kumerish
patreon
Looking Back: A Decade of Self Publishing
🕑 Added 2025-07-09 19:28:38 +0000 UTCSince finishing The Gulf in March 2023, I’ve been haunted by the feeling that I’ve been idle. Receiving both the new Blind Alley book and the Mutt Mag was a much needed kick-in-the-head — I’ve definitely not stopped drawing comics despite the fact that I haven’t dived in on a graphic novel.
There was a point last year where I hoped that Running with the Dogs would be my next project. Some time away from it made it clear that I wanted it to rest. I’m scared that’s the case with No Place — it always feels like time is the key ingredient in telling a story correctly. Being in my early 30’s and having two books within me is daunting. Part of me just wants to get everything done as quick as possible which is an obvious tension with the way that I “write”. There’s the second, more obvious, issue of just needing a pay cheque.
All that said, I finished the pitch for No Place last week. For the past three months, each week felt like the last week of work. It’s been the motto of the summer so far, “after this week, I’ll be all finished the pitch!”. I’m a fool! The perimeters of creative projects creep outward, boundless. You can spend a day working only to discover that you wandered away from your intentions entirely. It’s pointless to go into a project with a map. I’m not sure why writing The Gulf felt simpler. Maybe the story had been with me longer or maybe the nature of a road-trip adventure is it’s only about how you get to the destination. No Place is a looser story -- more vibes and character driven -- and the struggle has mostly been trying to make it seem appealing to a publisher. Part of the frustration is, for better and worse, I know if I started drawing the story tomorrow that I would end up with an interesting book; the story is in me and I’m happy to learn the nuance of it as I draw. Unfortunately, that’s not how publishing works. At the end of the day, taking the time to write and plan prior to drawing will be for the best. C’est la vie.
Here's a secret preview of one of the pages:
After finishing the pitch, I immediately started packing orders. In order to do this efficiently, I’ve taken over the kitchen table. I laid out all of my available works in individual stacks. Seeing 7 years of work laid out before me is a bit surreal. Including Blind Alley, I’m probably just about at 1000 pages drawn.
While taking a break, I went upstairs and dug up a few zines that weren’t on the table. It’s hard to believe I’ve been self publishing comics for 10 years now. I figured it’d be fun to take a tour of old comics and talk about what I see when I look at them.
Mother (2015)
Less said about this project the better! It was dumb and ambitious in the way that most first projects are. It was meant to be an ongoing webcomic I publish weekly while starting art school. Needless to say, I stopped quite quickly. It’s bad!
If I have to be kinder, there’s something in the heart of it that I recognise as myself. However, it’s not worth reading — anything good in it is buried under miles of derivative comics. The art is so unrefined and all over the place. I really struggled with inking and you can tell! I think I only finished 16 pages of it before giving up the project.
Quality aside, drawing was all I did back then. My output is outrageous to think back on — filling up sketchbooks in weeks — as opposed to months or years. From the comfort of my position now, it’s easy to regret spending the bulk of my 20’s behind a sketchbook but what can ya do! I am where I am now because I spent most of my waking hours drawing.
Here’s an old thing from 2016 that I still agree with:
Glyph (2016)
This was a project done for a summer course during my first year of university. Printed in multiple colours on riso, it’s mostly made up of little one page sketchbook comics. Flipping through it now, there’s no spine to it but I can recognise a voice leaking through. It’s weird being old enough, having drawn comics for long enough, to look back and see some fundamental pieces that have always been there in my drawing; the raw material from which I still draw.
Content wise, there’s a certain early 20’s occupation with receding youth and all that entails; nostalgia, relationships, home…a lot of stuff that ends up either in ish or A Gleaming two years later.
At the time, I was really obsessed with a lot of mid-century illustrators and I think that shows in how I was drawing; big exaggerated graphic shapes.
-ish (2017)
cw: loss/grief/death
-ish is a collection of loosely related comics that circle a theme. It’s the first thing I made that folks seemed to like. It’s the first time I made something without thinking. In some ways, it's fair to call this book an excorcism. It was made during the most intense period of my life, but, despite what The Comics Journal review has guessed at, is most factually a lie.
It’s the first time I realized I could lay a narrative blanket over my own feelings; a loved one was in the hospital — we were told they would die. They are ultimately (miraculously, even now) still with us today, but for three long months we lived in a purgatorial state. Test results, bites of news, and diagnostics would trickle down from individual doctors and nurses and heavily direct the balance of a day. Yet, somewhow, we would still find our minds wandering away from the situation. Sitting for lunch in the hospital cafeteria or going for a walk (it was spring), we were surprised a laugh could escape us. Alarmed to discover that we had not been robbed of the capacity. Someone we love is dying and we are joking around. That grief does not rob one of the the pleasure of the warmth of the sun on your skin or a kiss on the neck, but that it instead is a companion. It is a something, always there, drawing attention to itself; yes, I am still here. That duality is what this zine is about. I had always viewed grief or sadness as the opposite of happiness, but really it all stands side by side, disorganized, in a single moment.
The following summer, a dear art school friend passsed away. This book has somehow pulled that future event into its gravity. I view that two year period as a lesson in living. A lesson in grieving. It's unbelievebly strange how life goes on despite the weight of a grief. It would be only right that some grief's should be allowed to stop the passage of time. Yet, it all keeps happening. Grief becomes foundational. There are classes to attend and rent to pay. Jokes to be made, stories to tell. There's a lake to swim in -- it's where I was when I got the call that she, 21 years old, had been found dead in her bed by her mother.
I have a weird relationship with this book becaue of this. It's raw and upfront in a way I tend to avoid now. It encouraged me to bury my feelings or thoughts deeper when writing; in characters and plot as opposed to direct narrative. ish, to me, is a book that could only be made in the midst of such feelings. It's directness is a result of them.
Visually, I feel I was starting to find something. It’s not cohesive, but there’s an energy to some of the drawings — a way of drawing — that feels free to me. These university years were guided by a desire to experiment and grow. I was so hungry. It’s hard not to look back and wish for some of that time; not everything I drew had to serve a purpose.
A handful of the comics within ish were actually drawn for a comics course I was taking in university with Chris Kuzma of the Wowee Zonk collective. I owe Chris a lot — he was so taken with these early comics that it put a lot of wind in my sails. I’m not sure I would’ve pursued comics as I have if I didn’t get his encouragement.
I remember feeling so preoccupied with wanting to make work that was visually interesting and more abstract than where my natural inclinations left me. I wanted to be a cool alternative cartoonists. I wanted to be admired for those qualities. I was sick with it.
This is first era of work I look back fondly on; despite the rough edges, I think there are things I left behind that are still worth pursuing. It’s when I feel my work started to look and sound like myself, but I can also see (or feel) desperation in how I was drawing.
Anyway, I went on to republish this with a new cover the following year:
Some other drawings from this era:
Wavering Line #2 (2017)
Y’know, I was feeling extremely unkind about this short comic I did for Wavering Line #2, but, actually looking at it, I think it’s not totally shit. Again, there’s something about this era of work that I find exciting to look back on — it’s so almost there but so incredibly different from how I approach comics now. Maybe that distance, that sense of this not being wholly correct, is what can allow me to appreciate it. I don’t really get to work in different modes now and it was all I did back then. Work like this makes me wonder if, perhaps, I have become too comfortable. The character is drawn so inconsistently across a single page that I almost find it admirable. It’d be funny if this whole post spiralled into me having an existential crisis over the box I’ve painted myself into with comics, wouldn’t it?
This short was drawn in tandem with ish and it narratively reflects that. Perhaps I should have included this in the Silver Sprocket re-release. I frankly forgot about it or filed it I my brain as “utter trash”.
I like this last page. While mentioning the smell of lilac is not exactly what one could call a reference, it is, in fact, a reference to my favourite poem at the time. Even now, I find myself reciting, incorrectly, a line from the poem whenever I smell lilac:
“The whole damn world smells of lilacs”
I happened across this sketchbook page I posted on Tumblr from 2016:
It’s a poem by Al Purdy. Here it is in its entirety:
I’d been driving all day
arrived home around 6 p.m.
got something to eat and slept an hour
then I went outside
and you know
– the whole world smells of lilacs
the whole damn world
I have grown old
making lists of things I wanted
to do and other lists
of words I wanted to say
and laughed because of the lists
and forgot most of them
– but there was a time
and there was this girl
this girl with violet eyes
and a lot of other people too
because it was some kind of a party
– but I couldn’t think of a way
some immediate plan or method
to bathe in that violet flow
with a feeling of being there too
at the first morning of the world
So I jostled her elbow a little
spilled her drink all over
did it again a couple of times
and you know it worked
it got so she winced
every time she saw me coming
but I did get to talk to her
and she smiled reluctantly
a little cautious because
on the basis of observed behaviour
I might be mad
and then she smiled
– altho I’ve forgotten her name
It’s on one of those lists
I have grown old
but these words remain
tell her for me
because it’s very important
tell her for me
there will come one May night
of every year that she’s alive
when the whole world smells of lilacs.
And so you write it down (2018)
The following TCAF, I made a zine called and so you write it down which was partially a response to stories in ish. It’s funny looking back at these abstract, poetry comics — my work is so focussed on character now. It’s so dominant in my early work. This is the sort of storytelling that fills up my sketchbook, so, this side of me still exists, but it’s just hard to make time for this kind of work. Maybe in future issues of Mutt Mag!
In the intervening year, I had dropped out of my thesis, which gave me a lot of time to search for the type of work I wanted to make. The illustration thesis at OCADu operated through a very narrow framework and I struggled to conceive of my work within it. It’s one that I recognise has merit, but is one that most students were unprepared for; having spent 3 years working on assignments, to suddenly have to define a years worth of work— to make a body of work to launch your career — in a single month was daunting. It was daunting in the way most things are in your 20's; each decision feels like it will define your future. It all felt do or die, which in hindsight is untrue, but impossible to communicate to someone in the midst of it.
At the time, my partner and all of my friends were doing illustrations in gouache. I felt I should too. It didn’t come naturally to me, but I now miss working with it! I remember sitting at my desk, hour after hour, essentially having a slow percolating existential crisis — what type of illustrator am I? How should I draw? What do I care about? Who am I who am I who am I?
Despite the crisis, when I painted these, I knew they felt like me. It’s ephemeral, impossible to define, but sometimes certain works just feel right. The illustration directly above served as a landmark for me as I moved forward.
A Gleaming (2018)
After dropping out of my illustration thesis, I enrolled in another Kuzma comics course. This one had students pitch a single semester long comics project. Kuzma would provide guidance over weekly check in’s while you worked on it.
A Gleaming was a story that I had been sitting with for a few years before starting it — a group of high school friends reunite for a party and UFO’s show up. The initial idea was that it would end right as the flying saucers hovered above. It was inspired by those parties in your mid-20’s that are never quite as carefree, stupid, or fun as the ones in your late teens/early 20’s. The ones where the predominant feeling was that things were never quite going to be the same was there with the hangover the next day; you were adults now. It’s about a group of friends who are trying to recreate those yesterdays but can’t quite get back at it. It’s about feeling the world pull you forward into adulthood but looking back instead of ahead.
It's a story that, perhaps ill-advised, uses a gentrifying city as a metaphor for coming-of-age; ones youth being replaced with something unfamiliar, strange, and inaccessible. I was preoccupied with the rapid demolition of my the main strip of the small town I grew up in. It was once all mid-century single storey storefronts with low-rise apartments on the peripendicular blocks. Now it's all 30-storey multi-million dollar apartment buildings that jockey for ocean-views. I remember returning home for the holidays over the years and seeing all of the demolition and development; towers rising from memories. Selfishly, it felt as though the city itself was telling me I no longer belonged there. These apartments weren't affordable. The boujie cafe that replaced the shitty bagel shop was double the price.
As far as how I wrote this, I believe I had a list of things I wanted to happen and the dialogue for key scenes, but mostly just wrote it scene by scene. I knew the characters and wanted to cycle through them, which gave the story an inherent rhythm.
Visually, it’s messy and cluttered but it’s very me. I felt free while working on this and I think it shows in all of the decisions I made — both good and bad. I allowed myself to draw it in pencil because I was more comfortable with it than a pen. I was always after the freedom I felt in my sketchbook in my finished work. It also allowed for me to play with the medium a bit — smudging and erasing bits for effect. Stylistically, I feel like I was leaning too far into the open-line cartooning I was doing at the time. That way of drawing has a lot of energy, but relying on it too often, having competing forms in a single panel or page, kills it (which I am guilty of in spades).
For what it’s worth, I am grateful for this comic. It’s rough around the edges in a way that’s probably not wholly unexpected for a first book. I have problems with it, of course, but most of them boil down to it feeling a bit too open or honest. This was the story that made me realize that characters are plot — if two people want something different in the same situation story happens. As a writer I now try to have characters feel things that are obfuscated from themselves; all of the characters in the first issue of A Gleaming have such a firm grasp on what they’re experiencing and why, and that doesn’t feel real to me. I love when a character steps back and wonders, why did I do that?
After struggling so deeply with my thesis, this felt like being off-leash at the dog park. I’d obviously known I loved drawing comics prior to this, but this is the first thing I made where I felt like I had entirely done what I set out to do. I realized I could tell stories. I could happily sit and draw comics all day. I loved working a character through a scene. I loved thinking about the possibilities of comics as a form. This is such a relic of my mid 20’s, and it’s what I owe my career to, so I cannot criticise it too much. This is the book that made me want to keep doing this.
Camping97 (2018)
I’ve toyed with the idea of expanding this short. It follows two friends who are on a camping trip with one of their mothers. To me, it’s ultimately about belief but…I think, due to the “quality” of the cartooning, it may be a mileage may vary situation. You could win a game of kumerish-trope bingo with this one.
I grew up in a Christian household. I attended sunday school, youth group, and went to a Christian elementary school. I went to Bible camp in the summer. I memorized Bible verses and played guitar in the Church's youth band. I never felt wholly bought into what I was taught. I had fundamental questions that were never satisfied. I somehow always felt I lacked the capacity for the blind faith required to push these qualms aside. As I came to terms with that, I found myself preoccupied with what the proper lens to look at the world was; if not this, than what? Despite my desires, no dogma neatly put any of my feelings to bed. I could never quiet the voice in my head. I had to get comfortable existing in the nebulous, which remains difficult for me.
As consequence, I am intrigued by people who wholly believe anything. I've listened to countless hours of dumb extra-terrestial conspiracy theories or podcasts about the supernatural. I don't believe in it, not really, but I find others capacity to believe fascinating. To look at the world and see something fantastic or strange and to justify it. I feel so strongly that I wish I could believe in anything like that. It's a terrible and beautiful power that our thoughts or desires shape our perceptions.
This is a story based on that. Two friends look at the same night sky and see different things.
I drew this story in the summer after finishing A Gleaming for Zine Dream. I drew it on printer paper because it was all I had around which really hampered my ability to erase. The above image is what it looks like “finished” but now, 7 years on, I actually prefer the below un-edited scan.
Please excuse my politically incorrect language:
The zine was printed on 11x17 paper, two comics per sheet, and cut and half. It was a nightmare to assemble, but I wanted the extra height in order to emphasise the sky.
Heard in KlubZin #3 (2019)
I was thrilled to be asked to contribute to Klub Zin but didn’t really have a strong idea of what I should make. I decided to let myself draw a story page by page with no real plan. I think that’s probably obvious to anyone who has actually read it.
It's a "story" "about" a kid who is left behind. They've failed to follow their herd or were prevented from it. They don't know why.
It's not really about anything and that's my problem with it. It's nothing. It's just crap happening. There's nothing of value here.
There are moments in this story that I like and I even like some of the drawing but…overall, it’s easily my worst comic (maybe aside from Glyph). I did not know how to colour comics and some of the pages are hideous — I’ve cherry picked pages I actually don't mind.
Looking over these pages now, I find it eerie how often I find myself circling the same ideas, imagery, or arriving at the same moments. Woops!
Offering lemons to pigeons (2019)
A sketchbook comic collection titled after something I saw while on the street car in Toronto; a women thrusting a lemon out towards a flutter of pigeons. I’ve always wanted to do another one of these — my sketchbooks are full of these dumbass little comics. This is from an era of drawing that I often look at and wonder if I’ve gotten worse.
I think I should redraw the above image and make a t-shirt of it or something. Would people like that?
The above sketch was something I drew while working on my illustration thesis Summer Camp of Earthly Delights; about the experience of summer camp using imagery from Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights triptych. In the end, I was quite happy with the body of work I produced but, as usual, it took time to get there. The story of every creative project involves a false start where I end up scrapping work. In university, I’d often finish an illustration assignment and decide to start over. Dropping out of thesis a semester in and then repeating it successfully is true to form. I’ve gotten used to throwing work out. I find it important to embrace the fact that everything I draw or write is part of the process of actually making the thing I am trying to. No one will ever see the six drafts I’ve written for No Place, but they are part of building the right story. It’d only be a failure if I wasn’t willing to toss work in the bin and went ahead with my first (worse) draft. The fact that my brain is fine with all this repetion, I think, is what has made me decent at what I do.
I don’t know. I like these. Is that lame to say? Is it lame I am sharing so many of these because they make me laugh? I mostly just like how I was drawing; such simple shapes or open/energetic figures. I can tell I was having fun. The title comic — about the lemons — is poorly drawn and it’s the only multi-page story in the lot. I love labouring over a story but there’s pure joy when drawing dumb shit in my sketchbook.
There’s even an acme appearance!
A Gleaming No. 2 (2020)
Prior to graduating university, I applied for an Ontario Arts Council grant for comics in order to continue writing A Gleaming. Miraculously, I received it. It was for a pitiful amount but comparable to what I would expect to get when working with an indie publisher. This allowed me to justify going down to two shifts a week at my gig as a barista at a bougie cafe. I felt strongly about spending my time this way; I wanted to be a cartoonist. I was still doing illustration gigs as they came — mainly an extremely shit recurring job with The Globe and Mail, but my heart wasn’t in it.
I loved drawing this book.
I remember intentionally setting some aesthetic parameters: I wanted most shots at the party to either be at eye-level, like the reader is moving through the house, or for settings to feel like a stage. I tended to draw characters set right against the edge of the panels (the edge of the stage) as opposed to set in 3D space, which I still like the look of but tend to not do as often. I also gave a lot of consideration to the layout of the house and how we (a reader) moves through the space — rotating the camera so we get a full sense of the cluttered house party and physically navigating the house between scenes.
I remember the below rotation really creaking the gears in my head.
The story moves at the pace of a party, so there’s an emphasis on moment-to-moment acting. I’m a fan of that stuff — small moments — characters observing each other or sitting in a feeling. I definitely continue that in The Gulf but the pace and 12 panel grid basis for A Gleaming really allows me to break things down. I think these pages, consequently, often feel quite busy at first glance but I remember arguing (to nobody in particular) that comics are read panel to panel; the overall page layout does matter but only in regards to setting atmosphere. It’s cluttered and chaotic because it is a party. I still stand by that -- I still think too much emphasis is put on drawing a weird arbitrary snake through a comics page. That's real, for sure, but it's strange and limiting expectation to have of every comic. We never complain about having to skip our eye from line to line when reading a normal book.
Drawing this book with a mechanical pencil means that there’s no hierarchy to the lines — foreground and background are not treated differently so I occasionally feel like it reads as cluttered as opposed to busy. It’s calling out for a tone to add depth. In the time since, I've embraced inking with a nib. The nib encourages different marks and line weights; it's intimidating, but it also guides how I draw. Drawing with a mechanical pencil requires nothing and encourages very little. It's a safe choice and, while I generally like the look of this book, Ido think that a different tool -- maybe even just a normal ass pencil -- would've served me better and encouraged more clarity in some of the drawing.
Most of my issues with the first issue aren’t here in the second. There’s a lot more showing as opposed to telling. A lot more conflict. It’s weirder. I’m proud of this work and would love to someday finish this story. I'd love to apply a respectful layer of polish to the first two issues as well; maybe add a few pages or rewrite a few sections.
I self published it right as we entered the first COVID lockdown in Vancouver. I remember lining up outside the post-office, mask on, with bags full of pre-orders under my arms. It’s surreal to think back to how grateful I was for the support and that I’ve quintupled the orders, in as many years, during my most recent online sale. Real grateful.
The first sequence I ever drew from A Gleaming — in 2016 — ended up redrawn in this issue. It’s a terrible gag that I apparently felt quite attached to.
Here’s the sequence from the second issue, three-ish years later:
Anyway, I started drawing The Gulf and Blind Alley the year after this.
Thanks for joining me on this trip down memory lane. Feel free to ask any questions below.
All the best
Adam
Comments
Adam
Thanks so much! Means a lot to hear.
BigMamaDil
I wasn't super familiar with your earlier work, but the illustrations you shared here are awesome. I've also only relatively recently gotten into reading comics, and I feel like your comments about taking them panel by panel, regardless of the layout of the whole page, has helped me begin to more easily navigate them. So I appreciate that!!
Adam
ah thanks so much! It's fun to hear that you were brought in by Ex. Mag/The Gulf as I find people usually are here for Blind Alley!
Cal O'Boyle
Really enjoyed reading this! Big fan of your art but thus far I’ve only read your Ex.Mag short and The Gulf (both of which I loved) so reading this was a fun primer for digging into the rest of your work. The new one looks sick! Can’t wait to read it
