Hi! My name is Stephen McCranie and I make comics!

I’ve been drawing comics since before I knew how to read or write. You might say comics was my first language.

Here’s a comic I drew when I was four or five about a dinosaur who strikes it rich. I drew the pictures and then dictated the words to my mom:

I liked comics so much, I decided I wanted to be a cartoonist when I grew up. But first, of course, I had to practice!

When I was in college, I drew a comic strip called Mal and Chad, which you can read here.

Mal and Chad was eventually discovered by a publisher from Penguin Random House. Seriously! They just found me randomly on the internet, and then reached out. It was a dream come true.

Together, we made these books:

And so, I got my dream job!

But then I lost it.

My publisher wasn’t interested in continuing the Mal and Chad series, and so I was out of work. And since I didn’t yet have my wonderful agent Charlie Olson, I couldn’t find more work.

It was a hard time in my life, because I thought I had messed up my happy ending. But it was good time in my life too, because I learned that life is more than a job.

With the money in my bank account dwindling, I decided I launched a Kickstarter to see if anyone on the internet would want to buy this book I made:

Brick by Brick, which you can read here, is a collection of short comic essays about how to make the creative practice sustainable. My favorite essay in the book is “Be Friends with Failure.”

As it turned out, lots of people were interested in learning about sustainable creativity! The Kickstarter funded and I was able to support myself as a cartoonist for another year.

And just like that, I went from traditional publishing to self-publishing. But I wouldn’t be there long.

Just when funds were beginning to dry up again, I learned that the then little-known Webtoons app was running a webcomics contest with a grand prize of $30,000!

I dropped everything I was doing and created the 1 2 3 Challenge for myself-- 100 pages of comics, in 2 months, to win $30,000 dollars.

And you know what’s crazy? I managed to win! Here’s a video where I captured the exact moment I found out the results of the contest:

The contest came with a contract to begin serializing my comic. And just like that, I went from self-publishing to webcomics.

And happy end, right?

Not exactly.

Depression. Space Boy.

What are comics for? Why do I want to make comics that nourish?!