Helpful Relatives

I posted this on an industry forum. But then, I thought, what good is it there if the people I wanted to share it with most don’t see it?

John

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General Discussion (6m) – Helpful Relatives

I don’t want anyone to take this the wrong way, but I’m a little curious: how may people who own stores or game companies have spouses with outside jobs, or military pensions, or an outside job themselves or a mother who won $2 mil at Lotto? I was reading the “motivations” thread, and it made me think of this question.

Elaine Watkins

My wife has a GREAT job (Marketing Director at “Michael Feldman’s Whad’Ya Know” on public radio). This meant that when I needed to take a risk to make the cartooning business a success, by quitting my job at the Wisconsin State Journal back in 1996, I could.

We didn’t take a HUGE hit money-wise, since I was able to supplement the cartooning with freelance web design work. But the health insurance was a great plus. Plus, there was never pressure on me to make the same money as I did at the WSJ right out of the block.

The risk paid off, and the cartooning career is going gangbusters (both the Dork Tower comic book and the Dork Tower strip, which now appears in Inquest, Dragon, Pyramid, GameSpy.com and Interactive Week, and is also translated into German, French, Italian, Spanish, Polish and (soon) Bulgarian and Macedonian, to say nothing of a certain Hungarian pirate site). The readership of the comic strip in English is estimated at 750,000.

HOWEVER, if it wasn’t for a VERY supportive wife who always encouraged me to do what I love, as well as a family that always seemed to believe in me when I needed it most, I would probably still be a reporter at the Wisconsin State Journal.

Thanks, Judith. Thanks, Mom and Dad, David and Alexandra. Everybody else: you can blame them. 🙂

John