Hey everyone,

It's been a helluva ride, but I'm finally getting settled back in with a normie job, a new apartment, and a bunch of bureaucracy to wade through. My primary art focus is on commissions and a solo project that I will launch once commissions are fulfilled. Besides the obligatory "not dead" update, there are some very specific issues that have been coming up over the years that I wanted to address in brief.

First, there is the issue of certain "friends" of mine who don't seem to respect me on a professional level when it comes to my artistic abilities. I talked about one of these people in this video, but there have been others who follow a similar M.O.: ask me if I want to try drawing one or more of their OCs, escalate it to an obligation, and get offended when it comes to a point where I have to tell them that my paid commissions and projects I plan to monetize take priority over their "just between friends" requests. It has come to the point that I will no longer take requests for free art, even just rough pencil sketches. (This has been in effect for a long time now, but I'm just bringing it up here for clarity.)

On a similar note, I've had several partnerships for pet projects that fell through - these were not commissions, as said projects were mutual brainstorms built from the ground-up, and we would have split royalties after the fact had said projects come to fruition. I have absolutely no problem with this arrangement (though I'm not doing anything like that at this time), provided it follows the aforementioned pattern. However, if someone comes to me with their own original idea that they want me to draw, I consider that a commission, and will charge accordingly - I will not sign onto someone else's idea and agree to only get paid "once it sells." This is because of the time and expense it will take to commit to a long-term project of that nature; I mean no offense to the potential writers and I do wish them success however they end up going about their plan otherwise. Thankfully, most people have been understanding about this, but I want to make sure there is no ambiguity for the outliers.

The other main issue is more of a personal matter - sharing details of my stories with people close to me. I have only recently started doing this, more as a means of intellectual discussion than looking for feedback (which I just realized sounds incredibly pretentious), but I do keep an open mind on suggestions and welcome constructive criticism. However, a few people I have opened up to seem to have the impression that by inviting them into my mind, I am inviting them onto my writing team (with all the benefits that come with). As I mentioned before, I am not adverse to having a partnership if the idea is mutually built from the ground up - but just as I'm not going to latch onto someone else's idea for free, they are not welcome to do the same to mine. My ideas are my own. I already have plans for the direction my work is going in; I am not looking for free concept writers or coattail-riders.

And on a similar note, most if not all of my characters take inspiration from people and situations around me - there is no character based off of you in any of my stories. I am fed up with people thinking that I've created friend-insert characters and thinking they have claim to said character's development. Granted, this is a nuisance I brought on myself by mentioning behind-the-scenes details (said characters/situations would be unrecognizable otherwise; that's how little I've actually ripped off of real life), so I don't really have the right to complain. (And to be clear, if someone did recognize a character/situation as parallel to their own and privately mentioned that they did not want it used in that manner, I would alter it.)

This is not an attack against anyone. These are not accusations toward people I have not confronted about said issues previously. It is a guide to my boundaries as a professional that I'm more or less laying out for future reference, should these issues occur again. I know that a lot of what I just complained about is on me for not drawing the line sooner, so I am fixing that now to make things easier for all parties involved.

Now, it's back to business.

​~ Sarah Elaine

Smackjeeves, the site where I posted my weekly strip comic (which has resumed from its three-year hiatus about three months ago) completely changed before I had the chance to upload the most recent comic, and boy does it suck! The formatting of my comics has been devastated, and I'm still in the process of overhauling the entire archive.

Here is a master list of everything wrong with the site update, and then some - I didn't create this, but I agree with is 100%. If things on Smackjeeves get worse, I'll see if I can move the existing comics to a site like ComicFury that has similar features to the original SJ site.

Everything has been going wrong in my life for the past three weeks, and this problem with the comics is just one more brick in the wall.

I think that “you have to know the rules before you can break them” is just something successful (or more often than not, aspiring-to-be-successful) people say in order to knock back their competition. That ideology came about because people saw what was considered “the norm” and hated it, thus prompting them to create subversions that became the new standard of normalcy – not because they knew why the existing formula “worked” and wanted to play with it. There are people who possess that level of intellect, but most people don't put that level of thought into anything. Upstarts change history all the time, with Vincent Van Gogh probably being the codifying example. Movements like Roccoco, Impressionism, Post-Modernism, Dadaism, and Stuckism all involved out of hating what came before. In fact, I'm pretty sure that every artistic movement did. One of my favorite quotes on this subject comes from Neil Tennant of the electronic duo Pet Shop Boys:

Furthermore, the whole concept begs the question: Who makes the rules, anyway? I’m one of those nutjobs who believes that the media institutionalizes the standards we live by, but who is really in control? The Whites? The Jews? The Illuminati? While we may disagree on a name for this demographic that is pulling the strings, I think that for the most part, we can collectively agree that there’s something off about the way they shape our reality.

Take, for instance, the sudden trend of favoring female writers – one would think that a demographic that more or less makes up half of earth’s population would have a broad range of experiences, emotions, and ways of expressing an idea through the lens of femininity, but no, all of these broads have the exact same cookie-cutter mindset that serves to perpetuate misogyny by making women seem like insufferable outrage-mongers. The problem is not that all women are like this, but that the Powers That Be™ only employs women who outwardly think along these lines. It has been this way for women forever – that's why the Brontë sisters and Louisa May Alcott had to write under male pseudonyms, and why rabid Rick and Morty fans cried foul when a surge of female writers were hired onto their precious show. It's not that women can't write interesting and engaging stories, it's that the media doesn't want to hear that kind of thing come from the fairer sex.

This is the case with a lot of ethnic minorities as well, it seems, particularly in the history of popular literature. Hispanic/Latino writers are regulated to “life in the barrio” stories, with the barely-literate ramblings of Sandra Cisneros being seen as “profound” by benign bigots that are surprised that someone of a lower social class could string a couple of English words together. The only Hispanics in the media that I ever came close to being able to identify with growing up were in Dragon Tales and the works of Jhonen Vasquez. I’ve never read a book by an African-American author that didn’t include father/daughter incest, but am I really to assume that this is the standard when the prevailing stereotype is that black fathers don’t stick around to assume responsibility past the pull-out stage? Asian-Americans of all nationalities are regulated to publishing “between two worlds” stories, with a heavy exception to anime and manga – likely because Western translaters can't tell the gender of the creators in question (thus we have wonderful stories like Junko Mizuno's Princess Mermaid and Rumiko Takahashi's Ranma ½, which would never have been greenlit in the United States had they been conceived by a western woman). It's as though no demographic is allowed their own personal experience if it goes against the narrative that the media has set for that particular stereotype.

That said, it seems like it would be easy to cry a claim of institutionalized prejudice against a lighter-skinned enemy, but that would only further the divide – and more to the point, the other side (whatever that is) is probably just as responsible for the state of affairs. Say what you will about white supremacists, but in my experience, nobody clings to the “one-drop” blood ideology like an ethnic minority watching a half-breed find success. Take actress Halle Berry, for instance – she grew up being called names like “Oreo” and was estranged from her African-American father, but no one today would dare to call her less than black. Same thing with Mariah Carey, Frida Khalo, Meghan Markle…the only time a mixed-race person is ever considered “white” by the mainstream is when they go on a killing spree. And since I opted to become a content creator in lieu of committing domestic terrorism, I guess that qualifies me as a proud Latina who knows what she’s talking about in this department.

The moral of this story (if there needs to be one) is that one ought to be skeptical of any grander-scale advice on creativity, especially when it runs contrary to one’s given experience out in the real world. Most people in a position of power want to suppress the plebeians out of self-preservation, because nobody wants to deal with the harsh reality that there isn’t enough free real estate for everyone to have their own private Idaho. If everyone is at the top – and accustomed to the lifestyle implied by such – then no one will be at the bottom to serve them, but that’s a discussion for a different day. So the next time somebody gives some clichéd creative advice, ask them to back up their reasoning – if they can’t, they are probably just blowing hot air and should be ignored. Just in case, everything I just said should be taken with a grain of salt as well.

Hey, did you ever expect to see me update this thing again?

I make new comic strips on occasion - I just can't force them out like I used to. I don't know if it's my art style or brand of humor that's behind the times, but I can't really keep up with the likes of Nathan W. Pyle or Sarah Anderson or whatever Idiocracy-tier webcomic is en vogue these days. (Sorry I'm throwing shade...I'm sure they're both nice people who enjoy what they do, but I just don't vibe with their brand of comedy.) But when I do make another comic, good times will be had by all.

On that note, I'm actually working on a graphic novel - and this time I have something to show for it:

I have a new partner I'm working on a long-term project with. It's in the very early stages of development, but they're less of the "idea man" types I'm used to working with and more of a proper art director, which means results will be had (and that's a good thing).

Outside of that, I'm still most active on Instagram. Even if it's just a little sketch a day, it's something.

​~ Sarah Elaine

Hello everyone.

You probably notice that I haven't updated this thing in almost six months...I've been having a series of personal crises that have left me unproductive in most of my art, severely depressed, and possibly unable to afford future artistic endeavors for the foreseeable future. I've been thinking of retiring this site (or at least putting it on indefinite hiatus) - and by extension, The Great S.E. Comics project in general - for some time now, as I am under too much pressure to keep it consistently active, but now something has come up in my life that has made me unwilling to create art, for the most part.

Nevertheless, I have been posting semi-regularly on my new Instagram:

I know I'm normally the type of person to wear my heart on my sleeve, but the events in my life right now are actually too painful to talk about in detail. If you want to see some more active art posting, I suggest going to visit Zane's DeviantART gallery:

Goodbye for now,
Sarah Elaine </3