Joe Kubert taught me a lot of things. They range from how to lay out a cover to the most important of all artist's lessons: get paid. One of the ones that has come to be the most useful is to learn how to do everything. He told me that he wanted to teach his students enough skills so that if they went into a one-horse town with only one art job opening, he or she would be qualified for it. So we didn't just learn to draw, we learned to letter, to ink, to color, to design and more. At the time, a lot of us pushed back on that, knowing that comic book editors wanted to see you specialize in one thing rather show you could do everything.
It may not have been what comic companies wanted to see, but Joe was more right that I could have imagined. As the industry has shifted and self-publishing has become common and necessary, being able to do it all has been essential to my success. He taught us to be able to do every stage of making and printing a comic. I create it and then get the final file to the printer and not need to bring anyone else in. When you're producing on a shoestring, having to hire less people is invaluable. I could not have done Love and Capes or Raider without that broad skill set.
Fortunately, that "Learn everything" stayed with me. The Kubert School didn't teach much about computers when I attended there, so I learned how to use them after I graduated. I learned how to color in Photoshop and lay out a book in inDesign. And I learned how to build websites and shoot video and edit commercials. I've learned how to use MangaStudio. All sorts of stuff. And every new skill is one more tool in my toolbox that gives me more flexibility.
It's something I was thinking about as I was redesigning my website. I never formally learned PHP, but I was able to dig around in enough code that I could make the tweaks I needed to and sought out resources when I couldn't. I experimented with all sorts of changes in the CSS. I Googled more than a few things to learn how to build the site I wanted. And if I broke things, well, it wasn't live and I was the only one who would see it. But I'd learn something along the way.
That's the thing I wanted to share, and the reason I'm writing this atypically evangelical post: Learn things and don't stop. Make yourself better. Don't just be one of those people who learns what button to press, learn why it does what it does. You'll be all the richer for it.