The cartoonist Lucy Knisley has very quickly risen to my attention in the past few months. I have a copy of her book, “French Milk,” though frankly her work on her LiveJournal has been some of the best regular entertainment I’ve come to count on. That she’s able to come up with such insightful, personal and funny stories on a regular basis, arranged and drawn in an old-school panel format with engaging, vivid illustrations, invokes the kind of bewildered amazement that makes me wonder how she can manage the drive to get it done without getting paid for the work, dismay that she doesn’t have a model to get paid for it, and feel guilty that I haven’t paid her for it.

Not being an artist myself, the sentiment is probably too focused on money. Except, well, money matters. For at least the past 500 years, artists either find an established, institutional means to be paid regularly for the effort they could spend in less creative fields, find sponsors and manage themselves as cottage industries doing other things besides art, or keep their day jobs.

Lucy knows this as well as anyone, and has cartooned on the subject at least once before, in reaction to more experienced cartoonists bemoaning the loss of the syndicated newspaper comic strip as a viable form of expression with a regular paycheck. Her reaction to them isn’t too far off from my reaction to her latest cartoon, about being asked by a stranger what she wants to be “when she grows up,” and the discouraging comments that follow her answer — a cartoonist.

At least, I think they’re similar reactions. I’m not a cartoonist, and can’t even remember pretending to be interested in drawing, even as a kid. But I did spend 10 years working in newspapers, and recently started another career in an entertainment field where it’s considered appropriate to discourage others who express interest in it. And I have lots of friends who are creative professionals, and read and have read lots of comic books and comic strips. So I think I might have some insight on the subject.

Let me just bullet-point the most important points that I accept without question, before I get too far into what could be misinterpreted.

• Lucy Knisley is already an accomplished, published cartoonist with a substantial body of work that proves her talent, aptitude and commitment.
• She is, therefore, already what she told a total stranger what she wanted to be when she “grows up”.
• Profound conversations with strangers, in person or over the Internet, is often awkward.
• This is especially true if one of the strangers is clearly older and more expressly opinionated, than the other, and moreso if the opinions are perceived as negative.
• There will always be opinionated people, regardless of how informed their opinions are, or that they think they are.
• Most gentle-minded people tend to avoid expressing disagreements verbally, out of fear of escalating arguments. This is again, especially true of arguments with strangers, or when there’s no commonality of opinion established before a respectful discussion can follow.
• Fear of arguments comes from the more basic human fear of what we do not understand.
• Most people do not and will never understand what it takes to be a creative professional, even though many are fascinated by the prospect of being one.
• Fascination, that being the fatuous influence of desires, and understanding are not the same thing.
• Many people can’t tell the difference.

I’ve been asked “What do you want to be when you grow up?” before. It’s usually been by strangers. Friends of mine know better, as I can’t remember a time in my life when what I want to be has ever been clearly in focus. I don’t blame anyone for that, nor do I blame myself, but I admit to being fascinated (and I use that in the spirit of the above bullet point) by those who do know what they want out of life. The purpose-driven life, as some would call it, must be a great thing, however I am not yet convinced it is absolutely necessary to live a happy life.

Not that I’m an expert on the subject of being happy. But that’s another subject.

Lucy surely didn’t include the entirety of what she and the stranger talked about in the train station. I’m not entirely sure she actually turned the question around on him, as the final panel of her comic implies. Certainly the question has some importance to her, I infer from its inclusion in that panel, but maybe more in the asking, rather than the answering. I say this because among the other things she didn’t include in the cartoon, she apparently didn’t tell the stranger that she doesn’t just want to be a cartoonist, she is one, and list several of the things that any normal person would consider worthy of consideration — the kind of thing he might have reacted by saying, “Oh, then you really are what you want to be.”

But that’s not what Lucy wanted to talk about, in the real-life encounter (which I must also take as a given really happened, and wasn’t just made up for the chance to draw a cartoon about it) or in the cartoon, which becomes a meditation on the frustrations of being an artist surrounded by people who might discourage people like her.

Lucy’s conclusions about why such discouragement exists, and is expressed freely by so many people often enough to be socially acceptable, seem off the mark to me. Sure, maybe the “starving artist” idea is over-romanticized, but it’s not as though every “artist” who has ever fit the description of “starving” cultivated the persona. More to the point, how hard is it to find someone who has ever expressed interest in being creative, yet struggled and ultimately failed by any standard to achieve anything meaningful, going through life as a generally unhappy and maybe pitiable individual?

Now, maybe the reason for this is just as Lucy suggests, that the world is full of (see above) misunderstanding about creative arts, and there are many barriers for anyone to prove their ability as an artist. Or, to be less nice about it, that the world is a big meat-grinder for anyone who all but the most mediocre of individuals. Maybe the trips and snares of the world ensure that the majority of would-be artists are doomed, and but for the well-meaning wise strangers, they wouldn’t receive their proper warning before being consumed.

But why is “proof” of ability so important?

Maybe it’s because the uninformed uncreatives of the world have set up deterministic and quantifiable measurements for everything, such that creativity could be compared to something like how tall you are or how much weight you can carry. Maybe we’re introduced to the rank-and-file at an early age and any resources to teach the ways of the world are  (as per Sir Ken Robinson). Maybe the idea of success in creative fields is so strange as to become abhorrent, such that the first taste of success should have nothing but ruinous failure afterward (as Elizabeth Gilbert has said).

Maybe few artists spend much time talking about their successes, and too much about their failures. Gloom and doom makes for more memorable writing, however — just try to get through Warren Ellis’ Do Anything essays and remember the successes of people like Jack Kirby over the artfully crafted confusion and malaise. Go read all about Bill Watterson, the “Calvin and Hobbes” guy, and dare not to be surprised by how, 15 years after leaving the beloved strip and not looking back, he has no regrets.

Maybe there are legitimate reasons to be concerned for anyone who says she wants to be a cartoonist, given how newspapers and other print media, so long the medium of choice for comic strip artists, are not nearly as reliable as they used to be. (Though many media-savvy artists have found success by taking control of their own businesses, such as Scott Kurtz.) This probably could have been acknowledged by Lucy more than she did, though she did point out how the stranger admitted that his relative works for Marvel Comics (”NOT CARTOONING,” she writes). Why, though, didn’t she point out to the stranger, as she has to her readers in the same posting, that her work is set to appear in a Marvel Comic? (Girl Comics, coming next week.)

Again, I don’t fault Lucy for what she did or didn’t say to the stranger, or her choices of what to express in her cartoon about it. And maybe I’m reacting more to what wasn’t expressed more than what was. Maybe this was the same mistake the stranger made, unloading his opinion and interpreting her lack of objection as encouragement. This would go right along with how he might not have regarded Lucy as an adult (she admits she looks younger than she is,) and based on the assumption that she was some naive girl with a whimsical affectation, and attributed her interest in cartooning to inexperience.

But if he really did have a relative that worked at a major comic book publisher, maybe all he hears is stories about poor wannabe creatives trying to break in, and wandering off disappointed. Or maybe, it’s all that he remembers, out of the few stories his relative would tell someone else not really familiar with the business.

Maybe he was just trying to be helpful, and maybe she could have explained she didn’t need that kind of help. Maybe no one really needs that kind of help, but maybe artists like Lucy Knisley have reason to be more confident about expressing themselves when challenged.

Maybe she would have rather drawn a comic strip about it anyway. And that’s not a bad thing. Nothing to be discouraged.