Mantra Breaking: Being a Second Grade Artist, part one
For those that know me as a comic book writer, and writer only, the past month has been quite a bit of change for me.
You see, I long banged the drum and sounded the trumpet of "I’m a writer, I can’t even draw stick figures." It was such an easy mantra. I could say it over and over, and it allowed me to be the best writer in the world not getting published. I had to develop a business model that relied completely on others being talented. Sure, I had to be good with my words, but it was another layer of selling that I had to do. In comics, it’s not just selling your book to the audience. It’s selling your book to the retailers and the distributors and the publishers. While I’m more than ready to bite down and be the publisher, I’ve always been having to sell my books to artists as well.
Because woe is me, I’m not an artist. I can’t draw anything.
Bull Hockey.
At some point, it just started to wear on me. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve worked with some great artists - Rob Zailo is one of those old-school guys that would have fit right at home in the old bullpen in Marvel’s golden age. And I’ve also worked with some artists that really didn’t do too much of that work thing, or that revising of pages when they were the wrong format/characters/skill level. It can be very, very frustrating.
But that whole time, I was sitting behind my mantra shield - I’m not an artist.
What the hell makes an artist? Talent is a big plus, but lets face it - everyone is an artist in kindergarten, and most kids still draw for fun in second grade. And eventually, people are going to be better at it than others. So what? Suddenly drawing isn’t as fun?
Really, it’s the anxiety factor. If you draw something and you’re over the age of 16, people are going to judge your art. It may be something personal to you, and it may just be a measure of your skills. But if you show it to someone with a critical eye, they are going to measure it. I am in particular a pretty harsh judge of art. I have to be. If you want to work on a comic with my name on it, then it’s got to have a certain level of skill. Which, to some, probably makes me a hypocrite. I know that Dear Pirate doesn’t have the best of art. Big deal.
Writing for comics is a maligned art. You can spend years working on the craft, developing and understanding comics as a story-telling medium. You can become the second coming of Alan Moore, and still, editors probably aren’t going to read your pitch. But if you have a hit TV series on the WB, and you’ve never, ever written a comic, you might be a celebrity in the industry in your first year of work. It’s annoying, but it’s reality.
I’m working on a deep and personal script right now, and I’m really not in the mood to sell it as a product to an artist. So I started sketching and photo-referencing. And every now and then, I started to doodle. And then a pirate idea that I had started to bleed into the personal project. Yeah, I wanted professional artists to collaborate with on the pirate one (still do, but it’s different than Dear Pirate). But I was doing a lot of research on buccaneers and privateers. Pirates were on the brain, and the doodles kept coming.
That’s when I came up with a little pirate guy, and the weird idea of a pirate advice column. I knew it was a funny idea, so instead of spending the next three months getting a minicomic ready for Baltimore Comic Con (even though yeah, there will be one ready), I got DearPirate.com up and running.
You see, I long banged the drum and sounded the trumpet of "I’m a writer, I can’t even draw stick figures." It was such an easy mantra. I could say it over and over, and it allowed me to be the best writer in the world not getting published. I had to develop a business model that relied completely on others being talented. Sure, I had to be good with my words, but it was another layer of selling that I had to do. In comics, it’s not just selling your book to the audience. It’s selling your book to the retailers and the distributors and the publishers. While I’m more than ready to bite down and be the publisher, I’ve always been having to sell my books to artists as well.
Because woe is me, I’m not an artist. I can’t draw anything.
Bull Hockey.
At some point, it just started to wear on me. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve worked with some great artists - Rob Zailo is one of those old-school guys that would have fit right at home in the old bullpen in Marvel’s golden age. And I’ve also worked with some artists that really didn’t do too much of that work thing, or that revising of pages when they were the wrong format/characters/skill level. It can be very, very frustrating.
But that whole time, I was sitting behind my mantra shield - I’m not an artist.
What the hell makes an artist? Talent is a big plus, but lets face it - everyone is an artist in kindergarten, and most kids still draw for fun in second grade. And eventually, people are going to be better at it than others. So what? Suddenly drawing isn’t as fun?
Really, it’s the anxiety factor. If you draw something and you’re over the age of 16, people are going to judge your art. It may be something personal to you, and it may just be a measure of your skills. But if you show it to someone with a critical eye, they are going to measure it. I am in particular a pretty harsh judge of art. I have to be. If you want to work on a comic with my name on it, then it’s got to have a certain level of skill. Which, to some, probably makes me a hypocrite. I know that Dear Pirate doesn’t have the best of art. Big deal.
Writing for comics is a maligned art. You can spend years working on the craft, developing and understanding comics as a story-telling medium. You can become the second coming of Alan Moore, and still, editors probably aren’t going to read your pitch. But if you have a hit TV series on the WB, and you’ve never, ever written a comic, you might be a celebrity in the industry in your first year of work. It’s annoying, but it’s reality.
I’m working on a deep and personal script right now, and I’m really not in the mood to sell it as a product to an artist. So I started sketching and photo-referencing. And every now and then, I started to doodle. And then a pirate idea that I had started to bleed into the personal project. Yeah, I wanted professional artists to collaborate with on the pirate one (still do, but it’s different than Dear Pirate). But I was doing a lot of research on buccaneers and privateers. Pirates were on the brain, and the doodles kept coming.
That’s when I came up with a little pirate guy, and the weird idea of a pirate advice column. I knew it was a funny idea, so instead of spending the next three months getting a minicomic ready for Baltimore Comic Con (even though yeah, there will be one ready), I got DearPirate.com up and running.
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8:12 AM
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