Love Neil Gaiman. :p I really wish he would write the next.. Oh... Wait... XD

Oh, you tee hee

Brilliant as always.

I agree with him and disagree with him.

I agree that an fans of an artist have no inherent expectation of production. This is especially true if the items are offered without any remuneration whatsoever. Things happens, often private in nature, which will interfere with an artists ability to complete a planned series.

On the other hand, when an artist has made public a publication schedule, such as a comic strip which they announce will be published on a daily/weekly/monthly basis, fans will understand if you drop a strip or two. If it goes past that, however, fans are going to ask, "Hey! Are you okay? What's going on?" The artist has no obligation to respond, but it would be common courtesy to do so.

In the middle are the artists who have made no public announcement of a production schedule, but have regularly put out work which has now seemed to have stopped. Again, expect fans to ask.

It would be wrong of a fan to demand a response from the artist for things that they have not paid for and have not been promised anything.

But, equally wrong, and I have seen artists do this, would be for an artist to snap at their fans or patrons in the manner that the Wizard of Oz snapped at Dorothy for wanting to go home now rather than wait for tomorrow after she had fulfilled her end of the bargain.

I think Gaiman is dead on concerning the idea that the promise or expectation of future works in a series don't come with a deadline guarantee. Some artists (writers, musicians, visual artists, whatever) are just prodigious and can roll out new stuff daily or weekly. Sometimes a story takes longer to tell or to create. (Sometimes I look at how much Beach Bears material is out there and think "Wow! How does he do it?" because I don't have anywhere NEAR that amount of creative stuff inside me.)

But then there are artists who take money and promise a deadline and don't deliver. Ever. I have a local friend who paid in full for his fursuit SIX YEARS AGO and is STILL waiting for the maker, who has gone and completed MANY other projects, to finish and deliver his suit. My friend is afraid to make a fuss about this popular artist, because "then I'll NEVER get it". My thought is "he's breached his contract - you MUST make a fuss, and you don't have the suit anyway, the worst that can happen is that no one else will get duped by this con artist."

The difference, of course, is that in the former case, there is no contract - no reasonable expectation on either side of timetable for new work. In the latter, there was a contract and a reasonable expectation of delivery.

I don't disagree with a word you say.

Well, except the part about you not having that amount of creative stuff inside you.