We recently connected with Terry LaBan and have shared our conversation below.

Terry, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to hear about a time you helped a customer really get an amazing result through their work with you.

Last fall, I was hired to do graphic recording at a 3-day leadership meeting for a government agency. I can’t say who they are, but their work involves mediating disputes–they do a lot of work with organized labor. The agency had apparently been experiencing a lot of tension between staff and management, and the general mood was one of anger and dissatisfaction.

The meeting was held in a hotel in downtown Philadelphia, in a conference room that was really too small for the number of people present. There was barely room for me to set up my usual 40 x 60″ foam core boards, and the room quickly filled up with them. On the last, they had the head of the agency come in for a “gallery walk”, which of course, wasn’t much of a walk given how crowded the room was.

Now, I’ve done this sort of work for all sorts of organizations and I’ve often seen the imagery I’ve created spark discussion. But I’ve never seen anything like this. I sat in the back of the room watching in amazement as my charts became the center of conversation, with the staff advocates pointing to things I’d drawn and the agency head reacting to them, sometimes with indignation, in a session that was scheduled for 45 minutes but lasted for something like 2 hours. It was really remarkable.

A few days later, I actually got a call from the person who hired me to tell me how grateful they were that I’d been there. While graphic recording has been a great job for me, I’ve sometimes been sceptical about how useful it really is. I left that event convinced in a way I’d never been before.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

My ambition was to be a cartoonist, and that’s what I ended up doing for much of my adult life. I started as a political cartoonist for the local newspaper, and became part of the alternative comics scene of the early 90s, writing and drawing 3 comic book series of my own with Fantagraphics Books and Dark Horse Comics. I did a lot of comic book writing for DC Vertigo and for Disney Egmont, From 2001 to 2015 I created a daily comic strip called “Edge City” that was syndicated world-wide by King Features. I also did a lot of illustration, comics and cartoons for various publications, most notably Nickelodeon Magazine and Mad Magazine.

At some point in the late aughts I realized that the visual storytelling skills I’d developed had applications beyond comics and cartoons. My main business these days is called Breakthrough Visuals. I do live graphic recording, whiteboard explainer videos, infographics, and other types of visual storytelling services for businesses and organizations. What’s unique about me is my drawing ability and a warm, humorous sensibility. Most of the other people who do this type of work don’t have the artistic skills and creative background that I do. I offer a unique voice, an ability to sum up often complex issues in a concise and engaging way, and an understanding of story structure that allows me to work with a wide variety of clients and issues. I’m also still quite active as a cartoonist–my first middle-grade graphic novel, “Mendel the Mess Up’, is scheduled to be published by Holiday House this fall.

Have you ever had to pivot?

I’ve had a number of pivots, resets, or crisis in my career–1 approximately every 10 years! The first came when my career in the comics industry began to peter out. I started out doing “alternative” comic books for publishers like Fantagraphics and Dark Horse, which was fun but didn’t pay much. But that work did get me into doing more lucrative writing gigs with DC comics, and a Disney licensee in Europe called Egmont. But to be a successful mainstream comics writer you have to be into superheroes, and that was never my thing. By the late-90s I had 2 little kids and no steady comics work that could pay the bills. When Nickelodeon passed on an animated series I had in development with them at around the same time, it was clear what I’d been trying doing to that point was no longer sustainable. I thought I was going to have to go to law school or something, and was in a pretty bad state. Then I got a comic strip syndicated by King Features.

The contract for the comic strip was 15 years, which, of course, seemed like forever when I signed it. But the strip, while successful enough to that whole time, never built up the circulation to make enough money to be my sole source of income. When the 15 years finally did come to an end, the syndicate decided to pull the plug, which was fine, since it had been clear for a long time that it wasn’t going anywhere, and I was feeling trapped. But the strip had at least given my life structure. Now I was in limbo, without a clue what to do next. After 3 decades as a freelance cartoonist, I couldn’t imagine what sort of a job anyone would hire me for, and by then was too old to go to law school.

Fortunately, a cartoonist friend told me about graphic recording, taking live visual notes and meetings and conferences. It turned out the it was well-paid, in demand, and perfectly suited my skill set. I got some training and hung out my shingle, and that, along with a suite of related services, has been my main occupation ever since. It took some hustle to get started–something I hadn’t really done before–but it’s by far the most financially rewarding thing I’ve ever done, and I feel a lot better about my life than I ever did when I was trying to make a living only as a cartoonist.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

As I said earlier, as a child my greatest ambition was to be a cartoonist. But “ambition” doesn’t really capture the way I felt. My whole self-image was wrapped up in that desire. Making a living as a cartoonist was the only goal I thought was worth living for. I could’ve made millions in some other line of work, but if I wasn’t a full-time cartoonist, I’d consider myself a failure.

Now, I knew perfectly well that making a living, let alone a good living, solely as a cartoonist is a difficult thing to do. The truth is that you have a better chance of being an NBA All Star than being a well-off cartoonist, and the odds have gotten far worse in the last 20 years as the cartooning gigs that used to pay big or even decent money, like newspaper syndication and political cartooning, have mostly gone away. Nonetheless, I was relatively fortunate, and for a long time was able to scrape together enough money drawing cartoons or doing cartoon-adjacent work to meet my day-to-day expenses and pacify the tyrannical 10-year old inside my brain who demanded I live out his dreams.

But the price was constant anxiety and a diminished sense of self-worth. I wanted so badly to do something that broke through somehow, critically, financially or (ideally) both. But it never happened. Meanwhile, I constantly felt “less than” people I thought were more successful. I found gatherings of cartoonists stressful, and reading or hearing a news story about cartooning that pushed my buttons could set off an anxiety attack which lasted for days. Still, it was impossible for me to imagine doing anything else. I honestly thought that if I couldn’t keep cartooning full-time, I’d get sick and die.

The break came in 2016, when my syndicated comic strip was finally cancelled. For the first time in 15 years I didn’t have any cartoons to draw, and no idea when and if I ever would have. I started trying to be a graphic recorder and it worked out, and after a number of years doing it with more and more success, I stopped thinking of myself primarily as a cartoonist. And a funny thing happened–instead of dying, I felt free.

I now feel better about myself and my life than I ever have. I still do plenty of cartooning and use the skills I developed as a cartoonist every day. But I’m not attached to the label any more–I’m not even sure it even has meaning in today’s world. Truth is, that whole vision of myself I’d clung to since childhood was something I had to unlearn. We always tell creative people to be determined and follow their dreams. But sometimes dreams can turn into prisons, and if that happens, it’s OK to let them go.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://breakthroughvisuals.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/breakthroughvisuals/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/breakthroughvisuals
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/terry-laban-581aa85/

Image Credits
All images copyright Terry LaBan