The Art Comes First

So, I'm standing in the toy aisle in Walmart like a normal, functional adult does on a Wednesday night, and it hits me. Everything I make, all my artistic endeavors. It's all just to feed this. It's all to serve this massive corporate sausage-making machine. So they can slap it on a lunchbox, turn it into a Netflix series, make it into a bad Hollywood adaptation with a terrible "based on" new book cover, a video game adaptation with crappy controls, and you know...I don't want all that. I really don't.

It's not that I don't want to be successful. That's not my definition of success. I just want to tell stories and sell those stories one person at a time. Honest, hard work. Not this monstrosity of commercialized, sanitized, profit-driven slop you see everywhere. It gets my blood boiling.

Did you know they intentionally took away unique building designs from commercial areas to make it easier for different types of businesses to move in? Nothing wrong with that, of course. Except that you lose all artistic expression. You lose the character of place. When everything becomes cookie-cutter and sanitized and optimized for the algorithm and SEO, nothing is allowed to be purely itself.

The only defense against AI slop and corporate gray is true artistic integrity. We as artists have to say no. And I understand the irony of saying this as an artist with a website covered in AI art. Trust me, as soon as I figure out how to get rid of it, I will. It's just taking me a while. Wix is taking me longer to figure out than I thought.

In the meantime, welcome to my site. Welcome to the relaunched newsletter. We're not on Mailerlite anymore. We're not on Substack. We're just here on Wix, writing and updating. Etsy shop is open for those who like comics. My novel is coming along nicely. Life is good. I'll catch you later.

Stay weird. Keep making stuff. Love you lots.