Hi Caine,
I fall under the: I'm going to do my own thing, but I'm serious about it.

Getting Published, very serious, comics and european style graphic Novels

and looking for an artist

I decided back in HS that I wanted to keep comics fun, and self-publishing was the only way to do that while still making a decent living otherwise. Right or wrong, it's worked out for me. I'm an architect and pay the bills to live in this expensive city, and work on my comic stuff on the side.

"I'm going to do my own thing, but I'm serious about it."

All of my professional design experience has reinforced that decision. Editors, deadlines, trials of freelance work, having to pitch to someone else to do what you want... I never had aspirations to see my name on the shelf at the local shop, and never honestly felt I'd get to a level of quality (and speed) that would allow me to work professionally at a level where I could be on books I actually wanted to draw. I'm also a character designer and storyteller more than I am a sequential artist, at heart, so self-publishing allows me to do exactly the kind of work that I want to do.

I do commission art of various comic and fantasy subject matter which is nice, and I host a weekly art jam on my forum which allows me to draw various fun characters I'd otherwise not have time to draw. On the self-publishing front, I have over 150 original characters illustrated, biographied, and written into the timeline of the TRDL Universe, and we'll be doing sequential art for some of those stories as we go. I have a great Portuguese artist working with me now under the imprint. I spend my sequential art time working on a single graphic serial, Finit-e, which takes FOREVER, but is rewarding. The only drawback is that I have to be careful committing to other large commission or paid projects as they come around, because of my limited free time and commitments to the self-publishing work. But not a big deal, as things have been so far.

Compared to back in the day, with the little xeroxed zines and everything, today self-publishing is more than viable, economically and emotionally. I envy kids in school today publishing their work on the web and such while still in JH or HS. To have had this network of virtually free exposure back then!

I think you can't beat whatever you're doing, as long as you enjoy it! There may always be a goal of something more, but you can get there from here, right?