Ultraist Studios Blog Journal

Many years ago I envisioned the transitioning from a career in animation to a career self-publishing comics.

In animation wage-slavery, there is fairly decent upfront money, only you’re living hand to mouth where the fruits of your labour are owned by your wage-slave-masters.  The most obvious dilemma was that there is no up front money in making your own comic (and potentially no money off the back end either pending public opinion).

My solution to this dilemma:  You start with 10 percent of your time commited to making your comic, and 90 percent of your time earning a slave-wage.  As you begin making progress with your personal work, you can begin the transitional process.  You up the comic time to 30 percent, and then 50 percent, and then 70 percent, and so on until you reach 100 percent.

It’s easy to talk conceptual.  But breaking the mind out of the control matrix and diving off the deep end is hard.

This is where I have been stuck, in the 10 – 90 ratio.

During a “Brain Trust” brainstorm last month, Matt Campbell said:  “There is a source that has unlimited resources.  It’s like an ocean; you can draw a thimble of resources from it every year, or 10,000 gallons every day.  It makes no difference to this source because it has an infinite amount.  It’s the same source that makes planets and solar systems.  All it asks first is that you eliminate fear, judgmental constructs, to be kind, to have love and to be in tune with your surroundings.  It will make everything easy (and make all the wrong choices really really difficult).”

Which made me think how the Bible says something similar in Luke 12:  “Then Jesus said to his disciples: “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat; or about your body, what you will wear. Life is more than food, and the body more than clothes. Consider the ravens: They do not sow or reap, they have no storeroom or barn; yet God feeds them. And how much more valuable you are than birds! Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life? Since you cannot do this very little thing, why do you worry about the rest?”

2009 will be an ultimate experiment in proving all these theories.

After almost a decade of thinking about this, it appears that 2009 is the year I’ll finally begin to make the plunge.

A change in this years day job will free up a good 30 percent more time for comic making.  However that 30 percent gained in temporal currency is also 30 percent lost in slave-wages, so suddenly the comic work that used to be extracurricular now has to start pulling some weight.  It has graduated to something more than just a hobby.

I get the feeling that the Rubicon is being crossed… and it’s exhilarating.

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