by mouse on Wed Nov 23, 2005 3:23 pm
happy birthday, ian! (and many moooooooore!)
and don't get too down on yourself about not making a living with bruno. ask anyone in the arts - music, comics, art-art - it's really hard to make a living from it. there are some really good artists out there who never get noticed - and some fairly mediocre ones who hit it lucky.
honestly, i think sluggy freelance is a bit like that. i'm sure pete's a nice guy and all, but he doesn't really keep on schedule, he seems to be very disorganized, and frankly, the strip is getting hard to follow. he has some very passionate fans, who really didn't give you much of a chance. (i checked in on the sluggy forum the first couple of months you did saturdays, and those people are just nuts.) you do good work, you produce consistently, the strip continues to be lots of fun for us readers - yes, you do deserve to do better with it...but i don't know how to make the world work the way it should.
i hope you decide to keep going with bruno - in part, because i think you enjoy expressing yourself through cartooning. (and yes, the rest is because _i_ like it.) but it's important to keep things like that in your life, even if they don't enrich you materially. i think you realize how much it has enriched you in other ways.
anyway - happy (belated) birthday, and thanks for all the bruno you've given us.