Why Are You Like This? by Meg Adams

One of the oddest things, for me, about the contemporary cartooning world is that everybody has to be an entrepreneur now. (I mean, yeah, I know, late-stage capitalism hits all of us and all that jazz, sure, but even more so for cartoonists.) It used to be that cartoonists who did lots of different things - single-panels, mostly disconnected from each other - sold them individually to magazines or other outlets, but cartoonists all wanted to come up with a concept they could turn into a strip: a concept that supported a stream of stories, with new entries regularly, probably multi-panel. And some larger organization would back that strip, push it out into the world, gather the money, and keep the whole engine running for decades.

But, these days, even the most successful recent new strips of the 21st century - aside from a very few newspaper launches like Crabgrass - are all webcomics. On the positive side, that means the creator owns it all. On the negative side, the creator has to do it all: build a website, design and source merchandise and reprint books, run fundraisers, set up advertising, and everything else that actually brings in revenue on top of just creating the work.

And it may be a cliché, but cartoonists are not generally known for their organizational skill, entrepreneurial zeal, and eagerness to sell their work to other people. On the other hand, we have been getting a lot of interesting strips from good cartoonists, so the system seems to be working...but I suspect there's an element of "young cartoonist has enough energy and gumption to set it up and run it for a few years, then gets ground down by the lack of stable cash flow and aforementioned late-stage capitalism."

Because I want to see cartoonist have long, complex, interesting careers. If they can do that in high-profile ways, so I don't have to take a lot of time and effort to chase their work down, that would be even better, because I am lazy.

These thoughts are brought to you today by What Are You Like This?, the first collection of the ArtbyMoga online strip by Meg Adams, a talented younger cartoonist from the Pacific Northwest. The book is from Andrews McMeel, the book-publishing arm of one of the surviving major comics syndicators, so she's somewhat plugged into what used to be the big engine of comics success. But ArtbyMoga strips originally appear on Adams's social media, cast out for free into the world in hopes that will lead to engagement and clicks and eyeballs and merch sales and Ko-Fi tips and so forth. (There is something inherently Underpants Gnomes-esque about modern webcomics, particularly those that live on Instagram. To editorialize briefly, it's what happens when you let your economy be dominated by techbros who are really good at making sure most of the potential money in any system comes to them and them alone.)

But I'm supposed to be writing here about Meg Adams comics! She's got a energetic, expressive cartoony style, with big fat confident lines and great faces. Her work is in the roughly autobio area - I won't assume how much the "Meg" and "Carson" in her strips really map to her real self and husband; comic exaggeration is a thing that exists - and her strips are pretty domestic, grounded in the lives of this couple and their various animals (I think two dogs and three cats).

I particularly like how Adams draws herself. She has a conventionally pretty version of her face she does some of the time, for quieter, more normal moments. But she also has a more distorted, cartoony self that pops up a lot - see the cover, with that weird thin nose, distorted eyes, and unsettling mouth. I'm always impressed by humorists (in comics or out of it) who are confident enough to throw a Gookie and make themselves the butt of the joke, and Adams does that really well.

So I want you to support Meg Adams, and cartoonists like her. Read their comics, buy and read their books, buy T-shirts if you can, buy sketches or whatever if it strikes your fancy. Click like and subscribe, as they say. You can start with this book: it's out now, it's very funny, and it's pretty cheap, too. Thank me later.