If all you care about is praise, just pick up litter around town

31 Jul, 2026

Chasing nothing

Zinefest is in two days so I went ahead and put some shit up on my portfolio website. I thought I'd just reuse the illustrations from my old site, so I'm pleasantly surprised that I could include so much new artwork that I'm proud of.

At the same time—browsing through my social media channels, seeing if there was anything I might have missed and liked to include—I found it disheartening that I had so little old artwork I felt proud of.

Of course, there were pieces I put effort into which I still think look amazing. But there were also so many pieces where the colors and anatomy were phoned in to hell because I just wanted to post something.

What for? Sometimes I might get the validation of 1000 people on some stupid meme but far more often it'd be 10 on something I liked then deleted. I feel like I wasted so much time feeling so hopeless IRL that I would vie for acknowledgement online at the detriment of my artwork.

—so the fact that I'm actually pretty good at art after all that is kind of a miracle, but I think it helps that I genuinely enjoy drawing outside of characters. My love for complex compositions and backgrounds pushed me into a place where I had to put time and effort into my artwork. And now that I draw characters for only me, I can put in proper time for them as well.

I saw a sign

Walking around the city, I often find out about new events and bands through posters and stickers illegally stuck onto signposts and walls. But yesterday, I found something unusual: a sticker promoting an indie comic creator blog, ActionMan Adam.

It was pasted on the back of a sign on a traffic light, and looked to be in pretty good shape so I assumed it was quite recent—stickers usually get pulled off or stuck over after a couple of months. Turns out it was from at least 2009! I can accept that vinyl will withstand the weather, but I'm shocked that same sign has been up for so long to begin with. The artist, Marc Streeter, has long abandoned the blog and now works at Bastion Marketing.¹

In any case I was thinking okaaay, I could probably promote my blog like that too. Although I'm a good boy so I'll just use the notice boards at the grocery store.²

But then I wondered—what is the point? I don't have any band to promo or any comic to sell. I don't even advertise my commissions online anymore. There's no useful information here that I desperately want to share to some stranger who might see my URL in public. What would I even want to get out of it but attention?

But why does anyone write a personal blog to begin with? I just can't shut up!

Jump glazing

Me & Roboco is a Shonen Jump gag manga about an egocentric robot maid called Roboco. One of its recurring gags is Roboco's quest to get published in Jump, and her constant failure to do so because her art is shit and she only knows how to plagiarize popular manga.

This is a very on-the-nose gag for a manga that's critiqued for having too many Jump parodies.

The author, Shuhei Miyazaki, actually debuted with the official parody of The Promised Neverland, a fact that's repeatedly stated throughout Me & Roboco. Many of the manga's 'jokes' are just Miyazaki glazing Jump, but just as often there will be Jump glazing with a side of self-deprecation for not being as good as the rest of Jump.

Roboco's mangaka storyline runs alongside another character's, a grade school girl called Ruri. Despite her age, you see her progress from winning unpublished awards to eventual serialization—something that makes Roboco very jealous because she can't even make her pitch.

So in chapter 270, Roboco asks a serialized mangaka for advice.

It's a tiny panel but it stuck out to me because it's true. If all I share my art or writing for is praise, I might as well do something actually useful with my time. So I want to do it for something different—I guess I feel like people can't really understand me until they see my work.

It's not because my art conveys anything special; I literally just draw cute teddy bears and sexy anime girls. But I think that when you see my artwork, or the work of any artist, you instantly understand just how much they dedicate their time to creating and improving themselves—and at least in my case, I think you better understand that my holed-up dedication contributes to my shitty social skills and lack of interest in sports and parties.

Basically, it's people mean when they talk about "expressing yourself with art". In the case of writing that's a lot more obvious as I am literally expressing myself right now.

Anyway, the chapter ends with Roboco creating a comic that features 15 pages of her self-insert being praised by everyone else. The editor says the art is insufficient, the story is a mess, and there's way too much cheering for her character.

But then he says that he can tell how much she wanted to convey her charm to the readers. And for the first time, he starts the pitch meeting.

Me & Roboco is a very episodic manga but as it progresses you can see Miyazaki try different storytelling techniques and form recurring gags outside of Jump parodies. For example, he starts parodying other magazines too.

Jokes aside, it's kinda heartwarming how the manga's least funny gags are paralleled in Roboco's own character arc—and as both mangaka and character develop their own identities as creators, the unfunny reliance on praising Jump actually serves as a marker for later comedic growth.

I guess that's how you should see old art you're not proud of too.

#2026 #art #rant