Max Riffner

The Parlor

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Reinvention or Giant Bubble?

In everyone’s life, I think there is the potential to have chosen different careers than one has. For example, I think the Chief would have been awesome in marketing, but she fits well in human services (in no small part due to her amazing coping skills). I can show her comps or logos that I’m working on though, and she can get to the message quickly in a sentence sometimes better than what I’m visually showing her. Quite a talent.

The mid-to-late 20s is an interesting period in young adulthood as friends suddenly decide they wanted to be a lawyer, professor, doctor, or a fisherman, and quit their current careers to go back to school for new skills or just do what they always wanted. I always think it is neat when my friends reinvent themselves in this fashion, because I think after you’ve done it once, you know you can do it again if what they have planned doesn’t work out.

And sometimes, in my case, these changes happen by complete accident and you grow into them. When I was 18, I wanted to do comics; and my parents wanted me to go to college. All I wanted to do is draw and that is it. I had no other professional interests. They convinced me thankfully (as the bottom fell out of the comic market) but unfortunately I gave up comics to focus on learning graphic design.

Now, here I am as a creative manager in an Ecommerce department (a job that didn’t even exist ten years ago), focusing on business management, better web design, and, of course, back to comics (finally). I’ve even learned how to write a decent story for myself to draw.

All of this (writing, design, business, management) has been training for my next steps, as I come full circle and get back into comics as a business and a career.

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