I watched barfly last night. It really got me to thinking.

Barfly is based on the early part of Bukowski's life, as portrayed by Mickey Rourke. Bukowski, as most of you well know, was quite the drunk and spent his younger years getting in bar brawls, living in seedy hotels and blowing what little money he got for his writing on booze.

So, there ya go.

Life is not a simple case of make it by the time you hit twenty five or die as an unknown. There's a lot of inbetweens there.

Do you think that he would have been half the writer he was if he had been raised in an artsy fartsy family that nourished his every creative impulse, gave him the best teachers and introduced him to prestigious circles before his thirteenth birthday? Do you think him getting a doctorate in creative writing would have made him half the genius he is?

No fucking way.

The best education you can get in creative expression is no doubt experience. Raw, gritty, experience. That's the first step. The second step is to do it long enough that you have your own spin on it so that you don't have some teacher constantly looking over your shoulder, molding you into their idealized image of themselves. If you bother going to school, wait until long after you have become well established in your own style. The third step is to not put yourself on a schedule or a timeline. If at twenty you want to have written the great american novel by thirty, and if by thirty you're swilling away and writing mangled poetry, or doing photography or some other such thing, you're sure to be disappointed and discouraged. But when you do "art for art's sake" even if you're piss drunk, working as a janitor or any other number of scenarios,you're bound to get something out of it. The fifth step is don't compromise. Don't do what so many others have done and try to find a quasi-creative day job. Yeah, going into advertising art, or any offshoots of it, might seem tempting because you might think "at least I'm using my artistic skills *some* way" but really it won't. It'll be mind numbing and dictatorial compared to what happens when you pick up a paintbrush at home, and when you get home, the last thing you'll feel like doing is creating art.

I have decided to stop publishing the comic. Not to stop doing it, but to stop publishing it. I'm going to start putting it up on the web. So look forward to seeing full issues soon. These days, comic book shops aren't so keen on showing self published stuff. If they take them at all, they're a lot pickier than they would be to any of the shlock image puts out. And when they do accept it, they rarely put it in a visible spot, and take such a large cut, you're lucky if you break even. So I figure a web comic is the way to go. It cuts out my printing costs entirely, is readily available to anyone who wants to see it, and gives you a chance to network and collaborate with other cartoonists on the net. Besides, so much more of that stuff is becoming online. Maybe when I learn a little more I can even animate the damned thing. That would be cool.

Oh well. I have other things lined up.