We recently connected with Jason Strutz and have shared our conversation below.

Jason, appreciate you joining us today. It’s always helpful to hear about times when someone’s had to take a risk – how did they think through the decision, why did they take the risk, and what ended up happening. We’d love to hear about a risk you’ve taken.

A choice I’ve made that feels risky has been to focus on the completion of my first written and drawn graphic novel, Returned, a medieval horror family drama. This means that I have drastically cut down the amount of paid freelance work I take on, and am betting on myself rather than waiting to catch the next wave.

This has been a long road in working to complete a graphic novel. It began in 2019, when I decided that I would need to learn writing to effectively showcase my art and work towards a sustaining career built on my own concepts. Up until that I had worked primarily with writers on comic stories, and we were all hungry to succeed, but there is little money in splitting comic book profits. I also strived to add ideas to the stories I worked on, potentially to the annoyance of the writers. I had lists of concepts and story nuggets, and I used those to drive the stories I made at the annual 24 Hour Comics Day event that I planned at The Comic Signal in Grand Rapids, MI. Having completed writing and drawing a 24 page comic in 24 hours four times, I decided that my next challenge would be to complete a comic over a year. I also had been the primary caregiver for my daughter, staying home with her almost since she was born while my wife worked on school and later career. I knew my daughter would be starting full-day school in fall 2019, so I decided that would be the year of learning and writing with the goal of having a script ready to produce in 2020.

2020? Cue ominous music.

Everyone reading this lived through it, but the pandemic was a wrench in the plan. I needed to provide for my daughter, doing education, companionship, and later keeping her online for classes. I cut down the freelance work I had been doing as well as not moving much on Returned. One client I did keep around, an RPG publishing company, ended up hiring me as a full-time illustrator and Art Director late 2021, I worked for them until the end of the company in December 2022. This also meant that freelance work was even tougher to accomplish, and also monetarily unnecessary. Coming into 2023, unemployed and without much of a base of freelance work, I decided once again to return to Returned.

I used 2023 to relaunch my Patreon and started providing twice-a-week updates with script and sketch page commentary. I finished the book planning and editing around October 2023, and moved into creating the final art. I certainly could have used 2023 to rebuild a freelance career, but I really want to see what I can create for myself and potentially create a sustaining series of stories using webcomics and Kickstarters. I’m excited to be in 2024 and am looking at starting regular page posting in May.

Jason, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I am an artist, writer, and graphic designer. I solve problems for clients and their stories. That could be a poster for an event that effectively conveys the tone and details, or a extended comic story that brings the words to dramatic life. In my writing, I am looking to entertain first and sneak in big philosophical questions second, again focusing in the horror/adventure genre.

I have been working in comics for about 15 years, illustrating mostly horror stories such as The House of Montresor, an adaptation and continuation of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado with writer Enrica Jang. I read comics a lot as an early teen but moved toward graphic novels, preferring the closed stories those would tell. I always wanted to draw comics, but was held back by not knowing other artists or writers to collaborate with. I was also under the impression that I could not be a writer as well at that time. I met Jeremy Whitley while I was living in North Carolina, he was a writer looking for an artist. We collaborated on The Order of Dagonet, a comedy action fantasy book about the knightly order of Dagonet in English King Arthur lore. The order now mostly consisted of entertainment knights, legally distinct actors, writers, and rockstars called to fight the return of the Faerie world by a tracksuited jerk Merlin. That was my first true comic work. We had some success and with that came offers for us both to do other things for money and the book fell by the wayside. Since then I have been involved in graphic novels, limited series, and short stories for various publishers and Jeremy has many good books to his name as well such as Princeless, The Dog Knight, and The Unstoppable Wasp. Wanting to level up my game and work on my own schedule led me to writing my own stories to draw, leading to the medieval horror family drama that is Returned.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

Early in my career I embraced limits on my creativity, keeping me from generating my own projects. I felt that working together with someone else would help me complete projects as I thought creating everything myself was too much responsibility. To be sure it is taking full responsibility for the work, but I feel it is worth it to be creating just what you want to be creating. Be courageous and experiment early on rather than waiting to be scooped up by others.

Are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?

I wish the online resources that exist now for learning artistic craft existed when I was younger. I attended Rochester Institute of Technology from 1999-2004 for their Illustration program, a little business school and mostly art school with an assignment focus. While that was surely not the only way to study art at the time, it was the path I took. There are so many other paths now that I recommend people looking at formal college to explore what is out there that is both more focused and more affordable, in accordance with your expected salary. I feel that if you are driven to create, you will be able to grow using any number of free to low-cost resources, and be able to create your own path.

Contact Info:

• Website: StrutzArt.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/strutzartv
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/strutzart
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jason-strutz-a57321193/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/MrNosaj42/videos
• Other: Patreon.com/strutzart