Justin Boyd (Invisible Bread)
by GoComicsThe GoComics "Meet Your Creator" series brings you firsthand insight into the lives and careers of your favorite cartoonists. Each week, we hand over the keys to one of our talented creators, who share their inspirations, achievements, creative processes, studios and more! Read on to hear from this week's featured cartoonist: Justin Boyd of Invisible Bread.
I'm a bit of an anomaly.
I write and draw the comic Invisible Bread and I absolutely love doing it; been doing it for almost five years now. Been doing comics in general for nine years. But, I have a little secret for you.
I'm actually a software engineer.
I have a software engineering career and everything! I've been doing this kind of work for pretty much as long as I've been doing comics. If you catch me during the work week, you'll find me at my desk programming away and even possibly getting stressed about random problems going on at work. I've been secretly living the programming life, and you had no idea!
But, the thing is, being a programmer just wasn't enough for me. I found out early on in my career that there was a whole different type of creativity that I had that I wanted to express, and it could not be done via programming.
The story of how I got started doing comics goes like this.
Back in 2006, I had just graduated from The University of Michigan and had moved to New York City to start my first job. Only problem was that this first job had a ridiculous amount of downtime. So, I filled all that downtime by doodling random comics and sending them to my friend, for sanity reasons. At some point, we had made so many comics that we decided to start a webcomic and post everything we'd been sending each other. And that comic is called Left-Handed Toons!
We drew every comic with our left hands, even though we are right-handed, and holy wow, that was pretty hard.
So yeah, OK, I'm a comic artist too!
After about four years of doing Left-Handed Toons, I had reached a point where I felt that drawing everything lefty was holding me back from becoming a better artist. There were also different styles of jokes that I wanted to do that I couldn't quite accomplish given the format of LHT. And in comes Invisible Bread!
Invisible Bread has given me an outlet for express myself in a way that can't be expressed with code. I consider myself a funny person, and funniness isn't really super-valuable when it comes to writing good code. That doesn't stop me from writing silly comments in my code sometimes, but that's beside the point.
I've been writing and drawing Invisible Bread for a little more than four years now, and it's been fantastic. Even though it's a stick-art style, I've greatly improved my art skills to a point I never thought I could achieve. I've also met some amazing friends because of doing this comic and being a part of the webcomic convention circuit. I've come out of my shell a bit, too, and would probably consider myself more of an extrovert at this point in contrast to a-couple-years-ago introverted me. It's crazy what positive things this comic has done for me, and I can't wait to see what's next.
So hey, congrats on reading all that! If you like silly comics that are good for all ages, please come on over and check out some Invisible Bread!
Read Invisible Bread here. Find Left-Handed Toons here. Follow along on Facebook and Twitter.