The Morning Papers

We could contemplate the entire universe, or just one star

ITEM! First things first: the first part of my Conan comic is complete on the website (start reading it here) and part 2 just went up on my Patreon (it’s here).

ITEM! There are some new things available in my Topatoco shop. You can order Steeple volumes 1-3 (with signed bookplates available), or pick up one of the last five signed copies of Giant Days: Snooker Could Be Better. I won’t be reprinting this comic so if you’re in the US, it’s probably your last chance to get it.

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I’ve been reading an excellent collection of writing about the filmmaker Whit Stillman, Not So Long Ago. In the long interview that is the centrepiece of the book, he describes his favourite period as “from Jane Austen's birth, in 1775, which is also the birth date of America, to 1830, the July Revolution,” his rationale being that this is the crossing point between two distinct periods pre- and post- industrial revolution. “Something new appears, which is good, before something old, which is also good, has disappeared. That's why such a period is the apogee of a world.”

I don’t share his great love of the 18th/19th century bourgeoisie but it struck me as I read that I have lived my life in, and my career has benefitted from, just such a junction. I am a product of the pre-internet age, with the benefits of that era, who then benefitted from the new freedoms of the great informational opening up of the world.

My career is an accident of the year of my birth. If I’d been born ten years earlier, I would never have found a significant audience for my work in the UK. If I’d been born ten years later, I could not have entered the by-then mature webcomics scene, on the cusp of being squashed by social media, and thrived with my primitive early work.

More and more, I look around and see last vestiges of the old world, the pre-internet world, disappearing. The wide open fields of the early internet have begun to disappear too. Our collective reality is the eighty year old man in a rare bricks-and-mortar bank branch, clutching an iPad, bewildered and disenfranchised because he’s accidentally locked himself out of his account on an app he barely understands.

Of course, I am not that man. Well, not yet. But in trying to promote myself, my work, I feel increasingly like the things that worked have been taken away, and that I am being asked to participate in a process with all the logic and reliability of a stress dream. Which I think is probably just how the elderly bank customer feels.

In a weak moment (and to show weakness is never a good idea, professionally speaking), I asked on Instagram how to promote my work to new readers. Because after months of research, I couldn’t find an answer that made sense. Back in the ay this was easy - the community of regularly updating shared links to friends they admired, and a rising tide lifted all ships. It was easy, and it worked. But the internet changed and a good thing floated off like a toddler’s helium balloon. There’s no point crying over that balloon, little one. It’s gone.

I’m not desperate for thousands of new readers, just enough to replace the ones who get tired of me or die. I’m not going to make videos for TikTok, because we all know that a pivot to video is, idiomatically speaking, turkeys voting for Christmas. Just ask MTV News (and everybody else who ever pivoted to video).

When I ask these questions, effectively moaning to the people who take time to read my work that others don’t, I don’t think I want suggestions of solutions. I think I want someone to answer, a figure surrounded by a halo of glowing light. An intellectual who knows exactly what the answer is. Someone bookish, impeccably dressed from head to toe, older and wiser than me. I want reassurance.

I think I want an answer from Whit Stillman.

But if you’ve got any suggestions, I’ll be very happy to receive them. I love hearing from you whether you’ve got anything helpful to say or not. I always want to know if you want more of something I did, because if no one tells me that, I’ll try something different instead.

Yours in love and friendship,

JA