I have been drawing The Invisible Life of Poet since the winter of 2002. That’s almost six years since the idea began. After The Dayton CityPaper dropped me in 2003, it was on-and-off for a short time, but since the fall of 2004 I have created a new Poet almost every single week. There are now 208 strips in total, with 166 now online and growing every week. My “new” Wordpress-built site has been fully operational for well over a year. And yet, with only a few exceptions, The Invisible Life of Poet is still largely underground…a few very adamant fans, regular but not bill-paying site traffic, but never breaking the ceiling of wider popularity. While Nicholas Gurewitch has been interviewed dozens of times about his strip, The Perry Bible Fellowship, I’ve never been interviewed for anything. There was a time when I was bitter about this, but these days, I’m just confused. There are THOUSANDS of garbage comics out there that get far more attention than Poet ever has.

Over the years I have posited a variety of theories about why this might be. Poet is a solid product, a unique product, and a consistent one. I have read every scrap of info on promoting one’s webcomic. I listened to a recording of a forum at which some popular webcomic artists answered the question of how to bring readers to your site. They had one consistent message: do the work, do it consistently, and people will come. For me, this plan hasn’t quite worked.

I know that, to some extent, I have not been an active enough promoter. There is a good reason for this, that I don’t need to get into, but I’ve been acting to change that this year. Part of my problem now is that I don’t feel myself fitting in with other comic artists. I don’t feel I do what they do. Perhaps this is arrogance…I’m not sure. But I do genuinely feel that one of the most difficult challenges of pushing Poet is that it doesn’t fit into the typical categories people look for in a comic. It is too cartoon-y for the comic book crowd and too comic-y for the cartoon crowd. It is too melodramatic for people who want comedy every day and too humorous for people who want comic book-style excitement. It is too long for a quick meaningless laugh and too short for long involved plotlines. And perhaps most importantly, the subject material is very broad. Many of the most popular webcomics tend to focus on a single subject or group of people who share a common experience (think PhD Comics or XKCD, for example). Poet jumps from one experience to the next, and the average reader may find themselves only able to relate to a hand full of strips. Personally, Poet is the kind of comic strip I would want to read. And from week to week that’s what I try to create — a comic strip that I’D like to see. But perhaps my tastes skew from the general population of readers.

This latter point may be significant, because I am not a typical comic strip OR comic book reader. I hate most comic strips, be they web- or print-based. Comic books have never ever interested me. Ditto graphic novels. If the audience for Poet is anything like me, they may be tough to reach, because they’re not normally reading comic strips and comic books. In fact, they may be doing what they can to avoid such media, because to them (as to me) it is a tedious medium bloated with great artists and terrible, emotionless writers who understand little about how to write a good joke. And of course, the internet makes it possible for ANY idiot to produce a comic, so the truly good material can struggle to be heard over the din of a thousand tiny voices.

Other problems I have contemplated include the fact that I only create one strip a week, and today’s internet user can’t concentrate on anything spaced that far apart. I also wonder if this also leads into a problem of some event horizon of content, where one really needs a full year’s worth of content (think 365 days a year, instead of 52 weeks a year) to tip into the larger consciousness.

When I first created this strip, I had assumed that by the time I had drawn it for as long as I have now, it would be supporting me financially. But save for a few weeklies that once paid a small fee for the strip years ago, I have largely been working pro bono publico. For these last four years I have been sacrificing my Sundays to create this strip. Bill Watterson (creator of Calvin and Hobbes) once remarked that to spend that much time on something you weren’t being paid for means you’re either crazy or you love the work. The fact is, I still don’t really like drawing all that much (and here I go, starting another project that involves drawing), so I’m starting to consider the possibility that I’m actually crazy, and everybody is too nice to tell me.