I’m done asking permission to make my work real.
Every time I tried to publish a written book, the process stepped between me and the reader like a series of turnstiles: identifiers, registries, catalog entries, platform rules, waiting periods measured in months. Even when the numbers were “free,” time wasn’t. Paper wasn’t. Patience definitely wasn’t. I kept finding myself doing logistics instead of art—converting sentences into SKUs, translating stories into metadata, watching creativity get slowed to a crawl by forms, queues, and the quiet pressure to behave like a compliant vendor.
Meanwhile, images kept slipping past all of that. An image doesn’t ask for a barcode. An image sits on a page, a screen, a drive, an email, a feed, a folder. An image moves.
This essay is my line in the sand and my announcement: the projects I had planned as prose will be released as comics and graphic works instead. Not as a compromise. As a reclamation.
The Bottleneck of Books
Text has a tendency to become inventory. You can feel it in how publishing talks: units, lists, frontlist/backlist, slots. If you want your book to appear inside the official systems—library databases, bookstore catalogues, online marketplaces—you’re given an on-ramp paved with compliance. The on-ramp is not the art. It’s a map of who controls the lanes.
I’ve tried to go along. I drafted, formatted, learned the workflows, and watched perfectly good stories get swallowed by the part no one wants to talk about: waiting for the system to notice you exist. Even without a traditional gatekeeper, there are still gates, and the design of those gates pushes you to produce work that fits their speed, their windows, their formats. Prose can thrive there, but only if you enjoy building around traffic lights.
There’s also the material side. Text wants paper, ink, print time, packaging. Even handwriting a novel depends on whether you can afford new notebooks when you run out. The discussion about “independence” tends to erase that reality, as if sheer willpower can replace stock. It can’t. When you’re choosing between buying paper or buying dinner, the “thrill of the blank page” doesn’t land the way it does in motivational posters.
Images Move Differently
Comics don’t solve those problems by magic; they sidestep them by design.
A comic is a story built out of images—panels, pages, sequences, sometimes no panels at all. Because it’s image-native, it can live anywhere an image can live: a simple web page, a zipped folder, a gallery viewer, a social feed, an email attachment, a cloud link. If you’ve ever shared a screenshot, you already understand the distribution model.
This matters because it severs the tie to formal cataloguing systems. I don’t need an identifier to show you a page. I don’t need to wait for a database entry to post chapter one. I don’t need a marketplace to validate that a story exists before I can let it breathe in public. If I want to sell the work, I can, from my own site, as high-resolution files, as collected PDFs, as bundles. If I want to watermark the pages, I can do that myself at export. No “anti-theft portal,” no third-party DRM.
Most freeing of all: the file is the format. I’m not bound to a trim size. I don’t have to mimic a paperback. I can build a page that scrolls like a tapestry. I can make a single image function as an entire chapter. I can set rhythm with white space, pace with gutters, silence with a border that never quite touches the edge. I can draw something that looks like a baroque painting one day and a stark, two-tone sequence the next. I don’t have to choose. The infinite page is real when you stop asking a printer what shape a story is allowed to take.
The Pivot
What changed wasn’t the stories themselves—it was my relationship to how they come into being. I stopped trying to fit them into systems that wanted predictability, calendars, and finished products that could be shelved. I don’t work like that. I never have.
The work happens in arcs and surges. Some days I draw for ten hours; other days I think about a single color or shape and realize it’s not ready yet. That rhythm isn’t something to fix—it’s the pulse of the project. The stories will be released when they’re ready, not when a marketing calendar says they should be.
If you want to see how they grow, you can. I post process notes, sketches, and behind-the-scenes progress on Ko-Fi for people who want to witness the making, not just the finished page. It’s not about exclusivity or tiers—it’s about building a space where the act of creation is visible instead of hidden behind a curtain of “release dates.”
This pivot isn’t a scheduling change; it’s a philosophical one.
I don’t work on a clock. The pieces will be done when they’re done. Some will take months; some might surface all at once. I’m not packaging them for a release calendar — I’m building them for the long haul, the way you build something you plan to live with.
The main announcement here is simple: I’m taking back the means of storytelling. I’m drawing instead of waiting. I’m building worlds image by image, at the pace that feels right, until they tell me they’re ready.
Why Comics, Right Now
Comics have always lived just outside respectable boxes. Too visual to be shelved as “serious literature,” too narrative to be framed as “pure painting,” too weird to standardize without ruining what makes them spark. That outsider status is a feature. It means comics evolve without asking industries for permission. It means artists build vernaculars faster than committees can name them.
The past decade made something else obvious: the internet simplified the movement of images while making the movement of prose more conditional. Text online is routed through algorithms, content policies, SEO tricks, pagination schemes designed to sell ads, and reading experiences that interrupt you for everything except the sentence you came for. Images, while far from immune to all that, still retain a duct-tape resilience. They compress, travel, decompress, and still look like themselves.
Comics sit at that intersection of stubborn and portable. They use the strengths of images—immediacy, composition, gesture—and they keep what matters most about prose: the ability to structure time, argument, voice, and subtext. They are story you can see without surrendering to spectacle. They are not begging to be movies. They are their own form.
And yes, there’s a politics to that. Choosing a medium that doesn’t require institutional validation is a way of keeping control over what the work is, how it circulates, and how it earns. It’s a way of refusing to dilute the piece to fit into a storefront’s seasonal plan. It’s also a way of acknowledging material reality: I can draw digitally with tools I already own. I can release work without paying a gate every time. I can iterate openly instead of hiding drafts for a year while I wait on a zero-reply inbox.
Craft, Not Workaround
It’s important to say this clearly: I’m not “escaping” to comics because prose is hard. I’m choosing comics because the stories I want to tell demand a form that rewards structure and surface—where pacing is a spatial decision, where tone can be carried by texture and light, where the pause between two panels does the same work a paragraph break does but with more control.
When I draw, I get to compose silence. I get to decide how long you linger. I get to turn a sentence that would take a page into a single glance, a shifted posture, a shadow that insists on being read twice. I get to define scale—how big an idea feels—without asking a typesetter to bend the rules. I can write with line weight and layout and negative space and have those choices read as meaning, not just ornament.
All of that craft becomes even more interesting when the distribution is mine. I can pace the release. I can stage the page for the way you actually read on a screen. I can build in “breathing frames” that let your eyes rest between dense sequences. I can make bonus pages that are maps or inventories or process notes, and publish them as part of the world instead of relegating them to the back matter that most people never reach.
The Declaration
I’m reclaiming comics not as a niche, not as a fallback, but as the medium that lets me make the work at the pace and scale it deserves—without asking a bureaucracy to bless it first.
If art is going to exist freely, it has to move where it can’t be filed, delayed, or priced before it’s even born. For me, that place is the infinite page: the space where I decide the boundary, or erase it; where the story is allowed to be exactly as large as it needs to be; where the path from maker to reader is as short as hitting “publish.”
I’m done waiting for permission. I’m drawing instead.
Support independent creativity through the Mutual Aid Fund or by exploring the Shop: Made by Me | Oddities & Convenience. If you’d like: you can follow us on Medium, itch.io, or on ko-fi as well.
Got an independent project of your own? Let me know, I’ll bookmark your page if you bookmark mine 🙂