success, by the mainstream media, consider whether we are being offered a shitty deal and whether it is really worth having known and guaranteed headaches for a shitty contract. It's not punk. It's survival strategy.

[we should also consider what traditional media are leaving behind because of their maximalist/mass-imalist strategy, that is “good genre prose fiction for a male audience” -> and THIS is the article you want to read about it]

In the comics world, specifically: comics in Italy are selling less and and cover price raises are announced all the time , in France BD sales are down 8.5 percent, in the U.S. Diamond is bankrupt and about to close its doors, and American publishers are laying off staff or declaring that they may not be able to continue with their business.

How does all this translate for me? The biggest effort these days is not doing something that we humans are programmed to do: not thinking too much about the future. Don't think about the things I don't have the ability to act on.

Getting up in the morning and thinking only about the task in front of you, and then about the next one, and then next one, and so on.

No future. Stay in the present. At most, look just barely over your shoulder. Needless to say, I can't, and I live each day as if I were a different person, either very/totally optimistic or pessimistic because of a single piece of good news, even a small one. Ups and downs and MPD, in short.

And from this new perspective, what do I see while I frown?

That after the 454 pages of the Nathan Never-Martin Mystère team-up (prologue album included) that I finished in March (yes, it sold a lot), between December last year and today I wrote another 336 pages for two volumes. 376 if we consider two one-shots written between spring and summer. Now I have to write another 62 pages (with a co-writer), then 532 and then another 336. Very likely the timing of writing those 532 will coincide with the 336. Not counting pitches for new projects and corrections of ongoing ones. Since going full freelance I've been grinding out pages like there's no tomorrow (precisely), yet it's not enough to make do and I have to take three hundred more social media manager/communication manager/teaching jobs. Fortunately I can remember why I do all this, unfortunately the market has changed so much since I started doing it that I look at my teenage self and I feel like telling him that for a science fiction fan as he is, he should have vaguely foreseen. Idiot.

And yet. I am dead tired and at the same time enjoying myself.

There was a time when I wouldn't have slept at night thinking about how uncertain and unstable my situation is, now that I'm dangerously approaching 50, I'm thinking things like, “If I can add to these works another 300-page one by August I'll get to 2,000 pages of scripted comics in two years, yay!” I have DREAMED for years of being able to say something like that.

Oh, I can hear you, “Eh, but it's not just quantity that counts but quality...” Shut up, I’m not able to write bad stuff.

Writers. Crazy people.

“The reason normal people got wives and kids and hobbies, whatever, that's because they ain't got that one thing that ... that hits them that hard and that true. I got music. You got THIS, the thing you think about all the time, thing that keeps you south of normal. Yeah, makes us great, makes us the best. All we miss out on is everything else - no woman waiting at home after work with a drink and a kiss. That ain't gonna happen for us.” (John Henry Giles, House MD, season 1, episode 9)

And even this isn't true for everybody, and even if I would never use the adjective “best” and the pronoun “me” in the same sentence you get how I feel, more or less. Everything is horrible, everything is perfect at the same time.

Be reading you soon.