Almost Semi-Famous

OK, this is just weird. I live in Grand Rapids, Michigan, which is by no means any kind of hotbed of comics-creating activity. Heck, the art school here just offered its first college-credit "sequential art" class last year. But today I've encountered two interviews with people from GR who are now doing professional comics work.

The first is an interview with three people who recently had internships with comics publishers, in J. Torres' Open Your Mouth column on ComicBookResources.com. One of them is Matt Dryer, who studied Illustration at Kendall College of Art & Design, and since graduating is now an assistant editor at Dark Horse Comics, one of the better "major" publishers out there. The thing is, I've been a part-time student at Kendall for the past 6+ years, and I'm nominally an Illustration major. It's not that big a school, either. So it's almost inevitable that I had a class with this guy at some point. But I'm lousy at picking up people's names, especially when they're just people in my classes, so I'm not sure. I'd probably recognise him if I saw him, and maybe vice versa. As if that mattered. So here's a really great networking opportunity that slipped away, just out of my grasp.

The second instance is an interview with Jeffrey Brown, creator of the graphic novels Clumsy and Unlikely, interviewed by Daniel Robert Epstein for Newsarama.com. He talks a little bit about how he used to live in Grand Rapids, and describes it pretty accurately. His religious background and development sounds a lot like my own as well. But I never met him, and now he lives in Chicago or something. I actually did get a little "advantage" out of his connection to GR, however: my local comics shop stocked his book, even before it got picked up by Top Shelf Comix (a truly cool small-to-medium publisher) and got national distribution. So I got to read it before most people did. Other than that, he's just another modestly successful cartoonist I might have known... but didn't.

They say that "networking" is the key to getting good jobs.... the old "who you know" factor outweighing "what you know". As brilliant as I am about networking technology, I suck at the inter-personal kind. So I guess these two examples help explain why I'm still unemployed. {shrug}