Home Cookin'
Probably not the best title for this week’s submission, but entirely appropriate. I spent Sunday glued to the television, after driving out for breakfast. Before said drive, I was commenting on an odd cloud formation, low to the ground and dark, wondering what happened to that fogbank. My wife said “It’s smoke from a fire.” “Nonsense,” I replied. “If it were that close, we’d be smelling it,” and I couldn’t smell a thing.
We drove down for our breakfast and got about halfway there when we’d realized that we were driving into the open jaws of hell. The sky turned black with smoke and the sun was rendered to a relatively inconsequential pinky-orange disc. Everyone had their lights on and you still couldn’t see all that well.
Needless to say, I went back home and then started figuring out what to do about this. Brushfires are pretty common in California (where I’ve lived my entire life), so it wasn’t all that big a deal. This one was a little closer than usual though.
By evening, there was a fireline that was about ten minutes away by car. I was just a tad bit weirded out by that. Spent most of the evening paying close attention to the winds and the news reports. Slept only with the aid of my sinus medication, which means that I didn’t get any good sleep. I spent most of Monday trying to recover and figuring out what (if anything) needed to be done.
So if I’m a little more scattered than usual, blame it on the Santa Ana winds (and the bonehead hunter who should have known better than light a signal fire on a windy way 176 days after measurable rains, where the entire landscape is drier than the fish sticks they used to serve you at the school cafeteria.)
Hmm. Looking at Tsunami, things have gone from Marvel trying to do an end-run around the Direct Market to looking more like Marvel really doesn’t know which direction it wants to run in. I’ve heard conflicting reports running the gamut from “Marvel always planned on manga-sized edtions” to “Marvel was using trade orders to guess demand” to “Marvel is just trying to piss off retailers.”
None of them sound particularly encouraging, though some sound less gloomy than others, I guess. I mean, Marvel just went through a major upheaval, right? That can account for some of the confusion that’s going on right now, right? Well, I guess so, except that you’d think if Marvel was going to run into a new market with a new format (ie, the bookstore market and digest/manga size format) then they’d have had a plan in place for months, and this recent development shouldn’t really affect their plans.
That’s what I thought. I can’t tell what’s going on now, to tell you the truth. I’d note that most of the art in the Tsunami line seems like it’d reproduce pretty well on small pages (and you’re not seeing a lot of 9-panel pages in those books, either.) Maybe the intention always was to go to manga-size and then grab the market based on the format (and the content to some extent.) Not a bad plan, but one wonders why they aren’t going with heavy hitting characters to lead this initiative?
You might ask why I’m particularly interested in this? Since I did last week’s column on this subject and am giving it more ink this week.
I’m looking a Tsunami so closely because I think that if comics are going to survive as a viable art form, that there’s going to need to be some real changes in the industry.
I know. Big duh. I’m a real smart guy.
Of course there’s going to need to be some real changes in the way things are done. The direct market is going to need to grow and evolve, or its going to remain stagnant (and might have to look squarely into the eyes of a future where it’s shrinking and not growing.)
And what kind of comics pundit would I be unless I outlined those changes in excruciating detail, accented with emphatic exhortations and grave pronouncements unless my prescription for evolution is followed to the exact letter?
Probably a better one.
As much fun as being a comics pundit is, there’s other things that I like to spend my time on. No really. Like writing comics. I’m going to have to spend a bucketload of time promoting and publishing said comics, too, which I have to admit aren’t as intriguing to me. I’d rather be creating them than dealing with the business side of things.
Take the project I’m working on now (a weird western entitled StrangeWays). The first order of business I had to attend to was to find an artist to work on it. I could draw all those pictures, but A) I’m not very good at it and B) I’d be working on it until the next issue of Miracleman came out, and it still wouldn’t be finished. So I had to find an artist.
At least I had money to pay potential artists. I’ve seen a lot of ads looking for artists or writers or colorists or letterers saying that there was no money involved, but that they could be paid in copies. And just a word of advice to anyone who wants to get into this, if you want professional work, you need to pay a professional rate. I don’t know anyone who wants to work for free. Maybe for part ownership or a co-creator deal, or just for the fun of it.
But when it comes to making the commitment necessary to get an 88-page original story out, you’re not going to find anyone who wants to work for peanuts. And this goes for artists trying to find writers. Our work isn’t easy, either, so don’t ask people to work for free.
So, I went and put out the call for artists on a number of websites, places like Digital Webbing, Millarworld, a couple of the Delphi Forums that I frequent, places like that. Got some good replies, too, but I wanted a good field to choose from.
Then I went and checked out Comicsportfolio.com. That’s a lot of work, to go through all those listings. It took me about two days, off and on. But there wasn’t a lot of time spent on each one. Mostly because it wasn’t necessary. Lots of people did themselves some major disservices when it came to their portfolios. Let’s look at some of these.
1) No sequential samples. This was the single biggest problem I had. Probably 2/3s of the entries didn’t have any sequential samples. Pinups, sure. But no sequentials. Folks, this is sequential art here, not pinup books. I was looking for people who could tell a story with their artwork, and lots of folks just chose not to even try.
2) Incomplete work. Hey! That’s a mighty nice looking head shot. Where’s the rest of the figure? Not a bad sketch, but where’s the final linework? Again, if you’re going to take the time to put your work up there, then take the time to finish it.
3) Old work. If the last time you’ve updated your site is February of 2002, then I’m not likely to jump in and look at your portfolio. Particularly when it’s August of 2003. You need to keep your work current.
4) Amateur work. There was a lot of work that just wasn’t worth the time to look at. Yeah, that’s hard to say, but it’s true. There were a lot of folks who plain weren’t ready, but at least were working on it. But I wasn’t looking for someone rough around the edges; I wanted to hook up with someone who could finish the job and make it look good (and my idea of a good artist might differ from someone else’s, for instance, I think that Sean Phillips is ten times the artist that Jim Lee is. Just my opinion.)
5) Unprofessional attitude. When you revel in the fact that you’re trying to get in people’s faces and shake them up and that you wore a lot of black and scribbled pentagrams in your notebooks and like to stir stuff up and generally don’t care what people think, that’s kind of a turnoff. You aren’t there to explain your work; people can only judge you on what they see. And when I see that you’re acting like a problem child in the interview, I’m going to lose interest fast. Even if you’re talented. Maybe even particularly if you’re talented.
To tell you the truth, I usually didn’t need to spend very much time on any of these portfolios, which is too bad, because people usually put a lot of time into them (as well as money, ‘cause I don’t think they do free hosting over there.) I used to shake my heads at editors looking at portfolios at conventions, taking just thirty seconds to give the hopeful a head shake and a couple of hints. But after looking at portfolios for a couple days like that, my head wanted to explode. The good stuff would cause me to linger for a moment, but the mediocre and the dreck were passed on almost instantly.
It’s not fair. And it probably isn’t right, but it’s life.
And even when I found good people, they usually showed that they were only willing to work in one style (often manga-influenced). I gave folks a little leeway in that, but wanted to find someone who was flexible, or who already had a natural style in the vein of what I was looking for. Not an easy thing to find.
Hell, I even went over to the Kubert School of Comic Art pages to look at the work of some of their recent graduates. I even found a couple good possibilities who I contacted. And though I’m not using them on this project, I think that I’d be able to work with a couple of them in the future.
The guy who who I ended up choosing (and who, as I recounted a couple weeks back, had a lot of useful feedback about the script and storytelling in general) came to me with a bunch of black and white painted pieces, mostly from RPG rulesbooks, so far as I could tell. I liked his style and thought it was good, though I wasn’t planning on doing a book in greyscale, so I passed.
Then he sent me some pencils and some inked pages that just flat knocked me out. The pencilling was tight, well-staged, beautifully rendered. The inked pages he sent me had just the right amount of roughness and a great sese of lighting, even in just black inks.
I talked back and forth with him a couple times and offered him the job. He said yes, once some story issues got worked out. And now it’s a working project. Hooray. That only took about a month longer than I thought it would.
Oh sure, you want to know his name. Well, maybe later. But, as I said before, he’s been working in the business since the early 90s (at least that was the earliest work of his that I could find.) And he’s professional (though personable). And he does sequentials. And he finishes his work. All of which are of critical importance.
So yeah, more on that front a little later on.
In honor of Broken Frontier’s first anniversary, all the columnists have been asked to reflect upon their tenure here. I’m not what to say, frankly. I ended up here because of a fluke, more than anything else, that and the generous offer of one Graeme McMillan (for whom I wrote a fill-in column one month, and was then asked to do a regular column here.)
It’s been interesting. Hardly life-changing, at this moment. Who knows, though, perhaps in ten years I can attribute a whole bunch of life changes to humble beginnings laid down in this column, but I doubt it. Right now, I’m just interested in giving folks a piece of my mind (hopefully one that doesn’t bore them to tears or homicidal murder) and maybe, just maybe gives them a tiny little kick in the head.
Even if your only reaction is disagreement, I hope that you at least sit down for a moment and think about why you disagree with what goes on here, instead of just calling for a jihad and issuing an order for my immediate execution when I say something like “Hal Jordan makes a better Spectre than a Green Lantern,” or the like.
In short, here’s to the first four point five months. Let’s hope they let me have another.
See you in a week, where I may or may not discuss what I think of the monthly comics format. I know there are some folks who can’t wait for that. You may or may not be counted among them.