And Then What? The Road After “Success” in the Arts

Alexis Clements uses Alison Bechdel’s new graphic novel “Spent” to meditate on the predicament of the creative artist today.

By Alexis ClementsNovember 29, 2025

• Comics

• Art & Architecture

IN 2021, I ATTENDED an online panel organized by Film Fatales, an advocacy organization for women, trans, and gender-expansive people working in the film industry. The panel was about the realities of making your second feature film. In other words, as someone from a demographic group seriously underrepresented in the industry, you managed to finish and distribute your first feature film, a major accomplishment for anyone, and now you’re either thinking about or already down the path of making another one. The takeaways from the panel were not very surprising but still managed to pack a bit of a gut punch: everyone agreed that making your second feature is no easier than the first and, in fact, might end up being harder. This difficulty was due to two factors: first, the industry is struggling in general, and second, you don’t have the optimism of ignorance on your side with a second feature—that is, you know in advance just how hard it’s going to be.

That confirmation that things don’t often get easier over time for most of us working in the arts is something that keeps coming up as I move into the second half of my forties. My own experience, and that of many of my friends and quite a few of the people I work with, is that maintaining a creative career into middle age and beyond is really just about carrying on with the work, in spite of the challenges. And that’s true even for those of us who manage (or appear) to have at least some of the markers of success.

All of this came up for me again while reading Alison Bechdel’s newest graphic novel, Spent (2025). I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect, but I knew the book was premised on the main character, who happens to share the author’s first name and occupation, finding herself in the position of having earned enough money from her work to comfortably sustain herself and her partner Holly, along with the home, land, and goats they own. It’s important to say that, even though details of the story might take off from Bechdel’s lived experience, this is not a work of nonfiction. It is a fictional account of the lives of a group of characters that anyone who has read Bechdel’s long-running comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For would recognize. The only meaningful change, beyond seeing that they’ve all aged, is to a few of the characters’ names. The protagonist, Mo, is now Alison (henceforth used to refer to Bechdel’s fictional persona), but her character is the same—a kvetchy, left-leaning lesbian cartoonist who spends tons of time raging at the news of the world but struggles to make her politics and life live up to her stated ideals. Also, Alison/Mo’s partner is now named Holly, which happens to be the name of Bechdel’s real-life spouse.

The humor and truths in this book, as with Bechdel’s old comic strip, come from its satirical lens, from the author’s ability to heighten the circumstances, to poke fun, while undergirding that teasing with a deep care and affection for the worlds and characters she is rendering. And like many good authors asking questions about people’s life choices, she makes her fictional self the fall guy more often than anyone else.

There’s a conceit that Bechdel is also somehow mapping an understanding of Karl Marx’s ideas about capitalism onto the text, naming each chapter after key concepts in Das Kapital. But frankly, this conceit doesn’t hold up. If there were older drafts of the book that offered more pathways into that connection (as Bechdel implies), they have been so excised as to make the gesture toward Marxist analysis feel a bit obtuse or, at the very least, so obscure as to be largely irrelevant. As it currently stands, Spent’s political offerings come across most clearly in the contrast between Alison’s character and her group of friends who have lived together in the same house for decades in an ever-evolving cross-class and cross-race collective existence that represents both an ideal and an imperfect network of relationships and interdependencies. Their paucity of space and constrained funds press against Alison and Holly’s expansive land, home, barn, and cash flow—communal systems of support and shared resources are positioned against the capitalist drive to isolate, hoard resources, and privatize.

But what’s particularly relevant to this essay is the fact that Alison is grappling with the challenge of trying to figure out what having earned all that money from her creative work means for both her life and her art. Alison remains the sort-of antihero she always was as Mo in Dykes to Watch Out For. She is self-involved, prone to spiraling anxieties and distractions that keep her from her work, not the most progressive of the bunch, and also susceptible to questionable schemes and projects she thinks might help her maintain the financial heights she has recently achieved. More often than not, Bechdel shows Alison flailing, struggling to get to the work of actually making work, and agonizing over whether or not the things she’s pursuing are the right choices. In fact, while Alison is wading through her career crisis, the character Holly, without even intending to, becomes a viral sensation, generating her own money and fame, which further tests the protagonist’s confidence.

Even without knowing the details of Bechdel’s personal life, or what her finances look like, it’s clear to her readers that she has been steadily productive for decades, that she never attended art school (she was rejected by the ones she applied to), and it took her about a decade to make a living from her cartoon strip (this was back in the 1990s when housing costs, along with the publishing world and syndication deals, were very different). She started publishing books in 2006, and all of them have been released by major houses. Her first book, the graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, was adapted for the stage as a musical, which premiered in 2013, eventually making its way to Broadway and theaters around the world, with the film rights being acquired by a production company in 2020, a couple of months before the COVID-19 pandemic really took hold.

Bechdel is likely one of the people for whom it’s fair to say that aspects of her life have become easier with added income, but the generating of the work still relies on her alone. She still has to come up with something to say about the world that interests both herself and the buyers of her work—something that Alison struggles with regularly in Spent. And with that in mind, it seems notable that, at this moment in her career, Bechdel is returning to the work with which she started, to the characters and world she first developed in the 1980s, which helped her build her body of work. It’s a kind of return to basics, a touching-ground after what have likely been some pretty heady years.

Looking at the public record, Bechdel appears to be a sort of Horatio Alger, one of the little guys who made it big (let’s be clear that this is even rarer for lesbians than it is for the typical American). And yet, her return to the original source, and her protagonist’s existential crisis, feels like a reminder that success, particularly for artists, is a tricky thing, even more so for those who don’t manage to bring in enough money to stabilize themselves financially.

Let me give you a couple of other, less Alger-like examples, starting with another person who has also achieved national recognition. In late May, I was sitting in a cinema in Manhattan for the New York premiere of a documentary film. There was a lengthy Q and A after the screening that featured a number of people involved in the film, including one of its executive producers, the actress and advocate Laverne Cox. Cox spoke at length about the current state of the world and, at one point, referenced the realities of her own current working life. She told the audience that she had a three-pronged approach to her career, combining acting, public speaking, and branding/sponsorship opportunities. It’s a savvy business plan, built on the very real knowledge that acting opportunities are limited. Even for someone with the glamour, global presence, and popularity she wields, her transness has led some to limit her roles. She spoke to us while wearing a stunning outfit, with immaculate hair and makeup, a form of public presentation she maintains with skill but which certainly comes with a meaningful price tag. She then told us that not a single college or university has called her for a speaking gig since Donald Trump took office for his second presidential term, and that branding opportunities disappeared overnight. In other words, here is a woman with national standing who, in order to maintain that standing, also has to maintain a public image and extremely high standard of self-presentation, who has had major roles as an actor, and yet for whom none of that has created career or financial stability.

Let me give you another example of two visual artists whose names I won’t share, but who have each made work for at least 15 years, had solo shows in important places, and have been written about in influential publications. In the past, both of them received award packages worth well over $100,000, packages that included salaries for a period of time and employment benefits including healthcare, studio space, and a public presentation of their art. When they got the award, each artist chose to quit the wage-earning jobs they were doing to pay their bills and become full-time artists—many people’s dream. But after the paychecks from the awards stopped, both artists ended up on unemployment, trying to figure out how to move forward in their careers without having to do things that felt like moving backward.

Hearing their stories reminded me of sitting with a friend years ago over drinks. He had received one of the biggest monetary awards in his creative field, something around $100,000. He was in his thirties at the time, and as we sipped our drinks, he was reflecting on the fact that, now that he had won that prize, there was no chance of ever winning it again. In other words, when that money ran out, the chance of that kind of windfall coming in again was even lower than before.

These big breaks and large prizes are remarkable things that can provide incredible opportunities, but there is so often another side to that success. It’s notable that the Doris Duke Foundation, which awards a cash prize of $525,000 to theater, dance, and jazz artists, does so in a way that spreads the payouts over multiple years, with a long period during which the money tapers off to lower amounts; they also ask awardees to engage with a financial planner and management and professional development services, and they provide an additional $25,000 if the awardees set aside a specific portion of money in retirement funds. I am guessing they learned the hard way that handing a huge sum of money to people used to living a scrappy existence can land them right back where they started if you don’t also provide them with ways of building their financial and career sustainability over the long term. But even then, all the career planning and prize money in the world can’t guarantee ongoing opportunities and income.

To put this in perspective: according to MIT’s Living Wage Calculator, a single person with no children living in either Los Angeles or New York City needs to bring in roughly $60,000 (before taxes) to meet their basic needs. Add a kid or two to the equation and your annual costs will double. So, if you get a prize of $100,000 and you quit your day job, that money might last you a little over a year and a half, if you maintain a frugal existence and don’t have children. Even $500,000 would get you about eight years of just meeting your basic needs (not going out to eat more, not getting a fancy new apartment, not traveling more), or a much shorter period of time if your cost of living jumps significantly.

Separate from big windfall prizes or one-off successes like selling the film rights to a story or play, the money that used to be steadier for some kinds of artists has decreased dramatically, as we all know, due to changes across industries such as music, film, and television. This is why entertainment industry unions for actors and writers are fighting so hard for residual payments from streaming platforms and why musicians talk so much about the paltry payments from music streaming services. There was a world in the past where being part of a major television show or writing a hit song could make you decent money well into the future, or could at least help you feel more secure in buying a home and covering mortgage payments. But for an actress like Laverne Cox, for whom one of her biggest acting roles was on the Netflix show Orange Is the New Black (2013–19), residuals are nothing like what they would have been for a traditional television show.

The Freakonomics Radio podcast produced an episode this summer featuring David Adjmi, who at one point discusses the fiscal realities of being a playwright. Adjmi is definitely someone whom most would consider successful: his work has been on Broadway and in London’s West End, he won a Tony and a Drama Desk Award (among other prizes), he received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and so on. But here’s a telling quote from the podcast about the financial realities facing Adjmi and his playwriting peers: “[W]e’re going down even a darker black hole, which I didn’t even think was possible, but of course it always is.” I’m sure that the handful of clients I have in my tax work who recently walked away from careers in film and television would share a similar sentiment about their industries, after a grueling past few years trying to maintain work when they previously earned solid six-figure incomes in the industry.

Every field of the arts is different, the methods and means of generating income vary, and the scale of what is possible also varies. It has never been easy to be an artist of any kind. And if you’re not one of those who has family or spousal support or a social network with lots of expendable income, then it was and continues to be even harder for you. One way or another, rent and bills have to get paid, which takes time, energy, and hustle, and for a lot of us, that’s on top of the time, energy, and hustle it takes to make our creative work. The system is designed this way, and anyone who pays their own bills knows just how terrifying ballooning costs and stagnant or diminishing incomes feel right now. As I’ve written here before, the things that are going to make any of that easier and more equitable are things that are going to make things better for everyone in this country: guarantees like truly affordable housing and free healthcare, as well as care for children, elders, and those with disabilities, not to mention redistribution of economic, political, and workplace power.

So what are the takeaways from this grim reality? Bechdel’s book seems to present sharing resources and not following the capitalist impulse to isolate as a compelling, if sometimes complicating, path forward. Even Alison and Holly end the book sharing their space with two young people and seem better for it. And always, always, there is the reminder that, for artists, you kind of have to assume that the income from your creative work will be fickle and inconsistent. So if you want to keep doing this work for the rest of your life, regardless of that fact, you have to make choices that will allow you to sustain your life regardless of those shifts.

And we all have to fight like hell for better living and care conditions for all of us. Because, as the United States currently stands, the pool of people struggling to make ends meet is expanding exponentially. We artists face unique realities in our lives and creative careers, but we are not uniquely constrained economically—that’s something we share with millions of others whose incomes and work are inconsistent or precarious. And that shared reality is a position of strength from which to organize with others for changes that will benefit everyone, not to mention allowing us, as artists, to carry on with our work.