Creator Spotlight: Vas Littlecrow Wojtanowicz

Last week’s interview with Charlie Wise was a lot of fun and a big hit, so it’s most likely that this will become a recurring feature 🙂  This week, I get to share with you some fascinating insights from the mind of Reverend Vas Littlecrow Wojtanowicz.

EDIT: Some of the links below might be defunct, but their general website is still up.

I first got to know Vas from the Webcomic Underdogs group, where they were a mod for at least a good year or so.  Through that, we did a fun cross-over fan fic where Jane went on a date with Hielope 🙂  Vas is a great mentor and friend to all of us new comic creators, and really does a lot to try to help the community as a whole, making them a perfect person to interview, in my opinion.

Vas was kind enough to share a lot of links from various blogs they’ve written and to her various comics.  I have not looked at all the links, but I do know that some of Vas’ work is NSFW, so just click with care 😀

D: You’ve obviously done a lot of different things in your life.  Why webcomics?

V: Why webcomics? I guess that’s not a decision that I really had to make, because I’ve been making comic since infancy. In fact, webcomics just sort of happened back in 1995 when ZNLArts still existed. I helped run an arts and entertainment tabloid ‘zine known as The Electric Walleye.  We had an World Wide Web version of it on this old school public Internet service known as Prairie Online back in Fargo-Moorhead. Scans of our print comic strips, including mine, were uploaded along with EW’s online edition. Technically speaking, that made them webcomics. That’s probably why it took me over a decade to feel comfortable with the word “webcomics” to describe my own work.  I’ve been working on comics my whole life, and I see the Internet as nothing more than just another avenue of distribution. Comics are comics to me.  I just say “webcomics” because it’s an important cultural identifier for the online comics community that I choose to honor.

My relationship with comics goes much deeper than than just posting them online. Sequential art has proven itself time and time again to be major asset in my professional life and general well-being. I always bring up the fact that I am a comic creator when I do job interviews, because it’s a really great icebreaker. It’s also even better way of summarizing my diverse skill sets and my entrepreneurial talents. My comics were integral in the promotion of my modeling career; I’m not conventionally beautiful and they gave me a way to stand out. When I was performing, I found that comics were an absolutely efficient and cost-effective method of idea generation, that I could easily turn around and monetize further with ad revenue and print edition sales. A notable example of this was a page from Rasputin Barxotka entitled “Uninspired Chaos” which lead directly to the production of my most notable and complex professional performance art piece, “Eagle In The Cities”.

D: Do you think webcomic creators can use their medium to be a force for good in the world?  If so, how?

V: The webcomic format provides an easy and inexpensive entryway into the world of multidisciplinary arts. Most webcomic creators draw, write and market their own work, and I feel that this is a great thing towards helping people create a meaningful creative existence. A population with a well-rounded life experience is more resilient to challenges, independent, intelligent and community-minded than populations that lack basic access to the arts. This grassroots medium of webcomics has succeeded in doing what hundreds of government-funded arts organizations with generous corporate sponsors have failed to do over the years; making the arts more accessible to the common person. Even more importantly, I’ve found that most long-term webcomic creators are very open to sharing their knowledge. People who are willing to serve others, are a huge asset to any civilized society. Like other comic makers throughout history, webcomic creators are in an amazing position to contribute to the sociopolitical landscape by creating art with the power to satirize, explore the human experience and entertain in a non-threatening way. And yes, I feel that independent entertainment is a huge force for good.  Without amusement or compelling stories, the world becomes a very dark place.

D: You’ve been doing comics and webcomics for a while.  Got any good stories from the olden days?

V: When I first put the Nine Lives of Catnose online, I was an insanely poor addict. My vision was slowly recovering from prescription drug-related brain damage, while simultaneously dealing with poorly managed mental illness. I prostituted myself for meals and booze, because I was too poor for government welfare, but too proud to ask for help.  The only reason I wasn’t homeless was because my mom and grandfather, who were blissfully unaware of how bad things were, sent me money on a monthly basis without me asking for it. I fished for art supplies in dumpsters. I lived in a tiny studio apartment with a tiny built-in kitchenette, and a really old bathtub. My belongings consisted of flip chair, some kitchen stuff, a fishbowl full of rubbers, my scavenged art supplies, clothes, an ancient computer, and a scanner that I found from the dumpster. I would scan my comics, which were published at a local college newspaper and, I’d  walk to the Fargo Public Library with floppy disks in hand. The staff there was really nice and I considered them friends. I would upload my webcomics to my old Geocities site, a proto-blog called Vas Littlecrow’s Ego Online, in an effort to get more visibility for my art. Getting The Nine Lives of Catnose online brought me a lot of joy, during that otherwise dismal phase in my life.

Eventually, I managed to score a job as an art model at North Dakota State University. The Nine Lives of Catnose was originally just a slice-of-life piece, but because of my beloved post-rehab job, I started focusing more on making comics about being a model. A light bulb clicked, so I decided to gain exposure for my modeling work in the same way that I garnered exposure for my comics. With the help of my mentor and friend, photographer Paul L. Meisel, I became an Internet model. Even back then there was a lot of competition, and from an objective perspective, I’ve never been the most attractive person in the world. I’ll even go as far as to say that I really had no business being a model, outside of art class or grocery store sample work. However, because of my comic creations, I managed to distinguish myself from the competition of the then nascent Internet model industry.The Modeling Network website, picked up The Nine Lives of Catnose, and that really expanded my reach. At one point popular Internet models from the day, were requesting cameos in The Nine Lives of Catnose. Photographers knew me as, “that artsy model who does comics.” Before I knew it, liquor companies were paying me to be adorable at drunks and, I giggled all the way to the bank. I was getting free goodies from clients on a regular basis, and I could actually afford sushi, frilly outfits and handmade stoneware. The poverty days seems so far away because the webcomic and the Internet model enterprises really fed upon each other. At my peak, I was making $250.00 an hour with travel and a other expenses paid. I found that amazing because I wasn’t union. I could only put out my webcomic once a month, but I didn’t stop. Continuing my webcomic work was absolutely necessary for my modeling career, and later on, my performance career.

For this reason, whenever I hear someone say, “You can’t make money with webcomics,” I must restrain the urge to scream, “Shut the hell up!”  In our industry, there’s an abundance of people limiting themselves because they are too busy pretending that there is one single formula for webcomic success. Even worse, there are newbie webcomic artists believe this narrow way of thinking, because the elders perpetuate it. I am proof that this is absolutely not the case.

D: Any words of advice to new readers or creators of webcomics?

V: I have a lot of advice.<

Webcomic readers, we love you as fans, but please don’t behave like fanatics.  I know that it’s easy to get attached to webcomics, but remember that in most cases webcomics are works-in-progress and, that creators do have lives outside of comics.  If you’re interested in finding what I mean by this, read my “Don’t Be A Sucky Webcomic Fan” post on the Velvet Rasputin blog.

Webcomic creators, honor your boundaries. While it is often rewarding to please fans, that should never be your ultimate goal. I see a lot of creators burn out because they put the hope of getting validation from others regarding their webcomics, ahead of everything else in their life. This is not a healthy thing at all. No matter how wonderful comics are, they are never more important than loved ones or your personal well being. While you are at it, don’t judge yourself based upon what other creators do. While it is fun to compare notes with other creators, wasting your time fretting over someone’s art, how many people are following you on some crowdfunding thing or, how site stats measure up to those of other webcomics, strikes me as ridiculous. Instead of worrying, mind your own work! If you are lucky enough to create a webcomic at a moment when it connects with enough people to become profitable, then save and invest as much as you can. Audiences and advertisers are very fickle and will ditch you the moment your work no longer connects with them. In the likely case that this happens, you’ll need to be prepared. Conversely, if you never succeed financially with your webcomics, then don’t sweat it. Webcomics are just drawings with text and nothing to get hung up about.

D: How you channel/use your schizophrenia to help tell stories?

V: Ever since I suffered a brain injury, after a car crash on December 14th, 2013, this question feels like ancient history. After that incident, the schizophrenia spontaneously went into remission with my autism becoming more noticeable. I’m not going to speculate on how that works. More dramatically, thinking visually, drawing and even just waking up in a middle of a dream have become major triggers for migraine headaches.  I am still able to write the scripts that Ram Lama uses to illustrate Rasputin Catamite. Unfortunately, Rasputin Barxotka came to an end because the way my brain rewired itself to compensate for the injury, makes it impossible to do continue. It’s not fun to draw anymore, and my imaginary friends vanished along with that desire to illustrate. While this saddens me on some level, going into full remission felt like the answer to decades of prayer. Having limitless imagination seems like a great gift, until one is unable to leave Make-Believe Land, even when a person is surprisingly functional. Because that’s not my world anymore, I’ll have to go back to the past to answer that.  This will be a long answer, because it needs to be in order to avoid any misunderstandings. I am autistic and I feel that’s more of a boon than a disability. Schizophrenia, on the other hand, was hell and it was made worse because I was already suffering from PTSD.

Imagine waking in the middle of a dream or nightmare that doesn’t vanish after you get out of bed. You are still completely aware of the real world, but the alternate world seems just as real. People who don’t exist surround you. You don’t trust anything or anyone and thus, paranoia grips you at every corner. You don’t lie because you want to deceive, you lie because your mind deceives you to the point of not knowing better. You hear voices, smell things, and see things that don’t exist in this plane of existence. Even your sense of touch tricks you.  You say things that make absolutely no sense to others, while being absolutely convinced that they should. That’s what schizophrenia was like for me. I have always been relatively organized because of my autism so that saved me from being completely disconnected. My brain was a ball of chaos, nevertheless. A really great psychologist that I worked with once described my brain as being on five-hundred micrograms of LSD at all times. In fact, on the one time I dropped acid, it actually calmed my brain to the point of experiencing my first ever night of boredom.

Before I became a full-time professional model, my schizophrenia was so bad that I had barely had any concept of what reality was. All I wanted to do was die or be numb. Making things worse, was the fact that pharmaceutical treatments were mostly ineffective for my condition at best, and at worst, they exacerbated the multi-sensory hallucinations. My art was one of the few things that kept me from jumping into a complete abyss of insanity, even if some of my characters where often horrifying and based on the very figments that made my life confusing beyond measure. In August 1998, I finally had enough of being completely out of control. I eventually tapered off all drugs, prescribed or otherwise, because I really needed to learn what part of my consciousness was me, what were the drugs and what were my figments.  My current husband , Loki, along my family and, a group of very supportive friends, helped me stay afloat. I eventually found a really amazing psychiatrist who told me flat out, “All I can do is give you meds. If meds aren’t helping, you need to manage your mental illness by adjusting your life around it.” So, I did.

I began managing my mental illness using unconventional methods. I designed my studio space as a relaxing oasis, specifically made to remind me of what was real and what was imaginary.  I would schedule my work in such a way, that I could take long breaks when my mind was out of sorts or prepare months in advanced for the extra stress. Deep meditation, prayer rituals, repetitive behaviors and self-imposed isolation became part of coping mechanism repertoire. I even used a Russian hypnosis technique  developed by the legendary Dr. Vladimir Raikov to help me mimic another unrelated mental illness known as dissociative identity disorder as a way to organize chaotic and often nonsensical thoughts into more manageable bits.  The latter coping technique had the amazingly useful side-effect of making character development very simple, because I “became” the character.  It was kind of like method acting without the torture.  I have an entry on the Upir’s Mark blog which explains the process in a fairly simple way. This was not my primary tool for storytelling in most of my work. Role-playing, and mashing up real life with historical research, and current events remain my favored techniques for developing story ideas.  Sometimes, some of my comic stories are just re-contextualized and exaggerated versions of things that I actually went through. All of my characters function as a symbolic language. Most of my work consists of metaphorical autobiography.

D: Any thoughts on what you feel is/should be the future of webcomics?

V: I’ve been around the indie comics industry long enough to see the past repeating itself. Webcomics are decentralized and have few barriers to entry, so I don’t see them disappearing as an art form any time soon. The professional end of the industry presents a much different story. Monetized webcomics are in the midst of conditions similar to the ones that precipitated the indie comic industry market collapse of the 1990’s. I really wasn’t involved with the webcomics community at my peak, because the modeling community had more money to spend on my work, but I’ve noticed that the webcomic world lacks the vivacity it once had. Active forums, ranking sites, webcomic reviewers, wikis, transcript services, industry podcasts and more webcomic goodies seemed to be everywhere in the earlier part of the 21st century. Conversations in forums and communities were constant and meaningful. Sadly, most of those resources have either disappeared or switched to just hosting webcomics. In the last three years or so, webcomics seem to be collapsing in mass because people need work that pays the bills right now, and can’t afford to waste time on doing anything just for the fun of it. There are too many hobbyists, not enough mentors, and too much “you can’t make money on webcomics” and business formula worship. As was the case in the early 90’s, the economy tanked and because of this, advertisers spend less money, which adversely affecting creator revenues in a highly-saturated market. Conventions have gotten a lot more expensive, as have raw materials for print work and webcomic creation. I’ve always said that, “(Web)comics are a hard gig,” but presently, it’s even harder. My assessment might seem dark, but that’s only because the situation the industry faces a grim reality.

The few surviving webcomic communities out there feel like double-edged swords. If professional webcomics are going to survive without being swallowed up by the apparent eventuality of media consolidation, it is important that creators remain capable of reaching out to audiences outside of the greater webcomic community. This is a lot more difficult than it sounds. Generally, webcomic communities tend to be tightly-knit yet insular, which removes much of the incentive for creators to interact with non-webcomic communities. Ultimately, this destroys economic opportunities and it makes it harder for the art form to enjoy mainstream acceptance. Yet, without participation in webcomic communities, it’s very easy for creators to become isolated and demoralized, so they are absolutely necessary. Making the situation even worse is the fact that the webcomic community differs from the comic/’zine community of the old days in one particularly ugly way: we absolutely are awful at taking and receiving criticism. Without informed criticism that isn’t obsessed solely on promoting a single type webcomic aesthetic, the industry is pretty much screwed. What people assume is solid comic art now, may go out of fashion and turn into “bad” art overnight. I’ve seen it happen over and over, and I don’t see why it won’t happen again. Organizations like the Webcomic Underdogs and Comic Fury Forums are at least making a concerted effort towards trying to bring back some semblance of sanity back into the process of peer criticism. However, the webcomic community needs to go further in cultivating informed creators who are well-versed in various stylistic approaches and basics like anatomy, color theory and composition. I go into greater detail on the dynamics and importance of quality webcomic criticism on a Velvet Rasputin post entitled, Everyone’s (a) Critic(ized), in case anyone would like to investigate the issue further.

There are a few rays of hope, that could potentially turn this mess around. The most obvious would be a return to the patronage funding model for the arts. In the post-burlesque days of Velvet Rasputin, that’s how the collective has primarily received funding for its work. I am at a point in my art career where if my fixed-income doesn’t cover my bills, I just ask for money without any shame. Most times, I’ll get it without having to get a second job to fill in the gaps. For this reason, I was absolutely thrilled by the birth of the flawed but much needed, Patreon. My account isn’t producing much money at all, and I didn’t expect it to, because my work isn’t sunshine and flowers that you can read in front of your kids, and I am more concerned with obtaining funds from meatspace. However, I felt that it was important for me to get an account right away to model the behavior I wanted to see in other webcomic creators that I feel are needed for the industry to survive. As an early adopter, it makes me extremely happy that the webcomics community has really embraced this revived funding medium, and that fans seem to amenable to it. Another ray of hope is the advent of mobile-friendly eComics.  They are a lot easier to monetize than webcomics, and they provide a great way to create a product with minimal expenses. Additionally, the webcomic artists who are surviving the collapse, seem to be taking a much greater interest in the business end of running webcomics as multidisciplinary arts enterprise, rather than just slapping banner ads on their sites and hoping that riches will magically appear.  Those that don’t seem more at peace about their status as hobbyists.

Many commentators claim that the future of webcomics will be full of infinite canvasses, motion comics and other such gimmicks. Frankly on a large scale, I don’t see these things happening. If people want to see moving cartoon characters, they’ll watch animation. Infinite canvasses are not necessarily great for mobile devices, so that’s not going to happen either, especially since mobile is the future of web content in general. People who read webcomics, generally are people who love comics in their classic sequential art glory, and will consume them as such whether they are on paper or an iPad. Trends such as the mass embracing of Twitter by the webcomic community, give me hope that it might break through its insularity and reach people who aren’t part of it. Let’s just hope Twitter doesn’t self-destroy before that happens. I am also optimistic that many of the people who are involved in webcomics for the wrong reasons will be weeded out during the current dark period. I feel like if more people who genuinely love the craft of storytelling with sequential art are able to endure this natural industry down cycle, more comic consumers will be willing to take a chance of independent webcomic creators and their works.

D: Thanks again, Vas for sharing your experiences and thoughts! We appreciate it.

Any questions for Vas? Feel free to post them below 🙂