Webcomics Panel In Toronto

I just got back from a panel here in Toronto where a bunch of amazing cartoonists talked about webcomics. Among them was Ryan North whom I met and got to sign a book of his for me.

The panel was very good and informative, but a bigger deal to me was the fact that people were there who make comics. I know that might seem silly to you, but I've been making comics for coming up on two years now and I've never met or even seen anyone else who does it. For me, up until tonight, webcomics was something that never existed in real life for me, instead they were solely the domain of the computer.

In my real life there is no one ever discussing comics, I have to search that out in forums or on podcasts. And yet there tonight were people saying "yay, webcomics" and that made what I do and think about every day real for me for the first time.

Think of it this way. Say you were a whittler, that you were really passionate about whittling wood and you did it for a couple of years. When you talked to your family about it they were like "yeah yeah we get it, whittling is great." Some of your friends liked what you did but others were downright hostile and took every opportunity to mock you for whittling. And then one day you got to hear the worlds greatest whittlers speak about the topic and suddenly you weren't in a vacuum anymore. You realized, more than empirically, that there was a whole world of whittlers out there. And you smiled.

Sorry if I was rambling, but I just had to get these thoughts out.