🐐🎡 The wheel was innocent!

Hi there Goat Herd,

When I first started seriously thinking about making Sacrimony as a comic, I thought I needed to reinvent the wheel.

Occasionally I’d come across reviews for comics I genuinely liked that said things like “This comic hasn’t done anything innovative whatsoever. It’s just panels of artwork with speech bubbles.”

My first reaction was always, “HEY! SHUT YOUR FACE! I LIKE THAT COMIC!” My second reaction was, “Also… aren’t comics supposed to be panels with artwork and speech bubbles?” And then my final reaction would be a defeated little, “Well, I guess that person knows better than me. Maybe they understand what makes a great comic, and I don’t.”

Little did I know at the time, that reviewer probably just hated comics in general.

But I took comments like that seriously.

I spent months trying to figure out what gimmick would make Sacrimony stand out. Maybe it needed full watercolor pages. Maybe marker-colored pages. Maybe some kind of style that screamed IMPORTANT AND DIFFERENT PLEASE NOTICE ME. I kept searching for the thing that would make people stop and stare and something that would make a reviewer go “WOWEE!”

Instead, all I could really make was a digitally drawn and colored comic with, brace yourself, panels of artwork and speech bubbles.

I felt awful about that. It seemed so ordinary, so unremarkable, so lacking in whatever magical ingredient I thought “real” success required. But over the years, I started realizing I actually had something good going.

Was it “innovative?” I don’t know, I don’t even care at this point, but it became authentically mine.

The characters sounded like themselves, the dialogue felt honest, the world felt alive and lived-in, the pages got stronger and the story encompassed all the things I care about most. To me, that mattered way more than any gimmick I could have forced onto it.

I’ve learned something about myself over time: I do my best work when I’m not performing. I do my best work when I’m not chasing approval, trying to look clever, or bending myself into shapes that don’t fit. I do my best work when I’m just being myself.

That’s true in art and it’s true in life too.

So no, Sacrimony did not reinvent the wheel.

It just became its own vehicle.

And these days, that feels like more than enough.

Talk soon. 🖤
-M