Soul searching is quite the process, fellow Gluemeaties. Looking back on who you are, what you’ve done, and what will be next; it’s quite daunting. At times it’s frustrating. Sometimes it’s bittersweet, and on occasion it’s rather gratifying. But it’s always hopeful.
Thus, I hope this will be the best step Gluemeat can take.
I have to admit that back in March, I was beginning to feel tapped from doing Gluemeat. It was the first time I had felt that since I started in November 2001. It’s not because it was a draining process or because there was some kind of uncompromising pressure. I just felt tapped, like Gluemeat had run its course. Dare I say it: it had stopped being fun.
Anyone who has ever read the comic knows that I have always said I would stop doing Gluemeat the day it would stop being fun. I felt like that day had arrived. However, I couldn’t bring myself to ending it. It was almost like that family pet you can’t bring yourself to put to sleep despite the suffering in its old age. Although the spark was gone, I couldn’t bring myself to pulling the plug out of something I had poured so much of myself into and had shared an important fraction of life with.
So the simple realisation was this: I’m not done with it yet. I haven’t pulled off everything I could. I’ve barely scratched the surface. And the way technologies and accessibility have become since I started browsing the web almost twelve years ago, there’s even more to try.
That’s the new motto of Gluemeat: “Try.” Try to create and conceive new ideas, new experiments. No, it won’t be all about the comic anymore. It will be one part blog, one part creative outlet. Some would call this a tumblelog. I call it a more personal extension of myself.
Is the comic dead? Hardly, but I’m hoping that it won’t be the sole source of fun to be had on Gluemeat, for you and myself.
Next: online identities and the fatigue who loves them.
Talk about your niche crowd: indie film producer Gary Hustwit (who produced the excellent Moog documentary a couple of years ago on Bob Moog and the cultural impact of his synthesizer) is plopping himself into the director’s chair for the first time to tackle another discreet albeit omnipresent member of modern culture: typography. And he’s going to do it through an examination of the Helvetica typeface. That’s right: a documentary on the Helvetica typeface.
