There’s an episode of HIMYM where Ted and Robin realize their relationship has an expiration date. They want different things out of life and they’ll be incompatible in 5 years.

I think I may be heading towards an expiration date with my current comic. It’s been great, but I don’t think it’s a proper vehicle to get me where I want to go creatively. I want to tell better stories. I want to make more expressive characters. I can’t do it with one-liners and stick figures. The more I want to promote my current comic, the more I can’t shake the guilt that I can’t draw.

I’m proud of what I’ve done so far. There are some really good comics that I’ve done, at least in terms of what the words say. I mean, otherwise I wouldn’t have got some praise from the author of xkcd. (I sent him an email many, many moons ago.) The body of work is much better than my old comic, TPV. In retrospect, I wish I had just started drawing instead of doing a sprite comic. I couldn’t draw then either, but by now I’d have some modicum of ability.

The breakup won’t happen right away. I’ll ease into it. I still have much training to do with both writing and drawing. I actually purchased Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice and I’m going to work through it. I want to be more attentive to my craft. I also bought Musashi, and I didn’t expect this, but it has given me some resolve to do some good work and take pride in what I do.

So yeah, I’m going to outgrow Chalkboard Manifesto in a few years. We’ll see what happens next. It may not even be a comic. When I outgrew psycho-ward.org, I thought I’d make a new humor website, but I just focused on my comic.