Well This Has Been A Wild Two Weeks
20 Year Overnight Sensation
As I sit here this evening, the COTW Instagram page is about to cross over 14k followers. Almost 9000 of these have come from the past 30 days. It took 2 years to build the 5000 that preceded them.
When I started COTW in December of 2021, I knew that I wanted to use social media to lay the foundation for the community I wanted to build and if I truly wanted it to be a community, I needed to make sure that I built it on the right foundations. So straight away the notion of making content to get followers however I could went out the window.
I was convinced that there were other people like me in the world who just wanted to honor the old ways; treat each other with respect and dignity, be kind to your neighbor, look after your own, be proud of your country. I wasn’t seeing much of that though.
I live in a world of story. It’s been my job in some shape or form for almost 20 years now so I can tell pretty quick when someone is telling a story for the wrong reasons and that seemed to be all I saw. I think most people unconsciously respond to storytelling, good or bad.
If you’re not seasoned in it like me though you don’t necessarily know it when you see it for what it is. So I wanted to make sure that I was telling the right story, with the right narrative so on the off chance that I was right, and there were other people like me out there, that once they showed up they’d be able to walk around, pop the hood and know that COTW is the real deal.
And now here we are.
I’ve never seen people react to what I do. When I wrote and drew CARVER:A Paris Story I was by myself for a year. No one saw it until it was done. Then I had to wait months for it to get out into the world, to know whether or not I was still going to have a job making comics. This is very different. This is like hosting a party that no one was really showing up to and then all of a sudden the whole town shows up.
A lot of people have been asking me what I did, how I did it. All I can tell you is that I kept trying. I didn’t give up. Like Sylvester, somehow I kept holding on even as the “lil piggies were goin’ to the market.”
The trick isn’t figuring out how to get people to show up. The trick is not giving up before they do.