D.J. Coffman - Sequential Artist, Thinker

Feeling EAST COAST today.

Sort of back on track here. Hit the gym this morning, which I’ve skipped for a spell, so I’m feeling that. I’ve lost some weight though and I can see the progress which makes you want to go more, even though it hurts like a mothercrunker. This morning I pulled my man-boob muscle. YEE!!!

I woke up this morning laying in bed thinking about business. Thinking about all the great information I’ve shared, and I love to share with aspiring creators and other publishers and creators. Some things on my mind I’d rather not talk about publicly, but I’m kicking around among friends. Maybe they are ridiculous ideas, but aren’t most?

I had listened to about 6 hours of Seth Godin on the plane rides. Love that guy. “The Big Moo” is a neat collection of success stories and anecdotes about life and business stuff. I try to apply this to my work as a cartoonist and inject a lot of into comics. The only thing comics has right now that is REMARKABLE is, WEBCOMICS. And i know that well. — I forget sometimes all the things I’ve done in the past 12 years working online with comics. People remind me at shows… they say…oh, didn’t you do this? or didn’t you do that? — OH SNAP! I’ve done work for Kevin Smith and Brian Lynch! I forget that not only did we do all sorts of crazy pop-culture comics, the logo I did, within a week ended up on Kevin Smith’s chest on the tonight show— weird! I forget that I was in newspapers once. When people ask me what I’ve done, I guess I sort of focus on the present— because I really do have a crazy amount of different genres of work I’ve done. In webcomics along, I’ve done everything from niche comics about ukulele, to poker, sports, music, Howard Stern, Llamas– and now I’m doing super heroes.

And I love to talk to other creators. I love to set them off and inspire them. At the Webcomics panel in LA, not many people inside, maybe 13 total in the audience this time, not as busy as the other webcomic panels we had done, but it seems all the panels were light– even the Jack Kirby Panel on saturday with Mark Evanier I heard was light crowd…. but I digress…. at the webcomics panel, it was nice to look right into the eyes of  creators and ask them what was holding them back from starting TODAY.

Back to Seth Godin– there’s a video up online somewhere– he mentions bottled water, and it’s something I’ve thought of before. We all know it’s friggin tap water. We pay for it because of the packaging… the marketing. They even pay more for it then a gallon of gasoline! Wrap your mind around that. But the even more ironic thing to me I was having a conversation with a stranger in Los Angeles about the price of gas, as he was hugging down a cold bottle of water. Is it that they convinced people it was worth paying more for than gas? A jedi mind trick perhaps.

I’m off to go consume and buy Easter goodies for the kids now. That’s another thing… Easter is SUPPOSED to be about religious beliefs… but to the masses, it’s about chocolate eggs– and now, I think of drumming gorillas… drumming guerrillas indeed.