Episode Details

At the beginning of the year, cartoonists Dave Kellett and Brad Guigar made their predictions for the coming year — and set goals for themselves. Now, as the year comes to a close, it's the brutally honest follow-up episode where they grade themselves — and sometimes discover that Past-Brad and Past-Dave were wildly optimistic. Or deluded. Or both.

2025 PREDICTIONS

• DAVE: Business planning for cartoonists is gonna be filled with a lot of anxiety. Trump will be a chaos agent.
• BRAD: the “winners” of 2025 will be the cartoonists and businesses that help people *deal* with anxiety.
• DAVE: Bluesky will be at 50M users by the end of the year (we were at 23M when he made that prediction)
• BRAD: Substack: will gain in prominence. They’re going to have a user base in the same league as Patreon, Kickstarter, or Twitter.
• DAVE: “We will all be playing reactionary, whack-a-mole with our life decisions in the first two years of the Trump administration.”
• BRAD: AI will start to gain a foothold among writers and artists, as an assistant to their writing or their process or their brainstorming. Dave concurred. <— again, not saying we like it or promote it!
• DAVE: Pickstarter and Patreon will continue as market leaders in the next 12 months. (Brad: I concur, provided Patreon doesn’t issue their IPO).
• BRAD: You’re gonna see publishing take a huge contraction. From Random House to the Guigar House, you’ll see it all shrink, due to tariffs. (Note: We didn’t know about the tariff exception to printed matter.) Dave: Agree! My hidden hope is for incompetence.
• DAVE: YA and kids books will continue to dominate cartoonists who have *gone to publishers*.
• DAVE: Webtoons *might* begin to fall apart in the US market. This was more of a “curious” prediction than an “I feel strongly about this” prediction.
• DAVE: I’m gonna have to raise prices or lower features in my books. 
   

2025 GOALS

• BRAD: My big goal is to “just survive” in 2025. It would almost be counterproductive for me to make goals. It’s like writing my goals in the sand at the shoreline.
• DAVE: I also wrote down “survive”!
• DAVE: run ANATOMY OF DOGS Kickstarter.
• BRAD: Kickstarter in the first part of the year…but "I don’t know what it’s gonna be”. Worried about the risk of a NSFW book under Project 2025
• DAVE: gonna triple-down on Bluesky for the next 1-3 years. Gonna focus on it and build it out. Brad co-signs.
• BRAD: will use and pay for Buffer.com
• DAVE: wrongwayshow.com will launch as a project, after a year of planning. It launching is the goal. We did it!
• BRAD: build Spice Rack into an example of what loose collectives can do, and what they can bring to our businesses.
• DAVE: If I get burned on this first book KS in 2025, I will switch to smaller Quickstarters that are more nimble and more financially manageable.
• BRAD: Dave says he’s pulling back from KDP. Brad will lean in on KDP.
• DAVE: second half of 2025: launch on Substack? 
• DAVE: focus on the things that I can control in 2025. Focus on my health, my family, my creativity…and not let them steal my joy, and outlive the fuckers.
• BRAD: show up every week and record ComicLab.

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