We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Ben Wright-Heuman. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Ben below.
Hi Ben, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.
Comics was always a pipe dream for me. I’ve been drawing my whole life, but I never thought I was “good enough” to make a living out of it. I always considered writing my strong suit, and I even considered a career in screenwriting. Graduating from college during the Writer’s Strike of 2007-2008 made pursuing that complicated, to say the least.
I have a friend who was an art major who showed me some of their sketches, and they looked so much like the style that I wanted my art to have. I took a risk, and I showed them my sketches. This was some of the first really constructive feedback I’d ever gotten for my art, and with just a few style tweak recommendations, my work jumped forward lightyears. That’s when I realized, “Wait, I could actually do this.”
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
I am a freelance cartoonist and illustrator based out of Columbus, OH. I have a weekly weebcomic, CosPain, all about cosplay and convention craziness, and I have a self-published mystery graphic novel series, The Letters of the Devil. I also co-founded CanonWrite Productions, a comics anthology publishing imprint.
I’ve had an interest in comics my whole life, but it wasn’t until several years post-undergrad that I realized I wanted comics to be my career. Up to that point, I’d been mostly self-taught, but I realized that I needed help if I was going to pursue this professionally.
I enrolled in the Center for Cartoon Studies and graduated with my MFA in Sequential Art in 2016. The two years of that program were some of the best of my life. I went from sharing my art with a few friends to having an actual creative community that was supportive and invested in comics. I left that program with a collection of minicomics, my first graphic novel in the works, and a burning desire to make the freelancer life work for me.
My career really started in earnest when I moved to Columbus in 2017. I got looped into the local convention circuit and got to work making connections. I launched both The Letters of the Devil and CosPain that year, and I learned a lot about marketing and book production. It was a struggle and a hustle, but I made it work.
My second graphic novel, The Legacy of L, was crowdfunded in 2020, right before the COVID-19 lockdowns. My life was pretty heavily interrupted by this, and the book had a very quiet launch as a result. This was an understandably stressful time for everybody, but I found a way through thanks to a new business venture: CanonWrite Productions.
My friend and fellow cartoonist Rainer Kannenstine and I talked about getting some comics projects off the ground, and we took the lockdown as an opportunity to try something new to us: organizing an anthology. We reached out to our friends and contacts in the comics world and quickly found an incredible group of creatives eager to get to work. The resulting project was Less Than Secret, a cryptid comics anthology, one of my proudest works to date.
Less Than Secret made me really reevaluate how I viewed my career. I love my personal projects and still work on them, but working on this project showed me the value of having a team. I also realized just how much easier it was to support and promote other people’s contributions to a work than to just promote mine. As a result, Rainer and I officially formed CanonWrite Productions with the intention of producing more anthologies.
To date, we have released one additional anthology, What the Gnomes Know, in May 2023. We have a robot anthology in the works, and we have looked at potentially producing work beyond comics anthologies, including live read films, graphic novels, etc. The sky’s the limit, and we’re excited to see what comes next.
How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?
PAY YOUR CREATORS, AND PAY THEM WELL. Artists are undervalued too often, both by clients and by themselves. I’m guilty of this, too; I often undercharge because I have trouble objectively viewing my work. I’ve actually had clients pay me double because they said I was charging too little, and that was a BIG eye-opener.
Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?
Social media has never come naturally to me. I’ve messed with Facebook, Tumblr, Reddit, Instagram, and Twitter, but it’s never been anything but a chore. For all the posts and follows and promotion I’ve done, social media has actually done very little to help me really grow or make money. And especially with the recent Twitter/X drama, I’ve been moving away from using social media as religiously as I used to.
I honestly believe that social media is on the decline as far as relevance goes. It’s always going to have a corner of the internet, but I find more and more people that are fed up with it and living largely social media-free lives. At this point, I’m having more luck with things like Discord and Twitch than I am with anything else.
If others find that social media works for them, that’s great. Use what works, and what you’re comfortable with. But don’t feel like you HAVE to do that part of the hustle. Find your community, find how they interact with you, and go from there.
Contact Info:
- Website: http://BWHComics.com
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/BWHComics
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BWHComics
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-wright-heuman
- Youtube: https://youtube.com/@BWHComics
- Other: http://CosPainComic.com https://twitch.tv/BWHComics
Image Credits
“Gnome Man’s Land” Writing by Ian M. Klesch, Art by Ben Wright-Heuman All other images by Ben Wright-Heuman