Chris Schweizer is an Eisner Award, YALSA, and Stumptown Award-nominated cartoonist. They used to be a cartoonist and a college professor both, but for the past four years theyve been doing art exclusively. Their day job is writing and drawing graphic novels, and they couldn’t be luckier to get to do it for a living. But they also love to do other work, work that doesn’t have the kind of infrastructure that publishing does for bringing about a financial return. But Patreon offers that infrastructure, and as a result projects that might not otherwise be feasible for them are suddenly in the realm of possibility. They like to make paper figure sets for display or gaming, papercraft dioramas, portraits of historical figures with accompanying mini-biographies, posters, and essays about the craft of comic-making. They’re proud of this extraneous work. They enjoy doing it. It sharpens their skills, leading to better books. It allows them to dip their toe in a given research pool and do a project about, say, Mountain Men in the 1830s or Mamelukes in the 1500s without having to commit to a book about them at the expense of something with richer narrative possibilities. And, most of all, it’s a way to share something that excites them a great deal with others. Whether that be characters from a book they hold dear to their heart (like The Three Musketeers or Harry Potter or The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet) or historical figures whose exploits are less well-known than they might be (like black adventurers or warrior women of renown), or an aspect of comics-making that they find particularly important (avoiding tangents), they’ve found that it not only enriches their life to make these but it has the chance to enrich the lives of other folk, as well. If they can share an aspect of history that gets someone excited about history, or share a research experience that prompts someone else to take the same trek, or wax about a book and give someone else that nudge that will convince them to enjoy it, too, well, that’s about the most they could hope to do from a drawing desk, and it’s an opportunity that they welcome.
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