I have such an exciting and cool day job. It’s so exciting and cool that I can’t tell you what it is. I’m NOT an international spy, which is exactly what I would say if I was one, but I can imagine James Bond wouldn’t tell anyone at work about his webcomic and he wouldn’t tell his webcomic audience about his job. He wouldn’t want Moneypenny to Google “James Bond + spy” and find a comic strip where he’s making jokes about how stupid his original character “Punnymany” is. It wouldn’t need to be that overt, frankly, in my experience people always assume you’re talking about them. Cartoonists have been fired because of jokes they’ve made in their webcomics before, and that was just an office worker making a joke about work that a co-worker saw and assumed it was about them. You just have to make sure your account settings mean your boss can’t see how drunk you got at your birthday party, James Bond is juggling multiple public-facing personae. He has to worry not only about everyone in his office but also everyone in the casino and everyone in Blofeld’s base. James Bond might wish he was a cartoonist full-time but he has to accept that the majority of artists work a day job and, as a side-effect of that necessity, he’s a public figure now, doing important work for Her Majesty’s government. And James Bond can do his job AND make his goofy drawings and never get into trouble for it, just as long as he never crosses the streams. Wait, that’s a different film franchise.
The point is, I love my job and it’s a cool and important part of my life and the lives of others. Warm fuzzy feelings all round. And I can NEVER tell you what I do. It would be cool. The stories I could tell you. But I really, really mustn’t.
Hence the innuendo.
So let’s say I am an international spy, those guys love innuendo. The pandemic shut down all the missile control centres, the casinos royale and the volcano bases. And for a while there all I had to do was sit on my sofa and eat Doritos. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Comic productivity was so-so. Now, in my country at least, things are going back to normal…ish?? But now, all the supervillains coming out of lockdown all want to unleash their evil schemes they’ve been working on for the past two-three years at the same time. So now I am incredibly busy, the busiest I have been in, I don’t know, ten years. Every day a new volcano base. It’s incredible.
This is really good for day-job David. Extra money, getting to do his cool job a lot, saving the world every week, it’s great. But this is also really bad for webcomic David. No matter how you slice it, there aren’t enough hours in the day to draw. And when I’ve tried in the past to do everything, to be all the Davids for all the people at the same time, it’s been terrible for my mental health. So I’m going to be compassionate to myself and give myself a little break from webcomic responsibilities until things calm down. And I know I can do this because I have cultivated an audience of really cool understanding people who are nothing but supportive of this kind of craziness.
When things quieten down again you’ll be seeing a lot more of me, which I hope is soon.
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