Important page from DETECTIVE COMICS #416 by Frank Robbins.
Why is it important? Because comics. You could try to translate this to prose or cinema or cutscene or whatever, but it would only be an approximation of the power that comics gives us to dissect time and poke around it and choose what’s important (out of what the artists choose to present to us, the viewer.)
Everything matters on this page.
(via mendelpalace)
Some readers don’t like his smart-ass attitude, and some creators don’t like… that his paychecks are bigger than theirs. All of which is absolute crap, but that’s another story.
Millar has all my respect for things like the text following. He posted this on his message board, discussing further the topic of Bill Finger’s story.
Decades on, my generation of creators is hyper-aware of what happened to the people who really built the industry. The very small handful of people who built pretty much everything that pays for all those big offices around the world for the major companies. But even then I still see this happening. One reasonably well-known and sleazy company, for example, has a deal where every new creator-owned series is owned entirely by the writer and the artist is work for hire. Thus, if a movie gets made and someone makes one, two or three million dollars from the proceeds, the artist gets nothing but a cut of publishing.
Other thing I’ve seen is new creations unevenly split. In rights terms, 50/50 is the only way to go, but I’ve seen this split on big projects 75/25 and even 90/10 among the writer and artist. This rarely gets reported because artists, even more than writers, tend to be gentle souls, crushed by their next deadline and never quite finding the time or the energy to make a fuss. But I see all sorts of stuff going on now like front-loading money from a movie deal into a writer’s first draft of a screenplay money too. That’s a particularly sneaky one. Say, for example, the rights to a movie is going for a million dollars. That should be half a million each. But some very dodgy deals can be cut where the screenplay is 500K and the rights are 500 between both, the artist just getting half of what he’s due and the screenplay binned immediately and always planned to be binned with the writer recouping 75% of the pot.
What I mean by all this is that people should keep their eyes open. This isn’t an industry where our work is worth pennies anymore. These ideas can be used in endless mediums and are the reason the Big Two have vast Manhattan and Los Angeles offices. At the same time, writers and artists have to be fair with each other. Anything that isn’t 50/50 isn’t such a good deal. I think it’s fair enough for a writer to exclusively take a producer fee in the same way that an artist could take a design fee because, for example, I spend easily 5-10 hours a week on producer calls, watching casting sessions or even disappearing for a week entirely for story meetings or early edit screenings. I still split my producer fees 50/50 with the artists as a personal choice, but don’t judge the others who don’t as it really is a distinct deal from the rights and a different job.
MM
Indestructible Hulk #12 (WIP & Final cover) by Mukesh Singh
nothing not good about this
(via marcusto)
I think mainstream American Superhero comics lag a little behind other expressions of teenage life in culture, and if you do that, you’re risking writing comics that appeal to the parents of teenagers rather than the teenagers themselves.
In terms of blocks, I suspect a good chunk of it comes out of comics being a visual medium. Text is a great obfuscator of content. You can read a book, and your parents will never know that it contains matter they’d have trouble with, because they’re never actually going to read it. But comics, being visual, are transparent. At a glance, they can judge it — and so often judge it at a glance, without actually reading it.
So you walk a line. I started “Young Avengers” with the scene for a number of reasons, but one of them was certainly seeing if Marvel would let me do it. If I weren’t able to write that, I’d have had to bow out of the gig, because there would be no way of doing anything I thought worth doing.
Marvel didn’t even raise an eyebrow.
I think the biggest blockade to the creation of the content is creators not choosing to create the content.
"— From my new interview about Young Avengers over at CBR, which finds me in a pugnacious somewhat wanky mode. (via kierongillen)
(via mckelvie)
Supernatural Thillers Featuring The Living Mummy
October 1974
Cover by Gil Kane & Al Milgrom
(Source: comicsodissey)
spx:
The Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival Ends
The Comics Journal has a piece with comments from all the principals on the abrupt and much-mourned passing of the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Fest. Like everyone else, we’re sad to see it go but we look forward to great things from Dan, Gabe and Bill (Bill K. remains the Director of Programming for SPX).
As we read this stuff, it is important to remember that anytime a partnership dissolves there will always be different points of view from the participants. Almost never is it a situation where everyone agrees on the right course. But there is more to tease out of this article than the he said / he said / he said of how things ended for BCGF.
The first thing is:
These festivals are HARD. Do not doubt that each event is a labor of love for the folks that put their hearts and their backs into bringing off a BCGF, MoCCA, TCAF, SPX, MeCAF, CAKE, MICE, Asbury Park, Locust Moon, Stumptown or whoever I’m forgetting (please forgive me).
The burden to produce a great show that hits a moving target of available talent, drawing power and creative growth year after year can be crushing. Being successful at it means attending just as much to behind the scenes growth and development as to what guests you deliver or how many bodies you can bring through the turnstiles.
We have had our share of ups and downs at SPX since ‘94 and the same thing - or something similar - to what occurred with BCGF could have easily happened to SPX at some point along the way.
I am glad - and we’re extremely lucky - to be still standing, still growing.
The second thing is:
Keep in mind that all of the shows I mentioned above are very different - they diverge in their various missions, how they are organized, how they are funded, what resources they have to work with and the personalities involved. While they all get yardsticked against one another, each one is its own beast, with its own burdens.
All of these events are dealing with a unique set of ongoing challenges and opportunities, from keeping up with taxes and business filings, balancing the books, working over the next several years of contract arrangements, recruiting top guests, coordinating programming, planning awards shows, registering and laying out increasing numbers of exhibitor tables (Yeah, that was painful this year. Did we apologize? Let me do so again.), lining up artwork, promoting your event, updating your website, working on your charitable efforts, arranging the front of the house, laying out a program, planning a righteous Tumblr Meetup, organizing volunteers, getting all those books to all those tables, doing steady multi-front trench battle with the venue and generally herding a mountain of lightsaber-wielding, feral cats that are also on fire.
As a bonus you get to do all this in full public view for no money.
It takes crazy commitment to come back and do this year after year. My sympathies and respect to everyone - all my brothers and sisters out there - who take up the challenge. And just because you’ve worked in one corner of this world doesn’t mean that the solutions and strategies from your home turf will work somewhere else… Each situation is different.
The third thing?
At the end of the day what any festival will be able to produce is going to be dependent on people and personalities as much as perseverance. You can’t fight this. You have to roll with it, embrace it. In my involvement with SPX over the last decade, it has really come down to this.
Yes, we have an aggressive mission to promote, preserve and protect independent comic creators and their art form. Yes we put on a well regarded festival. These are things we do. But these things are not what we’re about. To me (and I’m just this guy, y’know), SPX is about PEOPLE.
First, last and in between.
Relationships are what make this show. Fostering old ones and building new ones is what brings me back year after year. That’s true “on stage” as well as behind the scenes. I think this is also true of our exhibitors and attendees. Maybe it’s not the case for every show - and, really, it needn’t be - but it is the only thing that helps me explain our success.
I know I’m rambling. But the sad and sudden BCGF dissolution got me pondering. And that demands you suffer through my long, semi-coherent, decidedly non-official Tumbling.
The other thing…
There is a whole other deeper discussion to be had (please have it with me) about what these indie comics festivals mean to our community of creators and publishers. There are currently more of these shows than ever and they, for the most part, seem to be healthy and growing.
But as Bill K. points out in the article linked above, this industry - if we choose to think of our community that way - can’t depend on volunteer labor and artists working against their own financial interests indefinitely.
No one is guaranteed a career in comics but if SPX and our fellow festivals have any common role it is, I think, to expand the constituency of this art form - those who practice it and those who appreciate it.
If we’re doing our jobs correctly, year by year, we’re part of a progression towards the wider recognition and fair compensation of independent voices in comics.
Like I said. Labor of love.
- MDT
Forgotten Masterpiece: “Landed” by ECO (Keiichi Koike) from Epic Illustrated #26, published by Marvel/Epic, October 1984.
excuse me, I have to go never write another comic ever again
Christopher M. Jones. 22. Comics, movies, music, books, photography, fine art, politics, arguments, jokes, whining, debauchery. Who I am, what I like.
Check out my webcomic: http://bagiacomic.com/
