The characters in my comic tend to be very reasonable. Even the angriest ones rarely get so angry that it comes across as actual rage. Things rarely escalate past the point of annoyance, so I almost never draw certain characters with expressions other than the mild ones. Even as I was drawing this I was having trouble making the characters look like themselves to me because I've so rarely drawn these ones in particular as anything other than basically happy. When I was young and learning to draw (although I'm still learning) I almost always drew angry faces because I was in a perpetual state of anger. I very much channel my actual emotions into my art so in order to draw characters the way they need to be drawn I have to force myself to tap in to the correct emotion. It's not as hard to fake happiness when I need to now. I've learned to step out of myself as a survival function in order to make the comic. That's why the comics that I produced in the absolute worst times of my life weren't just filled with misery. I was able to set it aside and do what needed to be done. It's not something I've always been able to do. Even now I can't always do it. If I'm in a pinch and can't get out of my head I will sometimes listen to mood appropriate music to nudge myself in the right direction. That generally has to be done with positive emotions because It's always been very easy for me to slip into the negative ones. I am extremely emotionally unstable for a man. More than one person of either gender have told me that I argue like a woman, which i take to mean that rather than arguing the points I argue my emotions. I have to pay attention when I get into arguments that I don't start doing that since it's not very productive. In order to actually achieve some sort of common ground you almost always need to stick to the unemotional aspects of conflict. Otherwise you descent into chaos bit by bit. I'm not sure if it's just something in me, or it comes from being raised by my grandmother and mother and I just picked up their styles. My mother eventually grew out of that sort of thing but Grandma tended to appeal to emotion right up until the last time I spoke with her. Remaining objective is something I have to actively cultivate in myself. Maybe some of you can understand that problem.
Unrelated to the above topic, I find myself thinking about extra content for the comic and how things started out. When the monetization model shifted from ad based to subscription based one of the key ideas was that the author's time was something that was to be valued. Meaning that being able to interact with them was a premium experience. That never really worked for me because I don't see myself as having much value. Or at the very least I don't see interacting with me as having much. I've always made myself available to basically anyone at any time. You can talk to me on any social media platform that does direct communication. As long as I notice the email you can always message me that way. The long and the short of it is that I've made myself accessible in a way that most creators don't, and in so doing seemingly made very few people interested in contacting me. I guess because if it's easy to contact someone it must not be worth contacting them. You are only premium if you sell yourself as premium and that isn't something I can believe about myself. I have all these beliefs that sort of screw me over as far as business is concerned because I have a sort of egalitarian basis for my worldview. I am not intrinsically more valuable than anyone else just because I perform publicly. Really though that's how most of the world seems to operate, especially when it comes to successful people. I wonder if that's something that will always hamper my success.
It's kind of like this: Elon Musk is extremely successful, but I don't see him as better than me just because he's rich and powerful. He's still mortal. He gets sick. He crashes out on his social media. If anything the fact that he is constantly on social media just proves that he's just as much of a fuck up in a lot of ways as anyone you meet on the street. His relationships fall apart. He fights with his friends. He has good takes, and terrible takes. He just does all of the regular people things on a scale of attention that I can barely even fathom. The again, on some level, if it came down to a choice of who had to die so the other could live i feel like maybe it shouldn't be me. What do I really offer the world by comparison? I guess it's a more complex issue than it seems like on the face of it.
In any case I don't like the idea of keeping myself away from people just so I can make more money. Even though I'm at a point where I desperately need it. I think that I would also feel really bad if I set myself apart and then found out that people never wanted to get the premium experience of me regardless. it is very possible that I am not a premium person and having that settled would probably not make me very happy at all.
Anyway, this is a premium experience of me that people who just read the comic won't get. I hope that it has some sort of value to enough of you to convince you that I'm still worth supporting. What I believe on that issue is not nearly as important as what you believe. XD