Author: Elayne Riggs

One of my biggest regrets in my years of involvement in the comics industry is the way I would refer to myself as an "industry professional" during my "early Usenet years," when I’d never been paid a cent for any of my comic book storytelling nor hired by any company. The impetus, though wrongheaded, was easy to understand. It hadn’t been that long since I’d discovered comics and online fandom, and I wanted to be a part of the excitement, but — having developed very definite ideas about fannish behavior from briefly hanging out with science fiction fans in my 20’s — I didn’t want to be "just" a fan. I craved credibility and legitimacy; after all, I wrote about comics and corresponded with lots of people who got paid to create them, so didn’t that sort of make me a pro as well?

Well, no, it didn’t. And by the time I decided to run for a board position in Friends of Lulu, I ‘d decided to stick to both the letter and spirit of the unwritten law. FoL’s charter specified that only a working industry professional could hold certain positions like national president, so I knew that was one I’d never hold. And when I started maintaining the Women Doing Comics list, I made up for past foolishness by leaving my name off of it (even though I’d had work published and my rule for the list was that it should include all current created and published work done by women, not only the work for which the woman got paid). I couldn’t, and still don’t, consider my efforts for charity books to be in the same league as people who did this sort of thing for a living.

We live in a hyper-capitalist society where status and success is measured primarily by one’s ability to make money. This has nothing to do with value or worth — that’s earned by deeds and conferred by friends, and none of us should ever have any doubt as to our individual value or worth no matter what we do to make money (or how much or little take-home pay we see). Professional status is a very serious matter, particularly in the entertainment industry where so many wannabes decide, as I once did, that there’s no difference between "aspiring" and "actual."

But there is. I didn’t realize just how much until I married a freelancer.

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