Something Sick, Something New

The pandemic started it.

I stayed away from writing about work. When I worked in an office, writing comics about office work was a little too Dilbert. Then I worked with customers, but there were plenty of comics about working with customers, especially the great Norm Feuti’s Retail comic.

When newspaper syndication dominated the existence of comic strips, it was all about the setting. So if you had a comic about plumbers on Mars, you were screwed if there was already a comic about plumbers on Mars. The comic strip editor of, say, the Huston Chronicle wouldn’t want to pay twice for the same subject.

Now that’s gone. You do you. As much as I miss the potential cash that newspapers could once offer an aspiring creator, that’s one constraint that deserved to disappear. We have a ton of comics about families, friends, children, and animals. Why not have two comics about plumbers on Mars?

Man, I really want to see a Martian plumber comic.

Old habits die hard, and I was always reluctant to tackle the same subject as somebody else. Maybe that made sense back when there was only twenty thousand humans on the planet, but I would say that never made sense once, oh, the printing press was invented. We have to share subjects.