Archive for March, 2010
5 items.
This should have been posted this morning, but I wasn’t quite finished last night and I had to work all day. So, although late, I still have a new one for today. I promise that Monday’s will show up in the morning.
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![job hunt, part two [nsfw?]](http://nakeddictators.com/comics-archive/2010-03-15.jpg "job hunt, part two")
It has been suggested to me that I get a regular schedule to post comics, so instead of a sporadic, whenever-I-get-one-done system, I’m going to go ahead and say that you can expect a new one every Monday and Thursday.
To my own surprise, I’ve managed to pump out three comics. Granted, none are of a particularly high quality, but I’m working on it. I’ve written a dozen or so more, and I’m looking forward to getting those drawn and posted.
For those of you that have managed to find this place already, feel free to post a comment with any sort of feedback–good, bad or neutral. I’d just like to get someone’s opinion.
“Where do you think the royalties to Mein Kampf go?” I asked my coworker the other day. “I mean, I know he has living relatives, but do they actually take that money?”
He didn’t know and we went on with our day. About twenty minutes later, he started reading aloud an article online about where all the money goes. Turns out, the story is more complicated than I thought, due to the fact that several publishers looking to cash in on Hitler’s bullshit put out their own translations.
In the U.S., Houghton Mifflin put out an abridged version, which — no surprise here — pissed a lot of people off. As for the royalties, Hitler’s relatives, who all changed their name to something that wasn’t Hitler, all refused the money. From ‘42 to ‘79, most of the profits went directly to the Justice Department (by force, it seems) for the War Claims Fund, who passed the money on to victims of the war. From ‘79 to 2000, the company reportedly took in $400,000 in royalties from the book and gave it all up to charity, although I can’t find which ones.
In England, publisher Huchinson published their own translation, donating all the money to charity, which was eventually revealed to be the German Welfare Council, until 2001, when the chairman refused any more of the money. No one wanted anything to do with it. Huchinson was eventually bought by Random House, who was bought by the German company Bertelsmann. Although it was — and still is — illegal to sell Mein Kampf in Germany, Bertelsmann’s ownership of the rights was no problem as long as they didn’t sell it in Germany.
Things then got uncomfortable when, in 1999, Mein Kampf wound up the ranked number 2 on Amazon’s bestsellers to Germany, which led both Amazon and Barnes and Noble to block all online sales of the book to German customers.
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I have also read before that membership numbers of white supremacist groups skyrocketed after Obama was elected, so I tried to do a search to find out if sales of Mein Kampf increased as well, but just wound up with a bunch of articles mentioning how professional doucherocket Ann Coulter referred to Obama’s first book as a “dimestore Mein Kampf,” once again doing her part to lower the bar of political discourse. My whole theory was then derailed when I realized that most white supremacists probably can’t read.
“If you really want to hurt your parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I’m not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.” – Kurt Vonnegut
So, here’s the thing; I’m fucking lazy.
Maybe that’s not even the right word. “Unmotivated,” maybe? You see, I have ambitions. Aspirations. I have a fuckload of ideas. Ideas all the time. The decent ones even turn into plans.
That’s the stage where it all goes to shit. The plans. Even now, as I type this first post, I can’t help but wonder if it will even ever be uploaded. That I’m not just sitting here, pecking out some intended manifesto of self-loathing that only I’ll ever read.
I’ll be twenty-nine in a few weeks. Twenty-nine. And — same as every other year — I take a quick glance at my life and come up a little blank. Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy with everything I have. A good marriage, a nice old house on an eight-acre stretch that I own, a good job at a small business that I like and isn’t hell to go to every morning… But I’ve always had this desire to create. I listen to music, watch movies, read books and comics, and I can’t help but feel that I should be contributing to this swarm. Even if it’s nothing but trite and unclever shit, I should be making something.
One thing I’ve realized — and this really isn’t easy to admit — is that I’m terrified of failure. I’m a complete coward. Nothing seems more horrifying to me than to put something that I created — a part of me — out there, only to have no one give a shit. So, although I try, I never finish anything. I lose my nerve and scrap the whole plan. But this itself is failure by default.
So, this is it. A plan I intend to carry out. The first comic has been finished and ready to upload. The art is sort of shitty, it probably isn’t funny, and I couldn’t care less. That’s not the point this time. This site is intended to be a motivator of sorts, a deadline to meet and a reason to hone my sub-par and atrophied illustration and writing abilities. But more on that later…