The studio is one thing. The work is another. Here's where the hours go.
What you're looking at
Two axes: vertical separates solitary work from collaborative work; horizontal separates unpaid from paid. Four items sit in the quadrants — the graphic novel (alone, unpaid, outlined in red), the newspaper strips (alone, paid, steady income), the Tuesday cartoonist lunch (together, unpaid, the green ellipse because it's the only thing that feels alive), and festival panels (together, sort-of-paid, meaning they cover the train to Milan). A red dot marks where the wrist pain lives: in the unpaid quadrant, during the long novel work.
Why I drew it this way
The 2x2 is the laziest diagram format, which is why I almost never use it — but here the laziness is the point. These are the only four zones that matter when you're trying to make a living at this. I made the novel's box larger and red-stroked because it dominates the calendar even though it pays nothing; it's the thing eating the hand. The Tuesday lunch is an ellipse because it's the only organic thing here, the only one that isn't a rectangle of obligation. I rejected putting "teaching workshops" in the bottom-right because I don't do them anymore — I tried twice, hated it, stopped.
What it argues
The work that pays is not the work that matters, and the work that matters is destroying the tool. The bottom-left quadrant — unpaid, collaborative — is the only one marked green, which means I've already told you what I think is worth protecting. The diagram argues that a cartoonist's week is not a balanced portfolio; it's a map of theft and compensation, and you can see exactly where the theft happens.
What I left out
I left out "looking for work" because it doesn't fit in any quadrant — it's alone, it's unpaid, but it's not work, it's the static between stations. I left out my father because he had one job for forty years and never had to make a grid like this. And I left out the bottom-right corner's true inhabitants: the people who do advertising storyboards and corporate explainer comics, who have health insurance, and whom I do not mention at Tuesday lunch.