I think I worry too much, and by that I mean both in frequency and, I guess, scope.
For instance, I worry that people won’t like Atomic Robo and the Dogs of War. As much as Scott’s art evolved over the course of our first volume, it’s evolved that much over again between that one and this one. It’s a huge improvement, and Ronda’s colors are – and I can’t believe this was possible – an even better match than before. And the stories this time around are different. There’s less emphasis on the comedy that everyone went nuts over in volume one. Then again, I only considered Issue #4 to be our “funny” issue last time around, so, who knows, maybe volume 2 is hilarious afterall. Anyway, I’ve made a living by entertaining people long enough now to know that any change, no matter how good it is, will create a very small minority to become incredibly vocal about how they hate the changes forever.
So, I worry about that. It’s probably a small thing to worry about, but it’s par for the course for me. I worried over the reception of every single issue for volume one. “This is it,” I’d say to anyone near enough to hear me. “This is the one where they figure out we’re morons who don’t know what we’re doing.”
“Who are you?” they’d say. Good times, good times.
At least that’s worrying about something within my sphere of influence. I can’t control what people like, but at least I can put forth my best effort and claim victory if it works out or blame everyone else for being uncultured slogs if they don’t like it.
Whatever a “slog” is.
But the other things I tend to worry about are a little out of my control. Like the energy crisis. Which leads to worrying about the stability of civilization. Which leads to worrying about the fate of all human knowledge. I mean, as far as we know, we are the smartest things in the universe. I don’t want that to be the case, but so far that’s what all the evidence points to. Don’t we then owe it to, uh, everything, to try to understand it?
I mean, you can make a case that even if intelligent life is incredibly, incredibly rare, there must be other life at least as smart as us out there somewhere in the universe because it’s really quite huge. But the problem is that evolution doesn’t have an end goal, it is merely a process by which organisms continually better adapt themselves to their environment. Intelligence is by no means a guaranteed result of “enough” evolution. The universe could be teaming with life no more intelligent than mold. It’s a very real possibility that we are it. And if we aren’t, there’s no guarantee that intelligence will necessarily lead to the development of a scientific method much less advanced technology. And if they do, the likelihood of a global catastrophe hitting at some point during the civilization’s lifespan is far greater than the likelihood of there being a civilization in the first place.
So, yeah. I worry about this kind of thing a lot.
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