CrustaceanSingles is a daily webcomic and I am the human who makes it (introduction post)

 Hi, I'm Andrew. I'm new here. And I have no idea what I'm doing.

Who I am

I write and draw a daily webcomic — CrustaceanSingles.com. I’ve been posting it daily since July 2011. That’s more than 2000 cartoons as of this post.

Some of them are even funny.

Self-promotion is hard. Or maybe it’s easy and I’m just incredibly bad at it.

Either way, I didn’t start Crustacean Singles with the goal of gaining fans, followers, fame, fortune…or other F-words.

I wouldn’t mind getting some of those, of course.

But the real reason I began scribbling and posting bad scans of those scribbles on the internet for anyone to see was to force myself to be creative every day. Habit-building doesn’t come easy for me, and I knew from experience that saying, “I’ll post a cartoon when I have a good idea for one” meant “This misguided project will be dead in six weeks.” 

An essential part of the creative process, at least for me, is to lower the stakes of failure. If I’m posting daily, every day is another chance to make something funny or meaningful (or both!). On the days where I don’t achieve greatness or even OKness, oh well, come back tomorrow. I’ll be there, trying again.

The comic has come a long way since those early days. I’ve made incremental improvements in the visual and verbal style, and the changes are almost imperceptible from day to day, week to week, even month to month. Sometimes I tell people it’s my one good habit, and sometimes I really mean that.

Why I’m here

So I’m creating this thing and then throwing it out into the uncaring void, but I’m doing it for me, right? So why do I care if I have readers? Why do I care if people like it?

For one thing, I’m a human being. I have this pesky ego that follows me around and makes me do stupid things.

But also, I have found that knowing I have an audience, knowing that real people are seeing what I make and reacting to it, has an effect on my output. I stretch myself further than if I were making this purely as a private exercise.

Know what’s a hundred times better than knowing that somewhere out there, someone is following me?

Interaction. When people on the other social media beasts I frequent take the time to post a comment. To tell me what worked or what didn’t, and even what part of it made it work or not work. To add to the joke and make it something even greater.

Comedy may be born in a raggedy sketchbook behind closed doors, but I truly believe it thrives out in the world, where it has a context, a community…maybe even a community with benefits.

Which brings me to…

Why you should follow me (or at least not downvote me to oblivion)

I want to make you laugh, or at least push air out of your nose faster than usual. I’ll be trying to do that every day.

Almost all my cartoons are a single panel, and I’d estimate they take less than thirty seconds to read. The potential payoff is, I believe, well worth your thirty seconds. And if I bomb sometimes? Please come back tomorrow. I’ll still be here, still trying.

I want to interact with you. I’ll be reading your stuff with interest, and I’ll try to leave comments that are substantial or even useful. If your work makes me jealous, I’ll try to learn from you. If I feel like I’m better than you, I promise not to make a big deal out of it (especially since experience tells me that whenever I think that, it’s just me being delusional).

So. Can we be internet friends?