Focused - 38: Knit Your Parachute on the Way Down, with Thom Zahler

Episode Date: January 9, 2018

David and Jason talk to artist and writer Thom Zahler, an independent creator for 15 years in indie comics (Love and Capes, Warning Label), licensed comics (My Little Pony), and animated television (Spider Man: Web Warriors, Knights of the Zodiac), about his journey from art school student to freelancer to full-on free agent, and how his business has grown and changed over the years.

David Sparks and Jason Snell spent their careers working for the establishment. Then one day, they'd had enough. Now, they are independent workers learning what it takes to succeed in the 21st century. They are free agents. Welcome back to Free Agents, a podcast about being an independent worker in a digital age. I'm Jason Snell, and I'm joined as always by my fellow host, Mr. David Sparks. Hi, David. Hi, Jason. Happy New Year.

Yes, you as well. This is our January interview episode. And, David, do you want to tell everybody who we're talking to? Yeah, I'm actually quite excited about this episode. We're having Tom Zoller to the show. Welcome to the show, Tom. Hey, thanks for having me. Now, Tom, I feel like, you know, because Tom and I were talking before we did the show, and I feel like you're the guy in the trenches with the scars. Tom's been an independent artist for 15 years. He started out as a graphic artist, but decided, heck with it, I want to make my own

comics. And not just your own comics, you've done My Little Pony, which, by the way, Tom, I got to tell my daughter that at dinner last night, and now she actually respects me just a little bit, that I'm friends with somebody that did My Little Pony. I know way more about ponies than any 40-year-old man should. Well, that was the discussion at dinner. I didn't realize there's a thing called bronies. Did you know about this? yes i do that's probably a little bit of a rabbit hole but the um and then uh you also worked on the spider-man animated series but you've got your own stuff at your over at your website everybody i recommend go check out uh tom with an hthomz.com and you can find all that stuff but those are love and

capes and warning label which is a girlfriend that comes with a warning label i uh i i really enjoy tom's stuff i it's funny i um i wrote a story about a panel that tom was on at comic-con the first year i went to comic-con about like how digital uh delivery was changing comics and it was very funny because i just wrote the story and then i got a note from tom saying basically like i know who you are were you at my panel and it was just a very funny cross i had a couple of those where it was like turns out that uh that tech writers like comics and uh comic artists read about technology and who knew um but it's really great to be able to talk to you about about everything you do and uh being being an independent artist because that's you know we're living that every every day ourselves now too well not the artist part i don't ask me to draw a circle it's

bad yeah that's that's why i have ellipse guides that's what you draw circles with all right well tom how did you come to be an independent agent? I mean, how did you get your free agency? Oh, I always knew I wanted to be a cartoonist. I never wanted to be anything else. So I built my life around that idea. I went to a place called the Kubert School in New Jersey, which is one of the few schools in the country that teach cartooning, because you don't willingly move to north new jersey for any other reason and it was like boot camp for artists and when i graduated uh i i cleverly based my life on a line from a batman comic that you can't you can't have a back door you might be tempted to use it so i was one of those irritatingly smart kids in school and

then i told my mom i was going into cartooning and she, she was not a fan at first. Because when you say you're going to be a cartoonist, it's like saying that you're going to play in the NBA. There's a new crop every year, but it's really hard to get in that, in that group. So it wasn't,

it wasn't that she didn't believe in me. It's just, she knew what the odds were. So when I graduated, I needed an art job and I went to, I worked at amusement park for a while and then I worked as a graphic artist at an ad agency

and I liked doing both there was a point in my life where I thought I'd be happy just doing art that that was close enough all the time I was was drawing caricatures and doing the agency job I was freelancing comics I was lettering I was doing a little bit of inking

I didn't I didn't start writing I didn't start actually penciling yet. And then a whole bunch of things happened. One was my boss at the agency was a fantastic boss, but he started to calcify the more that I worked for him, where he started micromanaging things. And for someone who wanted to expand his business, he also wanted to touch everything that went out. And those two things were kind of incompatible. And the one that got me was he had me go to a friend of his to find out how to print something on a mirror. And when I came back, he asked me, oh, can we squeeze him on the price? Can we get him to do this?

And part of me was thinking, well, he's your friend. You should be having this conversation. And I know how to, if it's ink on on paper i know where to squeeze people on and i don't know where to do it on on metal or on glass that's a different process to me so if he was telling me it was going to take two weeks it's going to take two weeks and i was so frustrated by it that i was in my car uh actually driving to see friends and i remember thinking i don't think i want to work here anymore but i don't think i want to work anywhere anymore and it was the first time that i actually thought about completely becoming a freelancer um so i thought about it for a while i bought a

pretend house uh because tell us what that means so i was i was still living with my parents um which worked out really well because we get along great they've always been supportive of me um especially once my mom started seeing me have some degree of success as an artist. My dad had done art for a little while and was always behind me. And I was thinking about moving out, and I wasn't sure that I'd be able to make the monthly house payment. So I started giving myself a house payment and putting that in a bank account so that I could get used to that.

a house payment and putting that in a bank account so that I could get used to that. And that would later become the nest egg that allowed me to finally go freelance. Yeah. Okay. So instead of buying a house, it gave you the runway to get the business going. Exactly. And then the other thing, and I always feel a little weird bringing it up because so much is involved with this event that it sounds reductive to make, you know, this all about me. But this is just how this aspect of it really, really hit me

is I was I was on the fence. I was thinking about going the ad agency wasn't doing great. Work was slowing down. And then September 11th happened. And I had I had just turned 30. There's a lot of you know, there was a lot of interest introspection that went on with that. And that's when I said, I think it's time. I want to, I want to take a run at this and see if I can do it. Uh, so it took me a couple months to put everything in order. But in, uh, in early December of 2000, 2001, I went off on my own and I haven't looked back. Now, you know, usually Jason and I recommend that people want to go on their own. They start like it as a side gig. You know, they do the independent thing a little bit on the side if they can

to see if it's got legs before they go on. But you just went all in. Yeah, I've been freelancing. So comic books have a bunch of jobs to it. There's a writer who writes something that looks like a movie script. There's the artist who draws it in pencil. There's the inker who does something that looks like tracing,

but it's much harder than that. There's a letterer who puts the word balloons and sound effects together. And there's colorists who colors on Photoshop. And I had done a couple different parts of that, but I had done like the lower level parts. I wasn't the marquee talent. Nobody puts the name of a letterer on a comic book,

or very few people do. So I had been kicking around the industry and getting a little bit of work, but I hadn't gotten the chance to do the things that I really wanted to. So that's when I said I was getting enough lettering work where I thought it would be steady enough where I could go off on my own. There were more than a few nights where I was going to bed at 1, two in the morning because I had just been so backed up with work. And there's a part where like you have to figure you're going to knit your own parachute on the way down. Like I don't know that I could make enough money to replace what the ad agency was going to be because the ad agency job was taking eight, nine hours of my day every day. It needed to be out of my way so that I could have more time to do work to replace the work. And it's hard to figure out when that is,

but there's a part where you just have to trust yourself and say, okay, I'm like 20% away from where I want to be and I'm just going to do it. And then when I did my sales that year, I found out that I was making more money just freelancing lettering than I was working at the agency. So it was, it was there all along. Oh, that's good. Well, that, I mean, that, that is the, uh, I think that's the trick, right? Is when you get enough data to know, oh, I could do this, this like, it's worth, it's worth pulling the rip cord because it's going well enough that I have some suggestion that it's going to be fine. And because, because you're right at some point, you can't go any further because you've got a job that takes up a lot of your time that you have to, you have to

schedule in. If it wasn't there, you know, hopefully you could turn up everything else you're doing and, and then be fully independent. And a mistake a lot of people make, and I had to remind myself of this at the time I was making my decision was just because you try and do this, going independent doesn't mean you're like banned from going back to what you were doing before for life. You know, I mean, if worse came to worse, I'm sure you could find another graphic artist job somewhere, you know? Yeah. I had done it a couple of times before, so it wasn't, it wasn't all out of the realm of possibility, but there, I think when you go, when you go freelance, you have to, you have to really want to do it. Like I will never talk anyone into it. I will, I will talk to them about it, but

freelancing means you're going to wake up at three in the morning and a cold sweat every once in a while. And when that happens, you have to know that you were the person who put you there. Like you, you don't ever want to have that feeling like, ah, my dad talked me into this. I shouldn't have done it. It's no, I completely committed and, and I am on this path and this is, this is where I'm supposed to be. And another subtlety of that is you don't get to blame anybody else for anything. Uh, you know, when you have a jobby job, uh, you can always say, oh, my boss is a jerk and he's dumb and he's making me talk to mirror people. And that's the reason why things aren't working. Uh, when you're on your own, if things aren't working, there's only one person responsible

for that. It's you. Yeah. When you're, when you're at a bigger company, if you screw up, there are other people who can, who can ameliorate that. Like when I worked at a newspaper, if I, if I put something together wrong in an ad, there were a couple other levels that would get someone to catch it. But working by myself, I, I completely can set the controls and steer for the center together wrong in an ad there were a couple other levels that would get someone to catch it but

working by myself i i completely can set the controls and steer for the center of the sun if i if i wasn't paying attention i it everything that happens here is completely my responsibility yeah so you did it and this was a long time ago so you've been yeah independent for a while yeah i just uh i realized as i was getting ready for this, I've just hit my 16th anniversary. It's weird that it's December 6th. And after September 11th, the economy was going down, too, which I took as a positive because every great success story I know starts with, it was a terrible time to start a business. You even got the comic book voice. So, yeah, and it's, it's gone, it's gone like frighteningly

well since I like it, it should not have been quite as easy as it was not to start. Um, so it's been pretty smooth, started pretty smooth. At what point did you realize that you were, you were going to be okay? I don't know. You know, I think I got so busy with everything that it was hard for me to think about being okay. I was just in the process of it. There was very much a rightness to it that I had not appreciated, that everything felt like it was going the way it was supposed to. I know I said it before, but that was where I was supposed to be. I know when I bought – it was probably when I decided to buy my car, but maybe when I bought my house.

And that was 2003. So that was the part that I realized that, oh, I think I'm financially stable enough to make this decision. Even a bank trusts you now. I know. It was 2003. They were a little freer back then, but I'm not adverse to taking advantage of the things that you have when you have them. So I'm guessing that things have evolved a little bit over those 15 years. How has things changed to what you're doing now versus what you thought you'd be doing when you left? I made an effort a few years ago, I think, to do more cartooning and less graphic design, less caricature, less kind of pickup work.

I wanted to switch from having 10 clients that paid me $200 to having one client that paid me $2,000. I wanted, I didn't want more clients. I wanted bigger clients and to play on a bigger stage. Um, one of the things that I did shortly after going freelance was that I self published my first comic book, which, um, it's like you have a lot of money, but it's costing you too much to store it. So, and burning would take too long. So what you decided to do is self publish instead, because that will, that will clear that stuff out really nicely. Um, I made a lot of mistakes on, on my first book.

They weren't necessarily mistakes that you would know not to make, but there was such a learning period. Um, I did a book called Raider, which was an action adventure spy book that, uh, very people who read it seemed to like it but it was hard to get people to read it and i was probably working a little outside my comfort zone it was where i thought i wanted to be but it wasn't until after that and then when that failed and i had to pull the plug because when you're in school you think about doing these these great 15 volume magnum opuses this is going to be this is going to be the thing that I'm known for this character that I've had

in my head since I was 14 and it didn't, it didn't quite work. It's not that I'll never go back to it, but it was not viable to keep doing it. So, um, I, I came up with another idea that became love and capes.

Um, I worked on a much smaller scale. Um, computer technology changed a lot, uh lot just from the time I was at the Kubert School. So I was able to color my own work in a way that I would not have been able to afford years before. Because now you can color everything in Photoshop and send those files to a printer. But before you had to get color separators and get plates made and all sorts of expenses that weren't there before.

And taking what I learned from doing Raider, I was able to do Love and Capes in a way that I wasn't able to do a comic book before. And that's the thing that got people to notice me and led to everything else that transitioned me from doing letterhead design and graphic design and the occasional TV commercial and going on to most of my life is now actually being a cartoonist. And that feels so much. I still like doing everything else. And the stuff that I learned to do has been invaluable because I learned how to be a graphic designer. When I design my comics, I don't have to pay anyone to do that.

I can do that myself. So it's a quality control issue where it looks exactly the way I want it to. Um, but it also gives me a level of freedom that I'm not the best at everything that I do, but I, it is printable sounds so, so low a standard, but I can, I can do everything well enough that I can, I can make things happen in a way that people who only know how to draw can't get something colored or can't get something lettered by themselves. And they have to pay someone to do it. It gives me more freedom to create new projects. I feel like being successful as a free agent really so often requires you not only be good at the main thing that you left to do, but there's so many other little pieces of it.

And it sounds to me like you've kind of faced that issue head on in your career. Yeah, I think so. And there's a lot of it that it just helps you to understand what problem you're leaving for the next person. They taught us this at Qbert that when you're drawing pencils, you want your pencils tight enough so that your inker doesn't have to think about the drawing. They have to think about how to ink the drawing and that you want things clear enough that it's good for the next person down the line. And having worked in so many aspects of graphic design and art and cartooning, I know how to set things up so that they're the least problem either for me or for the next person to get it.

And that honestly saves money with them having to correct files. It gives you flexibility. And like when I did Love and Capes, the whole book is built on a two by four grid. So there are two panels across the top and it goes down for four tiers. Every fourth panel is a beat. So it's either a joke or a serious moment or something. Cause it's in my head, it's Bloom County. I was writing a Bloom County strip with that kind of pacing. But it let me take those four panels and put them online, which got the book a lot more exposure. It works as a comic book, but it was designed to, because my graphic design work and working out here in Ohio, there was a printer who was able to compete with the major comic book printer prices, and it gave me a sense of locality. I was able to go down and do press checks.

If I wanted to do something crazy, they would take care of me in a way that a big comic book printer that's printing for DC and Marvel, when someone comes up and says, I want to print 5,000 copies, you're barely on their radar. So you better fit in their template where I was a big job to, to the company down the street. And they were willing to work with me on all sorts of stuff. And it, it, it gave me a level of personalization and flexibility that it wouldn't have had somewhere else. This episode of free agentsents is brought to you by Timing, the automatic time tracking application for macOS. Have you ever spent all day in front of your Mac only to wonder where all that time has gone?

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And once you start using timing, you'll catch those unproductive hours and it'll end up paying for itself. Stop guessing how you're spending your time and instead focus on doing what you're good at go to timingapp.com and get your copy of timing today i want to ask a uh this is i know it's an industry question as a comic person i i'm interested in that but i think it's a larger thing because i'm also i'm somebody who has my own website and I also write money or write, write money. Yeah, that's good. I write, you can do that. Yeah, I can. They, they, some people, nobody actually will take that money that I write, but I try. Um, I write things for money where people, you know, big companies pay me to write things. And one of the things I've noticed about

what you're doing is you've got your independent stuff that you do and then you also are are doing jobs for publishers how do you balance that is is it good to just like keep um keep some projects for yourself and some projects that that it's good it's nice regular money to come in i'm just i'm curious about that because you definitely have it it looked familiar to me that kind of mixture of stuff that's all you and stuff where you're you know you are obviously being paid to do a job for a publisher yeah it it is and um for people who aren't quiz in the world that we are um there are projects that are owned by the publisher so when i when i work on my little pony i get paid a a flat rate to do that when i work on one of my books, like Love and Capes or Time and Vine, a lot of times that's a back-end deal, even when I'm with IDW. So I'm paying to produce the book. They're getting

it out and into stores in a way that it's changed since I started self-publishing. So that's much easier to do. But I need to keep both those things going. It's very much a plate-spinning thing. The fact that the bank wants money for my house every month really keeps me on, on level with that. I mean, it does focus the mind, um, because I, I need to make that payment. So I need to take enough things that are going to pay regularly that I know I've got that income coming in and it's stuff that I don't have to worry quite as much about. It's not that I'm not putting the time or the effort into it, but I know that I don't have to promote that issue of my little pony the way that I need to promote warning label.

I don't have to, there's a built in infrastructure for some of those books that they can, they can take care of themselves and I can, I can focus all my time on promoting and making sure that the smaller projects that I do that aren't as noticed get some notice. So, yeah, and it's also sometimes it's just who's looking for something at that time. We get the call for My Little Pony stories a couple times a year, the group of us that work on it. And then you send out a bunch of pitches and you see which ones take and which ones don't um and then it's kind of based on whatever whatever idw schedule is the the last year's worth of my little pony stories were designed to tie in with the cartoon so we were

given the the synopses of all the episodes for that year and then we were essentially pitching some sort of uh sequel and that meant that it was on their time frame if i put if i decided to pitch a my little pony version of apocalypse now which my hand to god i did um pinky pie takes over discord's dimension and she goes native and then the other ponies have to go up river to get colonel kurtz, that the time that was coming out is based on when the episode was going to air. So those things are sometimes out of our control. Um, so there are times where I've done,

I've done scripts that don't see print for five or six months. And there are times where I'm right up against a deadline. Certainly not like this week where I have a pony script do. Okay. So wait a second. That one, that one got made the apocalypse. yes absolutely no people it it's subtle enough that people don't see what the reference is and it's not messed up enough that anyone would be offended by it but that was

my initial that was my initial pitch for it okay i'm gonna read that one i'm gonna read my first my little pony comic there's a character that's kind of like Q from Star Trek and one of the ponies winds up in his dimension and accidentally takes it over. Something you said a few minutes ago that is something worth kind of putting a marker on is the idea of saying, I don't want 10 $200 clients. I want one $2,000 client. And I think that that's a little bit controversial and it could go either way for people because for some independent free agents, having the ability to diversify gives you a little more power. If you have one client that doesn't pay you and it's the only client you have, that's a problem or if they fire you. Whereas if you've got a bunch of clients, it gives you the

ability to a little more flexibility. But I was thinking when you said it, really what you were talking about wasn't the number of clients, but the type of work you wanted to do. I think that's probably the bigger issue for you, right? Oh yeah, definitely. Um, that's a, that's a good catch. Like, uh, I'm working for a place called Webtoons now and they've kind of joked that they're going to wrest me away from the other companies I work for. And I love working for them. They're one of the best companies I've ever worked for. But I won't put all my eggs in somebody else's basket, because you don't know what's going to happen with whatever company that, you know, companies are not forever. Relationships are not forever. And you have to be aware of that,

that if I if i go completely in with any one person they own me as much as i'm working for them so i want to yeah i wanted i wanted less little clients that i had to service because that still takes an amount of time and energy to make sure that they're they're getting the value for what they're paying for but drawing one sixty dollar caricature isn't that takes it. There's still ramping up to do it and doing that work and getting it out in a way that I could do a comic book page that's going to pay me more, or I could write a script that's going to pay me even more in that same amount

of time. And I just wanted to move to two bigger things rather than more things. Yeah. It makes a lot of sense. Yeah. I mean, we have definitely talked about being, having diversified income. And I'm actually reminded of my days as a manager at a publishing company, and having great freelancers that I wanted to work with more.

And we definitely had those conversations about like, you know, above a certain point, it's from the business perspective, and actually from like a IRS perspective, it also gets a little dicey. If you've got a huge percentage of your income coming from one place they will start to say maybe you're actually an employee which is not great for anyone um and i i several times ended up hiring people full-time who were kind of happy because from their perspective i realized this is like the inverse of this show but from their their perspective, they're like, yeah, you know, you guys are great to work with and, um, you're my best client and getting a regular paycheck might be easier if I'm allowed to sort of do what I'm already doing. And so I would, sometimes it's true. I would, I would reap people out of independence and turn them into employees.

Um, but it was essentially like employees doing essentially what they were doing before, still, we had those conversations about, you know, beyond a certain point, we either need to like hire you and make you 100% hours or this is the most I can give you because I have to work for other clients too, which I and some people said that I totally understood that. And now I really understand it being on the other side of it. I just realized that one thing Jason Snell brings to the show is that he used to be the man. I did. I did. I occupied those shoes, those uncomfortable leather shoes. You guys said to wear shoes at work? Yeah, not anymore. Yeah. I, I was just looking at my, uh, my dress suits and all the things I used to wear to the office every day and that now have dust on them in my closet. Yeah. I, I don't know

if this would have happened with you, David, but if you notice that your, your wardrobe has bifurcated. Yeah. So I, I have really dressy things cause I still have to go to weddings and funerals and things. And I have lots of t-shirts and jeans, but I don't have anything in the middle anymore. I don't have business casual because where would I wear it? There's no business for me to be casual at. And I have a lot of more fun socks now because I don't have to put a suit on that often. Uh, the, uh, you know, you've had 15 years at it. Have you had any rough spots? Yeah, I, I had a, I had a horrible rough patch for about a year and a half that I just really started coming out of this year. Um, all of a sudden a bunch of client work started drying up.

My financial situation took a weird hit. And it was, yeah, it was a little bit of a panic. I mean, it's kind of like a low-level buzz in your head where you can't stop thinking about it. There's a – I know Jason is a big baseball fan. Travis Fryman of the Cleveland Indians, uh, still haven't won a world series. Um, he, they asked him when he was in a slump, if he was worried about it. And he said, no, cause it's my batting average, which means I'll get back up there.

It's an average. And it was a, it's an interesting way to look at it where I, like, I didn't panic as much as I maybe could have. I certainly could have freaked out much more, but the idea that eventually I will figure it out, like if I've done 15 years of this, then I should be able to figure it out for the next year and get through it. That it's, it's always like a waveform and you, you have to figure out how, how much of it you need to worry about it and how much of it is just the individual circumstances in your world that are eventually going to be replaced by other circumstances, like publishers going out of business and then a new one comes along that hires you.

But there's still that uncomfortable six, eight-month gap of time where you don't have that. And I would like to have more reserves built up. I managed to get through it, but it wasn't comfortable for a while. And it would be really hard because you've been independent so long. I mean, just the thought of dusting off a resume, it must just be... There's an internet. I could figure out how to put one together again, but that's really difficult. Like, I'm broken.

It's really hard for me. Like, I don't remember how to work in that world anymore. I have to force myself to remember that I had a job before I was freelance. Cause it really feels like I got out of school and then I went freelance and I know there's a huge chunk of time that I'm self editing out cause it doesn't feel real anymore. Um, and top of that, like when I talked to my friends who are working for the man, I look at him and I go, but what if you have to go to the dentist? Like, how does that work? What if, how do you renew your driver's license license how like i just go during the middle of the day when that happens you like you have a job i don't i

don't get how that works i uh i got in a in a fight with a girl that i was dating past tense because with my convention schedule she was she was bothered by the the by the the amount of trips i was taking and i needed to take him for work but the thing i didn't realize is that she could really only take vacation time in the summer and that's when most of the conventions i was doing were or whatever actual noun verb agreement that should be and i didn't um it never occurred to me that you had to ask for time off or that there would be restrictions because i was so far out of that world at that point that I didn't, it, it just did not cross my mind that when I was going on a convention meant anything to somebody else's vacation schedule. Yeah.

I've only been out of the firm a couple of years and that's already turning into just a fog to me that those 20 years that I did that. And, um, just the other day I met a client for lunch at a shopping mall. And it was it's a big outdoor mall here in Orange County. And I was watching all the guys that like the clumps of guys in suits going to lunch together, you know, obviously the work group, and they're all telling each other jokes and trying to like get along as they go to lunch together. And it just I just had this reaction to it that I couldn't imagine myself being in that group again. That's like a nightmare for me now, just to have to go

to lunch with a big group of people from work. Yeah, when you see that stuff, it feels like you die a little bit inside. I visited a couple of people at very corporate offices, and it just, I don't know, it almost it, it, it almost feels like high school to me. It feels like it's, it's sucking something out of my soul in a weird way that it just reminds me, I don't want to go back to that. Yeah. I'm sure they have great retirement plans and a lot of things I don't have, but you know what? I just can't do it. You know, I, uh, I tell a lot of my friends that, uh, the difference with, uh, my aunt once asked me, I couldn't live like you do not knowing where my next paycheck is coming from. And I said, you don't know where your next paycheck is coming from.

I just know what my boss is doing about it. Because there's not as many guarantees as you think. She was a teacher. She was pretty guaranteed. But, you know, other people, it's still, you know, you don't know what's going to happen. No, that's, that's something I've mentioned on the show before, but I had a moment where I was listening to John Syracusa talking about his job because, you know, he's, he's somebody who is, is happy to have a job and a paycheck and he does all of this other stuff about tech on the side. And he, he, but he was very aware and he said this and it has stuck with me, which is, you know, anybody who's got a job could get laid off

tomorrow. Basically. I mean, you're right. If you're a teacher or something it's going to be a lot less likely but anybody and you don't know if your company is um about to go out of business and they've they've uh they've uh what how does the the song go they've funneled the uh the the pensions to the ceo's back pocket so that you know the next day there'll be nothing left. I mean, you don't know, you can hope, and it's probably not true, but you have no perception of the engine that is funding you probably. And that's another way to live, right? And I get it. It certainly smooths out the bumps, but, um, cause there are bumps and you mentioned waking up at three in the morning that absolutely happens and there are rough spots, but, um, yeah.

Also, you take sick time if you need to go to the dentist, by the way. You just take sick time. That's how it works. Yeah. Okay. Let me take a break and tell you about another sponsor for this show. It's FreshBooks. Hey, all you freelancers out there, all you free agents, you know how important it is to make smart decisions for your business.

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of your conversations are living in one place. If you're listening to this show and not using FreshBooks yet, now's the time to give it a try. FreshBooks is offering an unrestricted 30-day free trial to listeners of this show. No credit card is required. All you have to do is go to freshbooks.com slash free agents and enter free agents in the how did you hear about us section thank you to fresh books for supporting free agents tom you know how do you manage the business end of what you do because i know drawing comics isn't enough you've got to figure out the finances and all those other sticky parts of being a business owner yeah it is very much a xenos paradox game of inches where i feel like i keep getting halfway closer.

I've developed my own spreadsheet system for tracking my expenses because I have so much that is different with what I do from doing conventions to generating comic books to doing character gigs that I needed something that worked for me and I couldn't figure out another way to do that. And I try to be really good about that because there are so many artists who fit the template of the flaky artist. Like when I do a comic book convention, I know how much every book on that table costs me to buy and how much it costs me to bring to the show. I need to know if the convention has been successful financially, if that's what the convention is going for. Like when I do the San Diego comic con, that's very much an advertising show.

Like I need to be there because I need to be there. So if I break even, I'm happy. But other shows, I'm trying to generate revenue. And if I don't do it, I need to know whether or not I need to pull it or change what I'm doing. So I track my sales and both by book and by convention and by gig, you know, in a way that a lot of artists I know don't. I'm lucky that my brain functions in that environment well enough to start figuring that out. And I try to get better about it every year, try to track my receipts better, try not to let them wait till the end of the year. Just all that stuff because it helped. I just had to place an order with my publisher at IDW to buy a bunch of books for next year. And one, being able to look at what I sold informed what I was buying.

But it also let me – I've gotten to the point where I can look at what I've done over the course of the year and have enough of close to real numbers where I can see, okay, this this is it is a good time to make this purchase before the end of the year and get in in this year's taxes rather than let it go for next year right because there there's so many people who go oh i can write it off i'm like yeah but you still have to pay for it like it it's not magical it's yeah i know that is uh well that's something a lot of people don't figure out and i think that is for a lot of people who are super talented, especially doing art or something non-businessy. I think that's a big stumbling block to being a successful free agent. It's not that they don't know what they're doing in terms of the art or the product. It's just all the other little bits hang them up. That was one of the things that being a graphic designer really helped with

because I had to quote jobs on a regular basis or I had to deal with quotes from printers and know what I was looking for, where it, it taught me how to deal with that level of math, uh, and the business side of it, that I could apply it towards things that I did later. Like when I realized how much money I was generating for the ad agency and that this is what's paying my salary, it became very important to me to track how much money I was generating for the ad agency and why you track hours that way. But it changes your brain from just going from gig to gig and getting enough to make it through that month. So what are some of the tricks of the trade you've learned along these 15 years that have helped you be successful as a free agent?

What are some of the little things that you do every day? Oh, I like having a little bit of a schedule. I like figuring out when I'm the best at whatever thing I'm doing. So for some reason, it means that I draw better in the afternoon. I design better in the morning and I do websites better on weekends, probably because the phone or email isn't going off quite as much. But there are things like that, that I've figured out that work for me that I try not to be precious about it. I want to be able to work from anywhere to maybe be a little bit slower, but get the job done. But realize that there's a part where I'm kind of overclocking the engine. And I know that I'm being more productive doing this thing at this time than I would be if I let it go for another day or two. And that helps me with scheduling

jobs even counterproductively. So you're not doing this job is doing three days, but the job I'm, I'm really psyched about doing is doing a week. But if I do that now, I will get it done 50% faster than if I wait for it later. And that'll give me more time to work on the job. That's three days from now. I try to keep all the deadlines both on a schedule and in my head and just kind of know what's going on, you know, try to know which crisis to go to and try to make sure that not everything's a crisis. I hadn't thought about it, but you are doing a lot of juggling because you are working

for other people at the same time developing your own stuff. Yeah. And it's really easy to push your own stuff off in favor of somebody else's work because the paycheck's there immediately. And it just feels, sometimes it feels like the responsible thing to do, but ultimately it's not good for your career. Like you, right now I'm being hired to do My Little Pony. I know My Little Pony is not forever. Eventually the right now I'm being hired to do my little pony. I know my little pony is not forever. Eventually the things that in doing that creator owned, those are going to be the things that will get me more work. There'll be the things that I'm known for. And then the things that could be published ostensibly forever or turned into different media or like my little pony pays for

my world today. Long distance pays for my world five years from now hopefully that's something i'm struggling with because i i always prioritize the work for other people over the stuff that i want to do myself and as i'm heading into this new year that's one of my big goals is to get better at that because i can i you know that's a problem i know exists for me that i haven't solved yet frankly yeah it was, it was really tough for me on warning label because it feels very creator-owned, but it has to be done every week. And there's a paycheck attached to it in a way that I get paid essentially every month. It's not quite a back-end deal.

There's a flat rate that attaches. But it's hard for me to think of something that's so me and so creator owned as the thing that goes to the front of the line because it's paying for things and that's a that's conflict i've had to try to work out in my head i didn't realize i was doing it until i noticed that oh you're not leaving yourself enough time to do the thing that's actually the most important thing you need to push that to the top a little bit so how do do you, how do you solve that problem? Um, I don't know that I've solved it. I've just looked at it and noticed it. Um, I'm trying to take slightly less of the other stuff. That's not, not things like warning label because the warning label and stuff like it is generating enough revenue where I can say, I don't need

to letter this book or I can give people the kind of prices that this is what this book would actually cost me to do. You know, it's you're not bailing everybody out. You're confident enough to say, OK, well, I cannot do that thing for you. I'm sorry, but I don't have the time for it because this other stuff is ahead of you. Even though it feels like a creator owned project, it's, it's not, it's still just as important. And it's actually bringing in enough money where I have that confidence to say that, oh, okay, I don't, I don't need to take every job that comes across an email. There, there are things I can decide to let go. Oh boy, that sounds familiar to me, right? There's that moment where you're like,

oh, somebody is offering to give me money for work. I should say yes, because I need all the money I can, because otherwise I will die. And then you realize, oh yeah, I can't say yes to everything. And I shouldn't say yes to everything because then all of these other priorities I have go away. And I'm curious, do you, so you talk about my little pony as a revenue stream, obviously you're, you're, you're doing that. That's good. Is there a way for you to be cultivating like, uh, other things that could turn into that in the background separate from your own projects or is it really just sort of like you ride this pony until it's done and then you you move on can you you know do you talk to other people about other stuff to work

on for publishers that might turn into a big job down the road yeah i'm i'm trying to think how to how to answer this and not get myself into trouble um having worked on a licensed property that it they're not my characters even if i think i'm right about something if hasbro tells me i'm wrong i'm wrong yeah like i can make my case it's it's like a few good men i get to object but you don't strenuously object um so i can i can with that, but it also shows that amongst my skillset is that I can take that kind of adjustment and criticism and work within the confines of a series like that. So it allows me to start pushing for other licensed properties that other, like I've worked on the strawberry shortcake book. Um, I did some, some covers for that. There, there are other

licensed properties that have been trying to go after because I can show that, look, you know, I'm good to work with on this. And some of it is finding out at the publishing company you're working for, which editors are doing what other projects. So I can go to them and say, you know,

I'm good to work for. All I do is I get my scripts in on time and they're pretty bulletproof. So why don't you think about using me for this other thing that you have? Um, and some of it is going to different publishers and saying, hey, I would like to pitch this thing because I work on My Little Pony. You know that I can do this type of work in a way that sometimes creatives get very precious about things in a way that there's a commerce aspect to it that they need to recognize when you're generating stuff that's going to be turned into you're when you're generating stuff that's going to be turned into movies when you're generating stuff that's based on marvel you know marvel and

dc characters there's a story that jmd matthias talked about how he was going to get rid of captain america in the captain america book and finally they squelched it and it's like well yeah you can't get rid of captain america like it's a great story but it doesn't fit the the engine that is marvel comics um you have to you have to recognize that and sometimes uh very creative types they're they're focused on the story they want to tell and they're not noticing that they also have to hit a bunch of check boxes and make sure that they put their toys back where they found them and when you're working on licensed stuff you really have to do that so by by working on something like my little pony you've actually

now built up a track record where you can say look look, I have a skill. It's not just I have a skill making comics. I also have a track record in working with licensed properties, which not everybody has. And that's a sign that you are not going to, for lack of a better word, you're not going to be trouble. You're not going to make them go through as the publisher who's got the license right make them feel pain because you've got these things and they keep on having to bat them down and say you know no you need to stick with a brief on this um and so you've you've built up some credibility there yeah and you know i've i've been i've been flexible with things and i've been fast with things when they need me to be fast so those become things that i can use to try to get other work and um the other thing that's happened with my little pony is it's made me a better

guest at comic book conventions because as opposed to saying that I do love in capes, which some people know they can say that I work on my little pony and a lot of people know that. And that allows me to go to a lot more places. It'll, um, some conventions you pay for yourself. Some conventions bring you out. I'm getting more of the conventions that bring me out because I work on pony and it allows me to be in a place where I meet more people, where I can conceivably line up more work. Um, it was at Baltimore comic-con that I met web tunes. Um, and I can do those types of conventions because I've worked on other stuff that, you know, my little pony makes it financially feasible for me to do conventions in a way

that 2003 Tom did not have. This episode of Free Agents is brought to you by Squarespace. Enter code FREEAGENTS, all caps, one word, at checkout to get 10% off your first purchase. Make your next move with Squarespace. Squarespace lets you easily create a website for your next idea with a unique domain, award-winning templates, and more. So maybe you want to create an online store, or maybe you want to create a portfolio, or maybe you just want to create a blog. Squarespace is an all-in-one platform that lets you do just that. There's nothing to install, no patches to worry about, and thankfully no upgrades needed. You don't have to worry about any of that stuff.

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I had to depend on multiple vendors and hiring people to make sure the website worked. I just wanted it to work, and I signed up with Squarespace, like I said, several years ago, and Max Barkey and my law site are both based on Squarespace now. They work great. If I ever get linked by a big blog and I get a lot of traffic, they just ramp up the bandwidth and it just works. And I just have no problem. That 24-7 customer support is great. If I send them an email, I get a response right away. And I have never questioned my move over to Squarespace. So if you want to use Squarespace, you can get started. Plans are just $12 a month. But you can start with a trial with no credit card required by going to squarespace.com.

And when you decide to sign up, use the offer code FREEAGENTS as one word to get 10% off your first purchase and show your support for the free agents. We thank Squarespace for all of their support. So with Squarespace, make your next move, make your next website. Another thing you said that I think is a very important free agent skill is you're saying now I'm going out to other companies that make similar intellectual property and telling them, hey, I can do this. I did it for my little pony. That's a big step for a lot of people, you know, to go out and start pushing yourself. Yeah. I don't, I always get nervous about waiting until I need work. I want to, I want to start looking for it before I need it so that I'm, I'm not in that white hot panic again.

But figuring out what, figuring out what I do that's unique has been an important part of how I get work. When I was starting trying to get animation writing work, I had done a spec script and my friend Dwayne McDuffie had read it. And he spent two and a half hours on the phone with me going over that script, talking about everything that was right, everything that was wrong with it. And by the end of it, and I can't say this without sounding really arrogant, so I apologize, which most people who know me think I don't have a problem with. I'm very Shatner that way. But he told me, this is a good script. And if I got it from a freelancer, I wouldn't be upset.

He said, but I want to see a Tom Zoller script. I want to see this script that only you can do. And I was nervous because I was known for doing romantic comedy stuff. And I didn't want to be pigeonholed as the romantic comedy guy. And he said, look, you want to do a script that's so awesome that people want to use you on stuff. And it doesn't mean they're going to have you do the romantic comedy, but you want to do the script that

is so uniquely you that they want to employ you to do another script. And after that, I didn't worry so much about staking out this space doing vaguely romance-related comic books um and my little pony but uh i should have thought um part of the way that i got the job working on my little pony is that idw published my little pony i'd been doing love and capes which had

moved over there to them and then i went up to him and said i would i would like to do a cover because i know it's i know it's going to be huge. And again, the girl that I was seeing at the time was a huge fan of My Little Pony. It seemed like a really good idea. And they said, oh, would you like to pitch the book? And I'm like, well, yeah, I'm not an idiot. Absolutely. But it was because they had worked with me on Love and Capes and knew that I had this track record of being able to get things done on time and worked in kind of a cartoony style that I was able to get that my little pony job and build from there. So much of it is managing the pipeline.

And no matter what you're doing out there as a free agent, you've got to be thinking, OK, things are going good now. But what what's going to be on my desk in six months or a year? And if you don't, that's how you get in big trouble. Yeah. I have to I have to look out ahead a lot more than I thought I would. I need to be thinking of what stuff I'll have coming across in six months. And when I start seeing those gaps in the schedule, that's one, when I get nervous, and two, when I start pushing a little bit more. I want to have something to fill it up.

It messes with revenue. It messes with cash flow. Well, that's revenue. But it makes it difficult to have a steady, regular stream of things. That's part of the reason I do the conventions, too, is because I do sell books there. So I know that regardless of if I have a script coming in, in a certain month, I've got two conventions coming in and

I track my sales at those things and I can figure out how well that I did. And okay, well, you can, you can benchmark that you're going to have X amount of money coming in this month because of this thing. Um, so that, that makes it a little easier to do, but I'm, I'm always looking over the horizon. That's kind of interesting because the conventions really are a segment of your business. Did you expect that when you started? No. Um, conventions have also changed. Like there used to be a convention season, but now it's the season that never ends. Uh, they've become much more popular. Um, there are lots of people who will fight over whether or not they're actually comic book conventions anymore. Um, but they're kind of the thing that they are and you have to

learn how to deal with them. Um, so I don't mind, I don't mind the travel. I actually like the travel. Uh, but when I, when I started out, there were like four major conventions that people had to do. And now if I wanted to, I could do a convention every two weeks. I think some of that is just how much that pop culture has permeated the culture where Cleveland can support a Wizard World convention in a way that it probably couldn't have 10 years ago. as a kid, as much as I loved him as a character, you would get check out from Star Trek. And now William Shatner shows up because the conventions are run differently and they sell autographs and they sell photos, but allows them to bring in that actor in a way that they wouldn't be able to bring in that level of actor before. And when William Shatner comes to town, it gets noticed a lot more and more people come to the show. And then there are more people in front of your table. And then at that point,

it's your job to make something happen. One of the things you told me that is that you just do art at your art table. Explain that a little bit. One of my teachers at the Cuber school, Bart Sears told us not to do anything at your drawing table except draw. So don't eat, don't read, don't watch TV.

You, all you want to do there is, is just your just your task. And the idea is that eventually your mind clicks over that this is my workspace. So when you sit there, it becomes like a sense memory that triggers you to get your head a little more in the game. I went far enough with that that when I bought my house, the house was fine, but everything was the wrong color. So when I was planning out what I was going to do with it, most of the house was fine, but everything was the wrong color. So when I, when I was planning out what I was going to do with it, most of the houses, carpet and paint

and all traditional house things, but the, the room that's my studio, which is a three season room. So there's two sets of walls that are just windows. Um, I designed it all natural textures. So it's a hardwood floor and brick walls and glass and metal because it had to be the most different room in the house. When I step in this room, it is completely different and my mind immediately gets focused on doing art because this is the only thing I do in this room. I don't hang out here. It's my favorite room in the house. It's kind of like the Batcave in that respect. It's the room that is the most me in this building.

It's kind of like the bat cave in that respect. You know, it's the room that is the most me in this building. But it because all I do here is work. There's no point where, you know, it's not like sitting on the couch where you can sit on the couch and be on the computer or just watch TV or not. This this is a place where work happens. We talked about this a couple weeks ago, the appropriate workplace, work environment and how it sets your mind. And it can be something as simple as having it be clean or having your desktop be clean, or it can be a larger feeling. But I mean, that's what I told David.

I feel like I can't believe that I'm now the person who feels like he can work better when the stuff is picked up off the floor because what have I become? But it's totally true. Like my environment makes a difference. The fact that I have a window and I can see blue sky and a tree outside the window in a little, just a little portion of it, but I can is it's important. It's part of my, it's part of my workspace. And, and, you know, I, I'm, I marvel at the people like we have a listener who, you know, works at a folding table in their house. They fold it open for the day and then they fold it closed i'm glad

it works for them but you know everybody's different about about that yeah i've had to i've had to adjust it to where for some reason it's easier for me to write up at my local panera there's something about me being up there because i take the trip and it's 10 minutes away where i feel committed to being there long enough to justify having gone up there and getting food. And even though my computer's with me and I still arguably have the same number of distractions, I think there's less that I can do up there other than write. So I can't decide, oh, it'd just be easier if I letter this, these couple of pages that I have instead of writing or, you know, do the laundry or whatever tasks that seem like they would clear your head, but don't always.

And so I've, I've learned to do that too. I try not to make it so that I can only do it there. I think that's a danger where you need to be able to do work, even if you're, you feel like you're working with gloves on. Um, but yeah, just being able to, to go up there and recognizing that that is a thing that makes me just slightly more productive. Sometimes that's the thing that, that kicks me out of whatever, whatever funk I was having where I wasn't getting stuff done.

Yeah. I'm, I'm kind of fantasizing about my new home office I'm going to be making next year. And one of the realizations I've had is I'm going to have two desks because I'm starting to think the types of work I do, uh, splitting up between two desks would make'm starting to think the types of work i do uh splitting up between two desks would make my life a lot easier and and the listeners are going to hear about that probably at um ad nauseum later yeah that'll be the story of 2018 maybe it's david's david's office no i feel the same way i i do the same thing i i will go out into my kitchen and write, or I will go to Starbucks and write. And it is, yeah, is it the location?

Is it the act of moving? I don't know, but it definitely puts me in a different frame of mind and it can make me more productive to sort of get a change of scenery. It's okay for it to be a help. I just don't ever want it to be the crutch that I can't do it without. I can't draw without my magical pencil.

Right, right. That's a good point that's the then you're then you're doing the uh the linus's blanket thing which is dangerous sorry that's yes brown stuff hey what's the hardest part about being indie uh for me it's stopping because there while i don't just watch tv when i'm in, there's a lot of times I'll have TV or podcasts on. There's a lot of TV shows that are essentially radio plays. There's no point where I need to look to see what's going on in Law & Order. They're kind of explaining it. So I could watch TV at home or I could watch TV and generate revenue at the same time. And I tend to go for generate revenue. It's also, I really, really like what I do.

I mean, this is what I've been aiming for my entire life. And it's hard to turn that off. There's actually, the studio is, because it's in a patio, there's only one way to get in it. It's off the kitchen. And there are times where I find myself locking the door at night to try to keep myself from going back in. I mean, I have the lock. I could open it, but it just, that, that little extra act makes it like you're done here for now. You can,

it's okay for you to relax. It is okay for you to do something that isn't, isn't drawing. But when I'm at the house, it is, it is sometimes a struggle to make sure that I'm not just living in this eight by 20 room, which I know so exactly because I put two different floors in here. I want to make sure that I go out and take walks and have relationships and meet people and go to Starbucks and all sorts of stuff. But it's really tempting to stay here. So after 15 years, that's still a problem. Yeah. That's not good news for me. You know, it's a problem in the right way because it was probably a little easier for me.

The money was keeping me in this room. Now it's the work that's keeping me in this room. So it's not that I'm doing jobs because I need to do jobs and, oh, my God, I need to do jobs. It's I'm writing comic books. I'm drawing the comic books that I'm writing. I'm doing the thing that I'm put on this planet for. It's my first best destiny. And now it's the sense of fulfillment that's keeping me in here more than the sense of keeping the roof over my head that's keeping me in here.

It's still essentially the same problem, but recognizing that there's a different set of circumstances that's causing that feeling to happen helps you deal with why you're doing it. Yeah, that makes sense. And it sounds like kind of a good problem. Yeah, it's I don't I don't know how people wear ties. I mean, I went to Catholic high school. I did that for a while, but I don't like I don't know how I would get up and go to a job anymore. Not not that kind of job. Like I could I could do some sort of longterm thing. Like I've thought about it. If Pixar ever wanted to hire me, yes, I would

go work for Pixar for a while, but that's essentially like a long-term freelance thing. It wouldn't, it wouldn't feel like forever and I could do it for a while, but it wouldn't, it's ultimately not what I want to be doing. It would be fun for a bit, but it wouldn't, it wouldn't be right. Not forever. Yeah, and you'd have to ask yourself, is the gig at Pixar worth letting my independent properties linger? Yeah, and how much would they let me keep doing? And what's that balance going to be where all of a sudden, I don't know that I could stop making comic books.

Maybe I could stop sending them out and having them published if that was a requirement of like a non-compete, but I don't know that it could stop sending them out and having them published if that was a requirement of like a non-compete. But I don't know that it could stop. So then essentially I'm back to what I was doing with the ad agency and working at night. And that's sustainable for a while. But at some point you just burn out. Yeah. I had a last year I had a client offered to hire me full time as a in-house on the lawyer side.

And I turned them down. But the thing that I got thinking about, one of the considerations was, I've got this breadth of business from people. If I go do something exclusively for one person, all that business is going to go somewhere else, and I'm never going to get it back. And I think as an indie, you have to always be thinking about that. What decisions are you making that's going to allow you to where you're going to voluntarily give up your, you know, your future business. It's a, it's a complicated question, but you know, that's why we do the show, I guess. Yeah. It's, it's the reverse of what you were talking about, where if freelancing failed, I could go back to go back to the real world. Like if, if all of a sudden I was working on

a project so big that nobody saw a comic book come out with my name for five years, people would think I'd left the industry. And then it would be having to rebuild those relationships and that presence of mine for editors to know that I can do work. And that's one of the hardest parts is to get on people's radar that I wouldn't want to have to go back to pushing for that quite as much. Yeah, in a lot of ways, I think it's easier to go back to a day job than it is to go back to indie in that way. Oh, yeah. I mean, I feel like the world is kind of built for those kind of jobs. I mean, that's the thing that people understand.

It's weird in that my mom was a real estate agent, so she essentially was a freelancer, but she didn't understand that I was going to go freelance at one point. Like, it was just, it's a different mindset from you're used to that traditional view of what a Like it was, it was just, it's a different mindset from you're used to that traditional view of what a job is where, you know, somebody goes down the stairs and has breakfast and goes out the door and then comes back eight hours later. It's, it's a very

different way of working on things. And I think the world sometimes is built for one, even though there's a lot more freedom with the other, but the world is changing. Yes. Well, Tom, thank you so much for coming on today and sharing your story. It uh it's always nice hearing from an elder statesman 15 years is a long time to have done this i'm not that old i i still am boyishly charming you started off as an independent way earlier in your life than we did so it's and and it's nice to talk to somebody who's been doing it for a while and has and has survived and is not you know oh that's good yeah it it's my it's nice to talk to somebody who's been doing it for a while and has survived and is not, you know, it's good. Yeah, it's my supreme pleasure to talk to you about it. I love this so much.

So I'm always willing to share. I guess I could rephrase that. It's nice to talk to somebody who has a lot more guts than I did. I was just stupid at the right time. Nothing wrong with that. All right. Well, Tom, thank you so much for being here. And David, thank you as well. We'll

be back in a fortnight to talk more about our feelings and maybe your new office. Who knows? I'm going to stretch that out, Jason. I got a whole year. Okay. Good. Good. We'll keep it there. Well, anyway, you can always reach us, relay.fm slash free agents, or you can tweet at us, free agents, FM. And you can go to facebook.com slash groups slash freeagents group and that's another place to talk to us and fellow free agents and we

will be back in a fortnight. See you then. Bye everybody.