Begun the class wars have

I spend most of my spare time making comics. From morning to night until my hands hurt and I get crazy. I don't have the name recognition of a lot of people. That's fine. My books hardly sell at all. Still okay. I'm not in this for your stupid job, man. I'm not trying to put anyone out of work. I am an artist and I do this to express myself. If fame and adulation come with it, fine. My goal isn't to have my picture on a periodical or to have a legion of fans to follow me around at a convention. I am the music industry equivalent of a garage band. I want to be a true-to-myself artist and not some candified whore. I see the vast wasteland of commercial comics and it make me want to hurl. There are spots of cool, but it it's a sea of inflated self-promotion and vanity. There are muck raking dimwits that run the show while living legends are forgotten. Worse still is the latest salvo on artistic integrity. Diamond this week pretty much sank the self-publishing industry. "Make better comics," they chirp. To make matters worse, there is a growing movement to catagorize people like me as "hobbyists". I guess if the only thing that you earn from your work is the satisfaction of a completed work, you are on the same level as a stamp collector (nothing against them). To make matters worse, the people behind this movement are just a breath away from where I am at. It's like watching people on the third class deck of the Titanic fight over who is to get on a life boat, not realizing that the first and second class are already off the ship. Well, if this makes me a 'hobbyist', then so be it. I like stamps better anyway...