There is a stack of paper on the corner of my drafting table that has survived three apartments, two laptops, and one very bad breakup. It is forty pages long. It is a comic. I have shown it to no one.

Not my partner. Not my studio mate. Not the editor who once asked, over coffee on Division, what I was working on “for myself.” I said, “Oh, you know. Small stuff.” That was in 2022. The stack has grown since then. It has also, in a sense, not grown at all, because I keep redrawing page one.

I want to be honest about what this project is and isn’t. It isn’t a secret masterpiece. It isn’t a graphic novel in progress that I’m quietly shopping to publishers. It’s a forty-page comic that I’ve been drawing for three years, and the reason I’ve shown it to no one is not mysterious. It’s the same reason I’ve rewritten the same invoice email four times this week. It’s the same reason I checked my bank balance before writing this sentence.

What the stack actually is

Forty pages. Pencil, ink, and a gray wash I mix from two tubes of Holbein. The paper is a ream of Strathmore 300 series bristol. I buy materials maybe twice a year.

So the material cost of this comic, over three years, is maybe $180. That’s the number I can point to. The number I can’t point to is the hours. I don’t log them. I know that I’ve drawn page one at least eleven times. I know that pages 12 through 18 were finished in a burst in February 2024, during a slow invoice month, and that I haven’t touched page 19 since.

Here’s the thing about a project you never show anyone: it has no deadline, no client, no editor, no audience. That sounds like freedom. It is not freedom. It is a room with no door, and you keep walking into the walls.

The money part, plainly

I’m a freelance illustrator. My income is irregular in the way that weather is irregular. Some years are good. Some years are not. I had a good year once and thought I had figured something out. I hadn’t. I had a good year.

When you have a bad year, you do not have a savings account. You have a checking account and a feeling. When you have a good year, you have a checking account, a savings account, and the conviction that next year will be the same. It won’t be.

The forty-page comic costs me nothing in the sense that it doesn’t have a client. It costs me everything in the sense that every hour I spend on it is an hour I’m not spending on a $400 spot illustration or a $1,200 book cover. I know this. I do the math in my head while I’m inking. That’s part of why it’s taken three years.

There’s a specific fear that lives in the gap between invoices. It’s not the fear of not making rent. I’ve made rent. It’s the fear that the work I do for money and the work I do for myself are two different people, and that the second one is not very good.

What the law says about a thing no one has seen

Here’s a fact that surprised me: under U.S. copyright law, my forty-page comic has been protected since the moment I fixed it in a tangible medium. That’s it. No registration required. No publication required. No one has to see it.

The U.S. Copyright Office’s Circular 1 states that copyright protection “exists automatically from the moment the original work of authorship is fixed.” A work is “fixed” when it’s captured in a medium “sufficiently permanent” that it can be perceived or reproduced “for more than a short time.” My stack of bristol counts. The scans on my hard drive count.

This matters to me for a reason that isn’t legal. It matters because it means the work is real before anyone validates it. The law doesn’t care if I’ve shown it to no one. The law says it’s mine, and it’s protected, and it exists.

Registration is a separate thing. Circular 1 notes that while registration isn’t mandatory, it’s necessary to enforce exclusive rights through litigation for U.S. works. It also notes that registration before or within three months of publication makes a copyright owner eligible for statutory damages and attorneys’ fees. I haven’t registered my comic. I might, eventually. But the point is that the work is already real. The registration would just make it easier to defend.

I think about this more than I should. I think about it when I’m redrawing page one for the twelfth time. The law says the work exists. My brain says the work exists only if someone sees it. The law is more generous than my brain.

The rituals that keep it going

I have a cheap, repeatable ritual for this comic. It costs nothing and takes twenty minutes. Every Sunday morning, before I open my email, I make a cup of coffee in the same mug — a chipped ceramic thing I bought at a garage sale in Sellwood for $2 — and I sit down at the drafting table and I draw one panel. Not a page. One panel. I don’t ink it. I don’t fix it. I just draw it.

That’s it. That’s the ritual. Twenty minutes, one panel, every Sunday. Some weeks the panel is good. Most weeks it’s not. But the ritual isn’t about the panel. It’s about the fact that the comic stays alive in my hands. It doesn’t become a thing I used to work on. It stays a thing I’m working on.

I have other rituals. I walk to the Hawthorne Bridge and back when I’m stuck on a page. That’s about 2.5 miles round trip from my apartment. I don’t bring my phone. I don’t bring a sketchbook. I just walk. The walking doesn’t solve the page. But it makes the page feel less like a verdict.

I buy a single donut from Pip’s on Fremont every time I finish a page. That’s $2.50. Over three years, that’s maybe $100. I’m not going to pretend that’s a financial strategy. It’s a bribe. It works.

The thing about showing no one

I’ve been asked, gently, by people who care about me, when I’m going to show someone the comic. I don’t have a good answer. The honest answer is that I’m afraid it’s not good. The other honest answer is that I’m afraid it is good, and then I’ll have to do something with it.

There’s a specific kind of paralysis that comes from a project with no external deadline. You can’t miss a deadline that doesn’t exist. You can’t fail a client you don’t have. You can’t disappoint an audience that doesn’t know you’re making anything. The absence of stakes feels like safety. It’s not. It’s a way of never finding out.

I’m not going to end this by saying I’m finally going to show someone. I might. I might not. The comic is forty pages long and I’ve been drawing it for three years and I’ve shown it to no one. That’s the fact. The fact is not a lesson. It’s just where I am.

But here’s what I know: the work is real. The law says so. The stack of paper says so. The $180 in materials says so. The Sunday mornings say so. Whether anyone else ever sees it is a different question, and I’m not done asking it yet.

FAQ

Do I need to register my unpublished comic with the U.S. Copyright Office?

No. Under U.S. law, copyright protection exists automatically from the moment your work is fixed in a tangible medium. Registration is not required for protection. However, registration (or refusal) is necessary before you can file an infringement lawsuit for a U.S. work, and registering before or within three months of publication can make you eligible for statutory damages and attorneys’ fees. See the U.S. Copyright Office’s Circular 1 for details.

Can I show my unpublished work to a publisher without losing my rights?

Showing your work to a publisher does not transfer your copyright. Copyright transfer generally must be in writing and signed by the copyright owner. Mere ownership of a copy of your work does not give anyone the copyright. If a publisher wants to license or acquire rights, that’s a separate negotiation. The U.S. Copyright Office’s Circular 1 covers transfer of copyright ownership.

What if someone uses my unpublished comic without permission?

You have exclusive rights to reproduce, distribute, and display your work, among others, from the moment it’s fixed. If someone uses it without authorization, you may be able to bring an infringement action. For U.S. works, registration (or refusal) is necessary before filing a lawsuit. The Copyright Office’s FAQ on fair use notes that there are no legal rules permitting a specific number of words or percentage of a work to be used without permission; whether a use qualifies as fair use depends on all the circumstances.

How do I manage irregular income as a freelancer?

I don’t have a formula. I have a checking account, a savings account when I can, and a habit of checking my balance before I make decisions. The National Endowment for the Arts publishes an Arts Data Profile Series with statistics on arts and cultural production, which can be useful for understanding the broader economic context. But the day-to-day management is mostly about knowing your numbers and not pretending they’re different than they are.

What’s a cheap ritual that helps sustain a long-term project?

Mine is twenty minutes every Sunday morning, one panel, same mug. It costs nothing. The point isn’t productivity. The point is keeping the project in your hands. A ritual that’s too ambitious becomes another thing to fail at. A ritual that’s small enough to do even on a bad week is the one that lasts.