Full-timer reporting for duty!
I don't have work on Tapas currently but I live comfortably on a combination of book advances, quarterly royalties, Patreon, and occasional freelance doing comics for online news publications.
I think it probably took me a total of seven years, 20+ short one-shots (ranging from page counts between 40 to 140+), hundreds of pages and hours before I was in a place financially where I could support a family (coming soon hopefully!).
A couple years into it I emailed an editor and managed to be a regular feature on a news site's comic section and that was when I felt like I really went full time but it was a VERY MEASLY amount of money. I was paying rent by the skin of my teeth and living a very unhealthy lifestyle. But it did let me focus entirely on my comics. In the beginning, I was a night janitor which gave me plenty of time to develop my comics in the day but by the time I realized things were kind of accelerating I needed all the hours I could get and would end up spending 12+ hours a day on my comics.
It is an extremely slow grind and you have to be a really good judge of your own work. If a comic isn't landing, PIVOT. Reiterate on it later if it's something you still feel passionate about a couple years down the line (my most recent pitch was a comic I started 5 years ago, didn't stick the landing with the audience, and I've come back to it as a better storyteller and it got approved). Always be tinkering and figuring out what works best for your audience and yourself. The first thing you make is almost never the thing that strikes gold. Heck, the first 10 things are unlikely to hit it. Pivoting has been extremely important for my career and I think it would've been very detrimental for me to have stuck with ONE idea for X amount of years.
It seems like a lot of people in comics want to make a big magnum opus right off the bat. I focused on making something that could get very popular (which took a lot of pivoting and tinkering and research) and do whatever I wanted from there. Most people don't reach out and send emails and set up meetings with publishers, art directors, agents, and editors to get work that pays. And that's HUGELY important. In that way, it's like any other job. You can't wait for someone to notice you and give you your first big break. There's a lotta legwork involved to reach a certain level and even knowing all of this from pretty much the begninng it still took me a whole seven years.
There is an aspect of luck. I'm lucky in that my sensibilities CAN lean into popular territory (though that had to be developed out of research and practice). But almost every single person I know who has reached a certain level in this field has done a lot of the same behind-the-scenes legwork that I do. I do want to say I am in an uncommon position and I know there are people who have done the same amount of legwork I do or more and still struggle. Even if you put in the time and effort there is no guaranteed success.It's a lot of hard and grueling effort for something that still may not work.
