Out Of Print

Imagine yourself at nineteen years old. You walk down the block on a sunny Sunday afternoon to the green metal newspaper vending machine on the corner. You slide shiny silver coins into the slot on the top, pull down the oven-like door, and retrieve a newspaper from inside. With me so far?

Let’s say you’re rapidly flipping through the pages, excitedly looking for something or other; the rapid motion raises the intoxicating scent of sun-warmed newsprint to your nostrils. Dizzy with anticipation, you finally lay eyes upon the object of your search. You can scarcely believe what you see, but there it is.

Something you drew, in print, on a newspaper page.

Something that came straight from your brain through your hand is etched forever in microfiche and visible to all heaven and earth, in physical, touchable form on paper.

Imagine how that would feel, not just to a regular person, but to someone for whom this had been a dream since first experiencing printed matter, circa the age of two.

Let me tell you, it might just feel so good, you decide to try to make it happen as often as you can get away with, for the rest of your life.

Continuing our opening scenario; imagine that, in the glow of post-published triumph, you treat yourself to a bagel with cream cheese at the nearby campus deli. As you wait at the counter, overseeing an inch of Philly cream cheese being sliced from a literal log of the stuff, you happen to overhear two grown adults casually discussing the activities of characters you made up in your head, in affectionate, glowing terms. They’re chatting about something you created, for the purposes of making each other laugh.

How would you keep yourself from becoming totally addicted to that experience?

And how would you react? Would you enjoy the praise in secret, or would you introduce yourself?

I introduced myself. This was years before I became paranoid from hard drug abuse and head trauma.

Imagine striding into a popular dive and on your way to the bar, you pick up one of those free alternative magazines that has show listings and music reviews. The pages are that grey, smudgy kind that smells like school and reminds you of the old Sunday funnies. Before you even locate your handiwork, you realize that two people you don’t know are laughing about the item in question, behind you at a table by the door.

Once again, you see it- something you made up and drew, now enshrined in the form of printed matter. No matter how many times you see this happen, it’s like the first time. You squint in the dim smoky lights of the bar at your creation, and you realize you want to take it outside and view it under bright sunlight. You ponder the many ways a flat-screen monitor fails to compete with the light of our world shining o’er ink and paper. But there it is. You drew it. It exists because you made it exist.

When you finally glance up from your magazine, you see the bartender has already brought your drink, who knows how long ago. It’s on the house, courtesy of the owner.

Would you ever want to do anything else, for even a nanosecond of your life?

Imagine entering an office building that is entirely alien to you, for some menial purpose. You are instructed to report to a room at the end of a long hall made up of partitioned cubicles, all of which are occupied by busy secretaries typing into slabs of boxy, alabaster hardware. The orientation of the cubicles is such that addressing these workers face-to-face is unavoidable, and each person returns a perfunctory stranger’s smile as you pass them. Briefly, next to an empty desk typically manned by a person you have never met, you see something carefully clipped from a newspaper and tacked to the fabric partition, long enough ago to have yellowed, proudly displayed for all to see, a cherished object.

Something you drew.

You have performed alchemy. You formulated a visual idea inside your mind, actuated it into reality with your arm and hand, and saw it manifested into physical matter by thousands. You experience a mental enlightenment, a focused sensation of ascent that is historically looked upon wizardry.

Once you’ve felt it, there is no going back. You’re in print. You are now cosmically obligated to maintain that status for as long as you are capable. If you’re in print, and then you’re not, the public is going to expect a damn good reason, i.e. death. Otherwise they presume the worst. You got crippled. You got cut. You changed.

So imagine you were lucky enough in life to experience what I’ve described here, for so long that it knits into your bones. Let’s say, thirty-three years, uninterrupted, in several different periodicals. Thirty-three years of knowing you’ve got that safety net to fall back on; no matter what anyone says, your ideas have been printed. No one can take that away from you. You get to make your mark, in perpetuity.

And then it ends.

For more than half your life, you’ve known the feeling of getting paid for ideas that came out of your mind through your hand, and then seeing those ideas on one printed page of thousands like it.

You’ve known the feeling of genuine admiration from total strangers from other parts of the country and/or planet, who often seek you out for future employment and commissions. Sometimes they just give you money, because they enjoyed your work in the past and feel that you deserve it.

You’ve known how it feels when your ideas have literal, demonstrable value. You’ve known it for more more than half your life. You’ve lived your life, in some small way, on the value of your ideas.

And then it ends. Not your life, I mean, obviously we all die eventually, but I’m talking about your life in print. Suddenly you find yourself without a paying cartoon gig, for the first time in 33 straight years.

How would you feel?

You’re not an actor on a cancelled sitcom or a movie that bombed at the box office. It’s not about finding another producer who’ll pay you to pretend. You’re not a rock star or rapper who tanked a contract with a flop. You were taught over a not-insignificant period of time that people would pay cash money for things you personally rendered, and that specifically came out of your head. You. Thanks to your ideas, the time you invested in your skills, and the printing press, it’s possible that just about anybody could know who you are.

How do you feel about stocking shelves or flipping burgers now, like you’re some pimply teenager with no other options? How would you feel about slapping on a name tag and cashiering for some megalithic corporate entity, taking orders from people half your age? Would you give up and forget about your ideas, now that they’re not generating income? Would you lose faith in yourself? Would you die?

Would any sensation brought on by posting your work on the internet compare to that of opening up a newspaper and finding your artwork printed there on the page? Would seeing your work facelessly shared on social media by persons reduced to a numerical quantity deliver any satisfaction to you whatsoever? Would seeing your work on a pixelated computer screen carry any real impact or joy, knowing the astronomically impactful experience of seeing it in print, with all inherent tactility and fragrance?

You created something that people of all walks of life personally absorbed through sight, touch, and even smell, into their minds. They didn’t click on it, they didn’t scroll to it, they held it near their faces and read it, they ate it into their souls with their brains. You communicated with humanity in the way that humans have spread knowledge for over a thousand years. You’ve traveled in the formidable footsteps of Benjamin Franklin.

From there, where can one go but down?