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A Life Lived in Comics Day 25: MIND into Matter

May 10, 2012

Exciting day Tuesday. Still getting over being sick; left early Monday, came in late today. Arrived to think I must have a leak in my office because a trash can was on my desk, but it turned out to just be that the carpets had been vacuumed. But once I get everything back where it’s supposed to be, the other thing on my desk is revealed: advance copies of both the regular version of MIND MGMT #1 and the Gilbert Hernandez variant cover. There they are above, as well as a copy opened up to show how it looks on the inside, though readers who picked up the 3 Story: Secret Files of the Giant Man one-shot will already know. I originally took this photo to send to Matt and his agent, but it made sense to show here as well.

I’m biased, but it’s a hell of a first issue, with a great main character, tons of wacky ideas, great design and bonuses, and a killer final caption that lets readers know this series is different even from anything else out there.

It was a half day, so not surprisingly I got about half a normal day’s worth of stuff done. One thing was taking a crack at my first MIND MGMT letters column. I convinced Matt to do the one for issue #1 so he could write up his mission statement for the series, but from here on its me. Tougher than others I’ve had to do, both because those had established tones (though I slowly adapted them to fit me better) and because Matt is including extra stories on the inside front and inside back covers, meaning that there is only half a page for the letters column. I don’t know about you, but even though I like letters columns, I’d happily trade half of one for extra comics, but it does mean fitting everything into 500 words. Eventually came up with a hello that I like, fit in one of the advance letters Matt solicited, and found room for a shout-out to the upcoming conclusion of Jeff Lemire’s Sweet Tooth.

Also of MIND MGMT note this week is the second of our free promo stories, coming out weekly until the first issue debuts. And that’s it for today. Not a whole lot else went on, and sickness has me falling behind. But, seriously, free MIND MGMT—what else could one want?

Next:  That time I went to the Tezuka museum.

Why’m I doing this again?

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A Life Lived in Comics Day 24: Bakuman

May 10, 2012

On Monday I read both the conclusion to Bakuman‘s halfway point in volume 10 and the conclusion-conclusion in the latest Shonen Jump Alpha. Since Alpha launched in January with Bakuman chapter 162, just a few weeks behind the Japanese serialization, I’ve had the odd experience of following the same narrative at two different points simultaneously (volume 10 brings us up to chapter 88).

It’s not been an entirely unpleasant experience, since the actual plot points of Bakuman are less important than the smaller-scale twists, meaning that cliffhangers still held tension despite my knowing about later developments, and besides the ending has never been at all in doubt. It was fun to read a weekly series, even only for a few months, knowing that I was doing so not long after the Japanese audience, something that wouldn’t have been plausible before digital comics (of course, I’ll still follow Toriko and One Piece and am curious to see what replaces Bakuman). I suppose it would be better to have the story in order, which will soon be possible thanks to Viz speeding up the book releases now that the series is done, but I can’t honestly say it’s bothered me much. Just reading Bakuman has been so much fun that I haven’t given it much thought.

So, I should back up and explain what I’m talking about. Bakuman is a shonen manga series by Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata following a pair of friends from middle school to young adulthood as they pursue their dream of creating the biggest, most popular manga in Weekly Shonen Jump magazine, the real-life magazine that Bakuman actually ran in. Meta. There are also romantic comedy elements, and while those are cute and enjoyable in a ridiculous way, the manga making is the main attraction for me.

Way back in volume 1, the thing that hooked me was how utterly mercenary the two kids, Mashiro and Takagi, are, with the series mildly subverting the common manga trope of the main characters striving to be the best something. Instead, they seem more interested in being the most successful, which is a variation on best, but still strikes me as a substantively distinct concept. Early on, their editor Mr. Hattori tells them that great manga is created by one of two types—”the genius type who draws what he wants to draw” and “the calculating type who masterminds a hit”—and instantly pegs them as the latter.

Ten volumes in, it’s beginning to look like part of Mashiro and Takagi’s character arc is a movement toward more personal work, and I’m excited to see how that leads into where we find them in the post-162 chapters.

It’s a pretty fascinating series to follow as a comics professional. The entire publishing system is different in Japan, and the role of the editor seems pretty different. Instead of a large slate of short-run publications and standalone ongoings, publishers have a few large magazines aimed at different demographics, and the series they develop run together in those magazines. Imagine if Marvel, DC, Image, DH, etc. each published just a handful of 500-page weekly magazines featuring 20 or so of their major properties and that was the main format they competed in.

Within the magazine, each of the 20 features compete with each other and are subjected to weekly reader polls, with the top serials getting the best treatment and the bottom few in danger of cancellation. This means that editors within the same magazine are competing with each other as well. In the exclamatory fashion of shonen, the editors are just as likely to shout about how they won’t lose to each other as are the mangaka (manga artists). Where other series might have fights or detailed explanations of the maneuvering of players going into battle, Bakuman instead dramatizes frequent white-knuckle waits for reader poll results to come in.

There’s also a huge emphasis in Bakuman on the cultivation of talent, with artists staying under contract even when they don’t currently have a series, under the assumption that with the guidance of their editor they will develop a new one. Of course, I have no idea how accurate most of this is, but the series depicts frequent story meetings, often taking place at the artists’ homes and studios.

Editor Hattori is treated as one of the heroes of the series, a great judge of talent and a master at leading writers and artists to the personal and creative breakthroughs they need. Younger editor Miura reminds me more of my own position, though I like to think I’m not as inept as he is, misjudging Mashiro and Takagi’s talents and too quick to accept the lesser work they create under his guidance. Still, I find myself rooting for him to get the hang of it, and recent volumes have seen him begin to see the mistakes he’s making and become more ambitious.

I wouldn’t want to see American comics subject to quite so harshly Darwinian process as the reader polls, though obviously sales are a kind of reader poll, but part of me does admire just how focused on delivering it makes the comics that survive. That particular obsession with making comics actually entertaining and not just rewarding for their clubbiness is something I wouldn’t mind seeing more of in the mainstream market. Western superhero comics are constantly repeating the old line of, “Don’t worry, it’ll be better next time,” taking for granted that readers are already hooked and will forgive a dull month or three, while shonen is deeply aware that any loss of interest could be the end and so focuses on hitting pleasure receptors this time. The best shonen manga is essentially crack, hitting readers with as much incident as they can fit into 20 pages, with reliable, addictive cliffhangers at the end of each one. The supreme example is probably currently Naoki Urasawa’s 20th Century Boys.

Bakuman is not only an excellent example (as was Ohba and Obata’s previous collaboration, Death Note), but it’s doubly thrilling in that it simultaneously dramatizes the process of creating exactly the addictive narrative that it is itself. While I don’t know how much I’d be into the new series the protagonists develop in volume 10, watching them develop it is intoxicating, and without spoiling the series’ ending, it’s great fun to watch them debating the question of whether and how to end a serial even as their own story is wrapping up. For all the series’ silliness and problematic sexual politics, it’s hard not to love, and especially difficult for someone who does something similar for a living not to relate to.

I’ve been reading a lot more manga since I’ve worked at Dark Horse. Some of that is the free availability of DH’s manga in the editorial library and now through our app, and some is certainly just the fact that my taste has been expanding at a steady rate for years and I was bound to start getting a lot more manga in my diet eventually. But I also think that a big part of it is that, while it is still reading comics, it’s different enough from the type of material that I work on (and I love noticing all the ways it’s different, from the different visual cues to the pacing to the way balloon placement is completely different) that it doesn’t contribute to burnout the way that going home and reading a bunch of Western comics might. I still get my comics fix without it just feeling like more of the same thing I’m looking at all day.

Manga series I’m currently reading include 20th Century Boys, Bakuman, Gantz, Gate 7, The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service,  Saturn Apartments, Toriko, Yotsuba@!—my beloved Twin Spica has come to an end. And I know there are way more I should be reading. Suggestions welcome.

This is the last week of this monthlong project, so I’ll have to get around to my visit a few years back to the Osamu Tezuka Manga Museum soon.

Next:  More MIND MGMT logrolling.

Why’m I doing this again?

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A Life Lived in Comics Day 23: Secret Origin part 3: Time Flies

May 9, 2012

In Part 1, the author first began reading comics and described his growing fandom over the years.

In Part 2, the author described how he went about preparing for and applying for his present job in comics.

And now, part 3:

In the summer of 2008, I was splitting my time between paralegal research, teaching cartooning to high schoolers, blogging, and fighting with my girlfriend. Our February trip to New York, where I attended NYCC and had my resume rewritten by C.B. Cebulski, was the last time I remember us enjoying each other’s company.

I spent my days in my underwear, listening to wiretaps of a couple of people traveling to different pawnshops in Oregon to sell assorted merchandise, which they were now accused of having stolen and carried across state lines. I made corrections to the official FBI transcripts, read interviews, and used software called Casemap to cross reference people, places, and events to help the defense attorney create a complete portrait of the timeline of the case. It was repetitive, frequently boring, but on the whole fascinating. Once a month we met for lunch and synched our hard drives. The rest of the time it was pretty solitary.

Except for my occasional trips across town to plan for the coming school year at the Northwest Academy, my high school where I was now about to enter my second year teaching electives. The previous year I had had a blast teaching a high-school level class on cartooning, and was signed up to repeat that, as well as teach the middle-school level and to revive my old, abandoned pop culture studies class that had failed to materialize a few years earlier.

In the high-school class, I created assignments where we dissected short silent stories, created character model sheets, read and discussed Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, and progressed from editorial cartoons to comic strips to three-page stories to eight-page stories. The comics fans in the class were a distinct minority, the rest of the class made up of the curious, which I enjoyed, as I watched them develop an affection for telling stories in the comics medium even as they didn’t necessarily cultivate much in the way of fandom. Unable to avoid bringing in broader cultural theory, we discussed how visual literacy was poised to become as important as verbal literacy in the coming years, and I was thrilled to see even the non-comics readers take to communicating through the medium.

(I was apparently mildly popular as a teacher and received good marks for my handling of the class, though I did have to spend some time conforming my attendance log to the master log after being less than diligent. The closest I recall to getting into any trouble was for my poor choice of listening material during a drawing period one day. We often listened to music while the students drew, but sometimes we’d put on other things, like standup comedy. We had Margaret Cho on (I know) one day when the principal came in to tell us that the school was on lockdown while a bloody fistfight went on out front. Cho was talking about being present at a friend giving birth, and the principle entered the room (which was in an adjunct building across from the main campus and mostly empty while we were there) just as Cho said the words, “Then her pussy exploded.” Had she come in just to check up on us, I’m sure I’d have been in serious trouble, but the lockdown had her preoccupied enough that she either didn’t hear or chose not to.)

In the meantime, I’d been applying for an assistant editor position at Dark Horse, and was somewhat on edge about the question of whether I would be the person hired sooner or the one hired later, since I had been told I’d be one of the two. Thing is, the economy was on the verge of collapse, and I worried the second position wouldn’t really materialize once things got bad. I was therefore very nervous when I got a call in the end of August from Dark Horse’s editorial director. I don’t actually remember the feeling itself, but I do remember him remarking on my tone of voice after he said who it was and I replied, “Yes?”

I celebrated a bit. A lot. I’d never had and have never since had enough whiskey to become sick not that night but the morning after, excusing myself from breakfast twice to throw up. I was in kind of a bad way generally at the time. After the fight a day or two later that led to the end of my relationship with my girlfriend, I spent the long weekend in a cocoon and only emerged to have my first day of work the day after Labor Day.

In the meantime, I resigned from the case, feeling a bit guilty, and helped NWA find a replacement for the comics classes. Fittingly, my replacement ended up being Shannon Wheeler, who had guest lectured an earlier version of the same class when I took it ten years earlier. For whatever reason, the high school version didn’t fill up this year, so he ended up corralling a rowdy bunch of teens, and I ended up at the Dark Horse offices September 2nd, ready to work but without bosses.

For reasons I forget, both Diana Schutz, DH’s executive editor, and Dave Marshall, her previous assistant, now promoted to associate, were out of the office my first week. I was assigned to read up on the comics I would be assisting on, go through the Chicago Manual of Style, and help out with odd jobs where I could. I think the first things I did for anyone were to transcribe a phone conversation between Zack Whedon, Evan Dorkin and Gerard Way for a MySpace Dark Horse Presents collection and retype a letter sent to the Hellboy letters column. I was also introduced to the editorial library, a room with (in theory) two copies of every DH comic and one copy of every book, and given the responsibility of restoring order to it, weeding out duplicates, and ordering replacements for missing books.

Dave got back first, and he started in training me on the basic assistant tasks. The first book I learned was Usagi Yojimbo, essentially the perfect training wheels comic. Cartoonists don’t come better than Stan Sakai, and Usagi is edited the way it always has been, which is to say not much. Stan doesn’t submit story outlines or thumbnails or any of that. He just gives us a two to three-sentence synopsis from which we can write tip copy. The first time we see an issue it is complete, and all that remains is to do minor cleanup, proofread, and get the design pages made. Still, the process from this point on is similar to other books, so it’s a low-stress way to learn the in-house steps.

Dave’s main projects at the time were getting Mass Effect off the ground and finishing a Mister X series. Mass Effect had been assigned to him partly on the basis of his affinity for the material, and it’s since become one of Dark Horse’s important franchises, but at the time it wasn’t entirely certain it would go ahead, for several reasons. Even when the first issue of that first miniseries, Redemption, came out, things seemed questionable. The sales weren’t there, and it began to look like Mass Effect would prove to be a big mistake. Then Mass Effect 2 was released to enormous sales and acclaim, and the comic became hot, selling out and doing well on eBay. I think that the first two issues of Mass Effect: Redemption are still the only comics I’ve worked on that have gone back to press for a second printing.

With Diana I first worked on Usagi, some Grendel collections, Beanworld, a reprint series of The Amazon, and two Frank Miller projects. One, The Spirit Storyboards, was solicited but never released when the failure of the film killed interest. It’s too bad, since the book’s designer did wonderful work, and the Miller art in the book includes some wonderful images, a reminder that the man is always experimenting, always having fun, even in a medium that at the time he likely wasn’t intending to be reprinted publicly. I hold out hope that the best material from that book will somdeay be repurposed elsewhere.

The other was The Life and Times of Martha Washington in the Twenty-first Century, my introduction to the kind of intensive, prestige projects that make up a lot of Diana’s portfolio these days. 600 pages and the size of DC’s Absolute editions, reproduced from a few different generations of materials (film, old format digital files, modern files), and featuring coloring tweaks from the original colorist, it was a huge project, and one that I spent a lot of hours in the digital art department going over. It was also among my first experiences coordinating with big-name comics talent, phoning artist Dave Gibbons in his studio about the new cover art and getting the signing plates to him. It also turned out to be great training on working on large projects with lots of moving parts.

I worked solely for Diana and Dave until late 2009, when I took on a few projects under Scott Allie and Sierra Hahn. I worked on Buffy for a few months, during the Brad Meltzer–written “Twilight” arc, in which the secret identity of the season’s big bad was revealed. On that book and Serenity I proved to be one editor too many, as they each had an editor, associate editor, and two assistant editors, so I didn’t stick around long. Still, it was deemed useful for my training to be exposed to different types of projects and a different editorial style, so I was found projects with each of them to do for a while. With Scott I worked on The Guild, and developed a fondness for the web series and the writing of its creator Felicia Day, and with Sierra I got to help reinvent the Terminator in Zack Whedon’s and Andy MacDonald’s 2029 & 1984 miniseries, which remain my favorite licensed series I’ve been involved with. The other major project I helped Sierra with was Green River Killer, an original graphic novel about the detective who worked on the Green River Killer case longer than anyone, written by his son Jeff Jenson and illustrated by Jonathan Case, and it is another of my favorites.

I also worked during this time with Scott and assistant Freddye Lins on MySpace Dark Horse Presents, where I edited my first short stories, Damon Gentry and Aaron Conley’s “The Horror Robber” and Andi Watson’s “Hen and the Door-to-Door Ogre,” and coedited Art Baltazar’s “Grimiss Island” with fellow assistant (now associate) editor Patrick Thorpe. Damon and Aaron had submitted some work to DH and as I was at the time the submissions editor (a right of passage for most assistants, replacing the editorial library and passed on to me by Patrick, the newest assistant until I was hired), I was the one who read it. During my time as submissions editor I hired people I found there twice, the other being Jake Murray, the cover artist of the Kult miniseries, which I started out as assistant on and became coeditor of. Andi Watson, of course, I had been a fan of for years, and have since had the pleasure of working with on new the new Skeleton Key one-shot. Patrick invited me to coedit the Art Baltazar story because of my Tiny Titans fandom.

Because I was probably one of the only people in the editorial department buying and reading Archie, I was also teamed with editor Shawna Gore on the Archie Archives series. This was the peak of my overextension as an assistant. I’m as busy now as I was then, but split fewer ways, which makes a big difference. Over time, Scott eased me off of his projects until The Guild was the last one left, and I finished that with this year’s Free Comic Book Day issue and the Fawkes one-shot, and as limited projects with Sierra ended, they weren’t replaced.

My first projects as editor came as they often do at Dark Horse, handed down from other editors or reassigned after editor departed. My first reprint series was Little Lulu, which moved naturally from Dave to me as he got more original projects, largely videogame tie-ins after his success with Mass Effect. Tarzan: The Jesse Marsh Years and Archie Archives were passed down to me from departing editors. Finally, MIND MGMT went to me to help ease Diana’s schedule, which at the time was dominated with the huge Manara Library reprint program and a few others.

Around this time I began getting the opportunity to originate projects. The first graphic novel I brought in is actually still in progress, so I can’t go into detail, but it was greenlit last summer and is moving along steadily. As my first project, it took a ridiculously long time to get it ready to present to the decision makers, a year all told from when it was first pitched to me to when it was approved. Part of that was my learning the process, part was getting the pitch into the right shape, and part was the fact that I simply couldn’t devote very much time to it because as an assistant my work on other editors’ books had to come first.

It doesn’t take me as long to navigate stuff anymore, and I felt bad for the creators who were having to wait for me, but in the end we did get approved. Since then a few projects I’ve championed have been rejected, a few others have found a home in Dark Horse Presents, and some others are in their early stages. Nearly all of the lengthy Tarzan planning I wrote about earlier in the month is over, and my time is split currently between helping Diana, training assistant Shantel to take over a lot of my work on Dave’s books, and managing Bucko, MIND MGMT, Archie, Tarzan, and the unannounced stuff. I’m finally starting to feel like a real editor.

All this time I’ve fought to get my life back from the personal low point that coincided with starting at Dark Horse. For about the first year I poured all of my time and emotional energy into the job and ignored the rest of my life. Not particularly healthy, particularly because while one can feel proud of what one does for work, it’s just not a way to get real emotional sustenance. I hopefully have a more normal work-life balance now, thought this monthlong blog project, which takes up way more of my time than it should, suggests otherwise. I definitely stunted myself a bit, and getting back into the dating world and developing new hobbies hasn’t come terribly easy.

I’ve become a better person than I was those years ago, not because I necessarily wanted or tried to, but because I pretty much had to to get through everything. Probably the job has been a part of it, as it’s much more social than my last one and requires a lot more getting along and motivating people. Things do seem to be coming together professionally in a way they hadn’t for a while, so hopefully the future bears that out.

Next: The end of Bakuman and what it’s like to read it as an editor.

Why’m I doing this, again?

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A Life Lived in Comics Day 21: Con Crud

May 5, 2012

I went to two cons in April, Emerald City and Stumptown. Other than being tired from the show itself, the parties, and the commute, I don’t remember Emerald City messing me up too much, and after some grouchiness Monday from the post-con comedown, I was fine by Tuesday.

Post-Stumptown seems to have thrown me, and the office, for more of a loop. It’s not surprising that, when people converge from a large variety of places into a single enclosed space, shake a lot of hands and give a lot of hugs, then weaken their immune systems with late nights and heavy drinking, it’s a pretty good situation for some bugs to spread around. In my experience the result isn’t usually anything major, but it usually sticks around a few days. So this week there have been a lot of scratchy throats at Dark Horse, and the entire editorial office has seemed to be in a general malaise.

Scratchy throat and a day of joint pain aside, it’s mostly hit me in terms of waking up far too early, throat dry and nose obstructed. Some days you wake up early and go back to sleep; other days you immediately recognize this is futile. So, for instance, when I woke up at 5:30 (my usual routine is between 7 and 7:30), I read for a bit and then headed for work, one of the first to arrive at 7:45. Friday was an early day as well.

When I don’t get enough sleep, it’s like my body overcompensates. I get a bit manic, louder and quicker to laughter than normal, but the flipside is that I start to crash midafternoon, and by the end of work I’m not up for doing much more. The Monday blog entry turned out to just be a post on burnout, Tuesday I turned down an invite to go out for a movie, Wednesday I actually did make it out for a drink with a friend, but only a quick one. Thursday I promised to write about First Thursday, but in truth I ended up missing most of it.

Waiting until 8:30 when Community was over, I missed the rush and headed straight to Sequential Art Gallery for Star St. Germain’s witty installation about modern dating, Date Lines. I poked my head in a few other places, but didn’t linger anywhere else except Floating World Comics, where I took in some original art from Floating World’s Free Comic Book Day offering Brad Trip and pick up several volumes of Cromartie High School marked down by 75%. Copublished with Spark Plug Comics Books, Revival House Press, and Teenage Dinosaur, Brad Trip is an anthology of surrealist comics, which presents a little difficulty for me, as I’ve not yet found my way into non-narrative comics, but it’s definitely compelling work, and I’ve been through it twice already. It also offers an unexpected callback to earlier in the evening, as one of the sequences uses lyrics from “Heartbeat” by Childish Gambino, the rap alter ego of Community’s Donald Glover.

A quick visit to the library to return an Archie book I was using for reference later I’m back home and crashing. Friday I once again wake up early, get to work early, and actually stay slightly late.

The day’s not particularly eventful, though advances of a Conan softcover and the next Beanworld hardcover come in, as do a bunch of things for Creepy, a new epilogue for Bucko, and some Dragon Age pages. I approve the digital version of MIND MGMT #1, write and submit tip copy for Conan the Barbarian #10, do balloon placements for Conan the Barbarian #7, and editor Sierra and I present a concept for promoting some Eisner nominees to Marketing.

At some point a box of DC comps appears in the break room, including stapled comics releases up through next Wednesday. Several people at DH receive DC comps, and a few share them with the office, allowing us to all give them a look and keep up with the New York part of comics. I tried out a few of the New 52 last year, including All-Star Western, Animal Man, Demon Knights, Justice League Dark, Men of War, OMAC and Static Shock, but eventually dropped off all of them, All-Star, Animal Man, and OMAC making it the longest at seven issues.

I was actually enjoying each of the New 52 series I was reading, but like everyone I have limited time and money and space, and I was finding that while they were pleasant enough reads, I would occasionally grab one from the DC comps, take it home, and discover I’d already bought and read and forgotten it. They’re disposable entertainment sure, but you only need so many series to fulfill that, and lately I’m finding that books like Rachel Rising, Mud Man, Reed Gunther, Prophet, Sergio Aragonés Funnies, Saga, Snarked!, RASL, and Sweet Tooth are scratching that itch far more successfully.

What really turned the tide was when I realized that I had been not reading Grant Morrison’s Action Comics for six months and was neither missing it nor particularly wondering what it was like. If my favorite superhero writer could write the character he was born to write for that long and my comics-reading life was none the less enjoyable for missing it, then I probably didn’t need to be spending money on and cluttering up my apartment with Demon Knights and Static Shock.

I do like to take the opportunity of a box like this appearing to give things another shot, so I pull out the most recent issues of the series I’d been reading, as well as the four Second Wave series, the Vertigo series The New Deadwardians (which turns out to be very entertaining). I read DC’s New 52 Free Comic Book Day special over lunch, making it the second FCBD offering I got to try out early, and then pass it on to someone else.

It’s definitely a Friday, with goofiness happening throughout the day and a lot of people exhibiting a general punchiness. The day’s overness declares itself right before 5 when the hallways are stalked by assistant editor Jim Gibbons, wearing an Iron Man helmet and a pair of Hulk hands. From where I sit I hear a series of shocked exclamations emanating from different offices and have no difficulty guessing their cause.

I am a bit depressed throughout the day to hear everyone talk excitedly of their plans to see The Avengers over the weekend. I don’t judge them and I certainly don’t tell anyone they shouldn’t go, because the reason I’m skipping it has everything to do with knowing I’d feel bad if I went and nothing to do with believing I can send any kind of message to Marvel and Disney when the film will surely be among the highest grossing in history. But I do wish the troubled feeling that I have over such a massive corporate undertaking somehow having no room in its record profits to compensate the family of its cocreator Jack Kirby in any way were more widespread. Like I posted Thursday, whatever the legal rationale may be, it just feels like theft, and from a man to whom everyone in this business owes so much.

I leave around 5:30, braindead and exhausted. No blog entry happened, nor did much of anything else, other than catching up on The Daily Show while doing dishes, making some dinner, and reading a few of DC’s Second Wave books without comprehension (I’ll try again later) before falling asleep shortly after 9.

Next: Free Comic Book Day comics!

Why’m I doing this, again?

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A Life Lived in Comics Day 18: My World and Welcome to It

May 1, 2012

The view into my office when I’m not in it. When I moved here from my old cubicle I began to put up posters and art, but for some reason stopped. My apartment’s the same way. Stuff in the window’s the upcoming gender-swap issue of Archie, a New Yorker cover full of injured musical Spider-Men, an Art Baltazar and Franco postcard, and a cover from Dell’s Kona. I love how he’s fighting a giant cat; not a giant lion or panther or anything, just obviously a house cat.

One way I know my job is cool is that people are constantly visiting. School field trips, journalists, visiting artists (like yesterday, when Stan Sakai hung out for a few hours), all kinds. It’s normal wherever you work for a friend to occasionally drop in for you to go to lunch together or something, but Dark Horse is the first place I’ve worked where an extensive tour of the place is actually interesting.

My friend Liz Conley (in town for Stumptown and mentioned in recent Stumptown and pre-Stumptown drink and draw posts) visited the DH offices today for lunch and a tour, which gave me the idea for today’s post. Editorial was sort of quiet, as several editors were involved in meetings with the Conan licensors, so it was a perfect day to wander around and see the different parts of the company, which are spread across three buildings on Milwaukie’s Main Street.

My tours started out really brief when I was still new to the company, not much more than a few minutes of the editorial offices, the digital art department, and sometimes the warehouse and marketing offices. Basically, I didn’t know the place or the people all that well yet, and while happy to introduce visitors to whatever I was familiar with, I’d hurry them past the people and places I couldn’t explain. These days, I know the whole editorial staff, most everyone in digital art and maketing, and a few people in the warehouse and business offices, so tours are a lot more informative.

On a few occasions I’ve brought non-comics friends through, and those are shorter as well, but as Liz is an actual artist, we talked with people from several departments, and she had several questions for some. We walked past digital artist Ryan Jorgensen as he was adjusting and cleaning some pages for an upcoming Eerie archive, and he took a moment to explain to us how the particular Photoshop tool he was using worked.

Naturally, it occurred to me that this was good post fodder only later in the day, so I didn’t actually document the tour. Maybe that would make a good future post. But I did take a few pictures of what’s going on in my own office, which could possibly be interesting.

Continuing the theme from the photo up top, I don’t use my wall space all that well. Several editors’ walls are completely covered with clipped papers, each one representing a comic they’re working on, a cover on top and the most current versions of the script and line art underneath. I still have a few, a habit leftover from working more closely with Scott and Sierra, but I organize work mostly digitally, and so there aren’t many, and when the ones that are there come down I likely won’t replace them. The exception is archival projects like Archie (the contents of the next few volumes are pictured), where I often refer to large chunks of pages and opening them on a computer isn’t practical. My mostly unused corkboard has pictures of me with Osamu Tezuka characters, taken in Japan (this will be a later post), small drawings from other editors, a Post-It with proper names from Mass Effect, and sheets with Canadian price conversion, the assistant editor job description, DH phone directory, and proofreading marks.

These shelves house copies of the books I’ve worked on, as well as additional volumes in series I currently work on, like Conan and Usagi Yojimbo, for reference, plus more general reference like The Overstreet Price Guide, Comics Between the Panels, The Best of Archie, etc. To my shame, those boxes on the floor contain submissions that I am years behind on. I really should get to them soon. On top of the lefthand shelf is a stack of Little Lulu volumes replaced by the Giant Size Little Lulu books I edited, some posters, a Quimby the Mouse statue, and a robot I made out of binder clips. The righthand shelf is topped with some Spirit figures and reference copies of all the stapled comics I’ve worked on.

More shelves, and more reference material, including the Chicago Manual of Style, which is Dark Horse’s bible, a college dictionary and unabridged dictionary, Story by Robert McKee, which I’ve never opened, and a volume of Robert E. Howard’s Kull stories (my Conan prose collection is currently loaned out). The pair of hardcovers with the spines facing into the shelf and filled with flagged pages are the two volumes of Fantagraphics’s Usagi Yojimbo: The Special Edition set, which is our reference guide for creating the digital editions on sale at the DH digital store. Below the photo are tons of Dell Tarzan comics and two complete sets of Another Rainbow’s huge Little Lulu hardcovers. Naturally, this being a comics office, I have the requisite statues and action figures. Underneath the Usagi poster are a print of characters from The Wire drawn in the style of The Simpsons, by Steve Lieber, and framed original drawing of Tamsin and Kitsune from Skeleton Key, which Andi Watson sent me for Christmas. Wotta guy. (Don’t forget the new issue comes out tomorrow.)

My untidy desk and the stacks of crap on it. Bottom left is mostly recent comics, but with a set of raw scans of material for the next Brothers of the Spear on top (it ran as a backup in Tarzan, which is why those are on top). Next to that, Silly Putty, naturally. The stack on the right is all kinds of proofs and other papers, with a pitch I received at Stumptown on top. I’ve only just noticed that my lamp is about to fall off the desk.

And closer in on the desk. My Cookie Monster mug is very popular and matches assistant editor Shantel’s Oscar the Grouch mug. To the left is Brian Wood’s most recent script for Conan the Barbarian and some lettering proofs for a story from Creepy #9, which correspond to the balloon placements I showed on Day 14. On screen are new pencils from an awesome project that it is too early to announce, and way to the right is a big stack of mostly Tarzan comics, though there is Conan sticking out at the bottom, topped by a list of the tip sheets due next Monday, color coded by who they’re for. Thanks to newly having someone to get them started for me, I’m in the rare position of being ahead on tip copy.

Did I cover everything? Anything in these photos that needs further explanation?

Tomorrow: Wednesday shenanigans, I’d imagine. And a MIND MGMT announcement.

Why’m I doing this, again?

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A Life Lived in Comics Day 17: Burnout

May 1, 2012

So we can’t love something all the time. Part of it is likely keeping this blog so much more regular than usual, part is undoubtedly some rougher aspects of the last few weeks that fall outside of the blog’s purview, and a chunk of it is naturally part of the waves and crests that come with anything that is a constant presence in one’s life.

I wrote in the previous entry of avoiding looking for work in comics for some time because of a fear that making my hobby my work might make it more difficult to enjoy. I was right, though not all the time. But there are periods when I feel that 40 hours a week is enough, and thinking about comics any of the rest of the time is no fun. This is only natural. My Stumptown entry from a few days ago was mostly concerned with my history with the show, so there wasn’t really space to get into this, but I had a less than great time.

I loved the parties, and I had a wonderful time as usual meeting and catching up with people at the show itself, but I found myself pretty uninterested when I walked the floor. I had no money to spend and wanted to avoid the inevitable sales pitch when I lingered at tables, so I didn’t encounter much new stuff. This is my failing, not the exhibitors’. Hopefully someone else discovered the next great artist at the show, because I have no doubt they were there; I just wasn’t in any shape to spot them. I saw enough during the few hours I was there Saturday and returned briefly Sunday only to take pictures, but once I was out there I actually forgot to do so, a Wright Opinion tradition, hence only the one photo in my con entry (though having only managed to get one, me and Stan Sakai at the Dark Horse booth was the one to get).

I got a good deal done today, and even feel all right about some of the training I provided, but tired from the weekend and no less burnt out than the day before, today felt pretty much like a job, jamming out copy and inching forward on a few things.

So I’m passing today. No big deal. What I do is still great, just not feeling it today. And that’s maybe a valuable point to make in this month of comics as well. It’s not fun everyday, but you have to bring it those days too. Still, blog-wise, I got nothing.

Why’m I doing this, again?

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A Life Lived in Comics Day 16: Secret Origin part 2: Plan B

April 30, 2012

2007 and 2008 were the years comics took over my life. Before then, I had evolved from reluctant comic store visitor to hardcore fan (covered in Secret Origin part 1), but in those two years I interned at Top Shelf, took a series of comics theory and comics making classes, taught my own class, began working with the Stumptown Comics Fest planning committee, launched this blog, and ultimately landed my current position at Dark Horse.

There was a time in my life when people would ask me if I wanted to work in comics and I didn’t hesitate to say no. Not because I didn’t love comics, but because I was coming down off of another passion and didn’t want to screw this up too. For so long I’d intentionally left a job in comics out of my plans for the future, precisely because I loved comics, and I was convinced that it was a mistake to turn a hobby into a career, fearful of the damage letting the twain meet would do to both. But plan A, film, for which I had gone to school, was fizzling both due to my mistake of pursuing it in Portland and my growing distaste for the business, which if I am honest took hold even before I finished my degree.

In retrospect I think moving back home with a vague notion that film in Portland would take off in the next few years was deliberate self-sabotage. Sure, I sort of worked in the Portland film business for a little under a year, gripping on corporate films and car commercials, and flirted with storyboarding and teleprompting. During the year I was listed in the local directory as a storyboard artist I was contacted only once and never got a second call after submitting samples. Teleprompting never took off at all. With that dead end reached, I realized I hadn’t made a plan B, a fine strategy if you’re backing yourself into a corner in order to make failure not an option, but no good if you realize you no longer want to succeed.

For a while I got into what proved to be my most lucrative career option, paralegal research, which earned me considerably more money at the age of 23 than I had ever made before and a good deal more than I make four years into my comics career. It was fascinating work, and I threw myself into it. Immersing myself is the only way I know how to work. My first case involved a massive offshore bank fraud case that was essentially a Ponzi scheme. In addition to logging long hours in front of the computer I was lent for the job, I enrolled in an investigation class (though I didn’t stick with it long) and even read a biography of Charles Ponzi.

Eventually the case ended. I got another similar one later, but by then I’d started thinking about a job in comics, as it seemed to offer a lot of the creativity of film without the same stakes and type-A personalities that come with the money involved. (In some ways that was wishful thinking, but the type of money and status-obsessed person I’ve met a few times in comics is far less common and generally less capable of destruction than the similar types I avoided working with in film.)

At first it was just a vague notion. I wrote first to Jamie S. Rich, whom I’d met when I was 16 and my high school set me up with a job shadow at Oni Press, where he was then editor in chief. I’d kept in occasional touch with Jamie since then, and he recommended a few local publishers I might contact. I wrote letters to Oni, Top Shelf, and Cellar Door. After a month or so I received an e-mail from Brett Warnock, Top Shelf’s copublisher, who was impressed that I’d actually mailed something rather than just send an e-mail. We arranged a time to meet for coffee, and at the meeting he offered me a marketing internship.

The position involved basic packing and shipping, researching likely venues to publicize projects like Jeffrey Brown’s Incredible Change-Bots and Renée French’s Micrographica and getting in contact with them, the barest pretense of helping lay out books, and working the Top Shelf booth at Stumptown. Truth be told, I wasn’t very good at it, but it got my foot in the door, and Brett generously allowed me to list him as a reference when I looked for work going forward.

The same day I started at Top Shelf I also began Art 217: Understanding Comics Art at Portland Community College. Taught by Dark Horse editor Diana Schutz, whose name I knew from Sin City and Usagi Yojimbo, the class is a largely introductory course, but I had little experience hearing the concepts involved anywhere but in print and was happy to get to take it in in a classroom context. There were definitely ideas that were new to me as well. I think Diana explicitly said in the first session that we shouldn’t be there looking for jobs, but it really was an opportunity too good to pass up.

One of the final sessions included a tour of Dark Horse, the second time I’d been there after a visit to hand-deliver an application for a marketing position, but the first that I’d seen anything beyond reception. As one of our final assignments, we created 8-page minicomics. Mine was an autobio story about the perils of visiting a church for clueless types like me who didn’t know what goes on there. It went over well, and I just recently learned it was the first thing connected to me that Dark Horse’s editorial director ever saw.

After the term ended, Diana and I got lunch, and I asked her advice on what I should be doing next, as I’d settled on a job in editorial as my goal. This went back to one of the films I made while at USC. Shot in Portland but planned while I was in LA, the film required me to coordinate shooting times and casting from a distance, delegating to people I’d barely met and overseeing preparations for the shoot date in a different city over the phone. I found it more exciting and more gratifying than actually writing and directing the film or any of the others I made during that time. (Though, as a fan of winging it, I did get a kick out of a film where I wrote the key scene in the stands during halftime of a Trojan football game and then rushed back to the soundstage to shoot it when the game finished. My favorite filming technique has always been to meticulously storyboard a scene and then, upon arriving on set, chuck the storyboard.) If I’d stayed in film, my skills better fit producing than writing or directing, and in comics they best fit editing.

Diana gave me several ideas, the best of which was starting this blog, which in its earliest days served as a writing sample generator. When I first met DH editor Scott Allie at the Portland Comic Book Show, I was able to give him not just a resume but a folder containing some of my stronger reviews and interviews. As more interviews accumulated on the site, I continued sending them to him. I count my interview with Brian Michael Bendis, conducted at Stumptown 2008, as one of a series of turning points in getting me the attention that made me a strong job candidate, especially once it was reprinted in the back of Powers vol. 2 #29 and I was able to hand people the comic instead of a printout.

All this time I was familiarizing myself with the Portland comics scene through the interviews I was doing for the site and through the Stumptown planning committee, in which I would eventually develop a role (see yesterday’s Stumptown post), and just becoming a face that people recognized at events. I took another class from Diana, this time at Portland State University, where she taught the more rigorous Art History 399: Contemporary Comics Theory. I also attended Jesse Reklaw’s PCC course Cartooning: Tricks of the Trade to keep my hand in drawing and work on storytelling, which editors should obviously try to know as well as the talent, even if we may lack the actual creative writing and drawing ability.

Around this time I ended up teaching my own class at the high school level. My old high school, the Northwest Academy of Art, prides itself on staffing its art classes with professionals working in each field (which I kind of was, a little) and doesn’t require teaching degrees for its electives teachers, so I was able to make a little extra money and solidify some of my thoughts on comics. A few years earlier I pitched a class on pop culture, which combined semiotics, a look at the way movies, television, etc., reflect and reinforce cultural norms, and an excuse to talk about silly crap. I distinctly remember one student making a beeline for my table at open registration and telling me my class was their first choice, but due to a scheduling snafu, my class was at the same time as a few required classes, leaving fewer available students than were needed for the class to run (it’s a small school).

This time I’d been asked if I’d be available to teach animation, as another teacher had had to change plans. I admitted that I lacked the expertise in animation but would be happy to teach comics if the opportunity ever arose. Soon, it did, and I found myself teaching a mix of basic drawing lessons, storytelling, and comics history. It was a very small group, but an appreciative one, as the school’s focus was more on college prep and less on art than when I attended, and it was a pleasure to see the students pick up drawing and storytelling principles. When one told me a quarter of the way through the year that they already saw their drawing improve, it was among the more gratifying professional experiences I’ve had to date.

One day after class at PSU, Diana mentioned that an assistant editor position would be opening up at Dark Horse. I guess this is how editorial jobs largely come about here, as they’ve hired assistant editors on a few occasions since I’ve been at the company, but none of those positions were ever listed on the jobs portion of DH’s website that I know of. I don’t recall writing a cover letter, but I did have a newly updated resume to show.

Earlier in the year I had attended the New York Comic Con and visited the table of Marvel’s C.B. Cebulski, who was doing portfolio reviews. I wasn’t trying to be an artist, but I went to C.B.’s table anyway and handed him my resume, asking him to give his opinion on it and notes on how it could be better. He struck some information, suggested how other parts could be more prominent, and generally gave guidance on how to make it impressive in as specifically a comics was as possible. As this is the resume that I used for my Dark Horse application, I put a healthy portion of the credit for my hiring on this incident.

I interviewed mainly with Scott and with DH’s editorial director, as well as a brief visit with VP of Publishing Randy Stradley. My understanding is that it was between me and one other applicant, and at one point I was told that we would both be hired, one sooner and one later, with me as the likely candidate for the later position. Sensing the prevailing economic winds (this was August of 2008), I agitated to be the first person hired, which paid off when I was called and told I had the job and the other candidate was never actually hired (shed no tears for them, though—they eventually got a job in a different department at DH and now have a cushier position in animation).

My initial assignment was to assist Diana and her previous assistant, then recently promoted to associate editor, Dave Marshall. By weird coincidence, both were out of the office my first week, and I spent the time reading up on the series I’d be working on and doing small odd jobs for other editors. My first day was September 2, 2008, the day after Labor Day, which in Oregon is when school starts, so it took about a month before the whole thing stopped feeling like an extended school field trip.

In a bit: the inevitable burnout

Why’m I doing this, again?

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A Life Lived in Comics Day 14: The Honest to God Day in the Life

April 28, 2012

The title refers to the fact that I actually sort of kept minutes and made a proper day-in-the-life post, not that everything in it is honest: times are approximate, and I had to leave out a few proprietary things here and there. Also, everything took a tiny bit longer than normal, as I stopped for a minute or two throughout the day to write everything down.

But that said:

7:30: Wake up. Quick check of comics news sites and work e-mail.

8:15: Bus from Portland to Milwaukie. On the trip, read Shonen Jump Alpha on iPad. I’m a few weeks behind.

8:45: Clock in.

8:46–9: E-mail to an artist about a Tarzan intro. Notes on a script draft for a Creepy one-pager.

9–10:30: Notes to Matt Kindt on a MIND MGMT story and some promo stuff for the DH blog and wrote to Marketing about a press release for a special MIND MGMT project being announced next week, sent in the Brothers of the Spear Archive vol. 2 solicitation copy (written yesterday, waited for it to be assigned an ISBN), notes to Nate Piekos on lettering for an Eerie story, approved Creepy 1-pager scripts, selected preview pages for Archie Archives vol. 6. These sort of happened all at once.

10:30–10:45: Printing and stuff.

10:45-11:45: Eerie lettering approved, and a workorder sent up to get it merged with the lineart and a set of proofs output. Final pass on Doug Moench’s script for Creepy #9 and balloon placements on the inked line art.

Balloon placements are one of my favorite assistant editor tasks, as they’re essentially a puzzle. Ideally, lettering goes unnoticed, aiding in a smooth read, which requires taking into account reading order, the physical space within panels, and creating a trail that leads the eye across the page.

Using copies of the line art (printed when working with Diana, Scott or Sierra, digitally when working with Dave) and the script, you start by numbering all dialogue, captions, and sound effects while giving the script a final proofread. Once everything is numbered, you draw the balloons, captions, etc., onto the art, matching the numbers in them to those in the script.

If everything has gone well in the drawing, and in this case it did, there’s a logical best place for each balloon and everything fits. Common artist mistakes are things like not leaving negative space to fit balloons or placing the character who speaks first on the right. Since we read left-to-right, the first balloon and therefore the first character, should be on the left. As you read comics, you’ll sometimes notice a character on the right speaking first and some awkward placements and long tails necessary to make it read right.

The rules vary from editor to editor. Some like to anchor balloons to panel borders, others hate to do so. Some care if balloons fall into the eyeline of characters, others aren’t concerned by it. Whether balloons can overlap panels or not is a matter of taste as well.

For this story, I did a small amount of reordering things; nothing major, just swapping the order of a balloon and a caption from the same panel in a few places, splitting one caption into two in one instance. Kelley left plenty of space, though the pages are quite full, as Doug is pastiching H.P. Lovecraft’s prose throughout this story, and that can necessitate a certain wordiness.

Over time it becomes pretty second nature. I used to do everything in pencil and redo pages several times. Now it’s straight to ink. For the most part this story went smoothly, though I had to break out the whiteout one time when I accidentally made some balloons into captions and had to restart one page when I lost count of panels. Took a bit longer than the usual 10-page story because of the amount of lettering to do, but if you’ve read Creepy #8, you know Doug’s using those words well.

In Europe it’s standard for artists to do their own placements, and many artists indicate rough placements in their layouts. This helps avoid problems later, but as I enjoy doing the placements, I’m perfectly happy to get to play the puzzle over art as good as Kelley Jones’s.

11:45-11:50: Solicitation cover for Brothers of the Spear comes down, and I make notes, asking for another option on one of the two pieces of art used.

11:50-12: More printing and moving paper around.

12-1: Lunch outside. It’s sunny for a change. There are only about three lunch options in Milwaukie for those of us without cars, but a new one has finally arrived: a food cart called the Steak Shack, which likely pays for itself on Dark Horse staff members’ lunches alone.

1-1:30: Recovering/making a schedule for next week.

1:30-2: Finalizing Conan v12 HC.

2-2:15: A break followed by a brief warehouse visit. There is a box of freebies, mostly damaged comics that aren’t saleable, which is invaluable for filling in stray issues needed for reference. While there, I also grab my comps out my box. I have new issues of Conan the Barbarian and Creepy, the 3 Story one-shot, and the variant cover I helped editor Philip Simon arrange for Reset #1 (the artists of the three Dark Horse Originals series launching in April, May and June created variant covers for each other’s #1s).

2:15-3: Corresponding with a future Creepy writer in between working on solicitation copy for Tarzan: The Russ Manning Years.

3-4: Tracking down some production deadlines for the Brothers of the Spear interiors and working with Art Director on refining the volume 2 cover. Since Brothers of the Spear ran as a backup in Tarzan, there are no original covers for us to use. Volume 1 has a great design by Kat Larsen using two pieces of interior art on the top and bottom halves of the cover, one with art from Russ Manning and one from Jesse Marsh. Volume 2 is entirely Manning art, but we’re keeping the dual images for consistency. It’s proven a little difficult because, while the Manning art is lovely, it’s tough to find panels the right shape that feature both brothers in the foreground and captures them doing something interesting. We found a few good options, but this time we may use the two-image motif to show one brother on the top half and the other on the bottom half. Should get more options soon, then we’ll see.

4-4:30: Catching up on e-mail. Eisner campaign business. Sending out art for a couple projects to licensors.

4:30-5:15: A joint Editorial/Marketing initiative comes up. Impromptu meetings and e-mails. Otherwise I’d have been getting notes on MIND MGMT #3 finished art and lettering to Matt Kindt. Better get that to him over the weekend.

5:16-5:45: Carpool home.

6:50: Laurelhurst theater to see Wanderlust and have a beer (like many theaters in Portland, the Laurelhurst shows cheap second-run movies and serves food and booze).

8:30: Get out of the movie, which was weightless but fun. Internal debate over whether I want to try to catch the end of the DH-sponsored pre-Stumptown Drink and Draw with Peter Bagge at Bridge City Comics. Ultimately decide to go, but a combination of buses means I don’t get there until…

9:30-11: It’s starting the slow process of winding down, officially ending at 10. I miss Peter Bagge, who I’ll hopefully get to say hello to later in the weekend, but do chat with a few folks from work while drinking free Ninkasi beer. I also get my first quick visits with a few of the people I mainly see at shows, like the lovely Liz Conley, now a member of Couscous Collective, but still the gawky 13-year-old I went to high school with in some portion of the back of my brain.

As always, the Friday night party is a nice transition into Stumptown proper, and I meet a few new folks, such as Jackie Estrada of the Eisner Award committee, and get a little time with people I haven’t seen in a while, like Shawna Gore, one of the organizers of the party and of the fest. Mostly it’s comics talk with everybody, though my question, “So, what did you draw?” gets some cool answers, like DH senior editor Randy Stradley’s dinosaurs and a peek into the weird brain of DH assistant editor Jim Gibbons.

11-11:30 Help cleanup a bit while waiting for my ride and debriefing with party organizers.

11:30: Ride home from Kaebel Hashitani and Merrick Monroe of Sequential Art Gallery.

12: Attempt to wind down with some TV. Fall asleep almost immediately.

Saturday: Stumptown, naturally.

Why’m I doing this, again?

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A Life Lived in Comics Day 13: Digital Native

April 26, 2012

I’m about as young as you can be and still remember before the Internet was a part of daily life. I remember looking up things in encyclopedias for school papers. Which isn’t particularly remarkable, but I am pretty amazed when I realize how few years separate me from people who don’t have those memories. It’s almost like I was born into the digital world, but not quite, like I immigrated from another country at a young enough age that I speak English fluently and have lost much of my proficiency with my first language, but I still remember the old country.

As I’ve mentioned, I started reading comics when I was 11, and it was only about a year later that my family got our first CD-ROM-enabled computer. (My parents were early adopters of computers going back many years, so this wasn’t our first–most recently we’d had a Windows 3.1 machine that ran WordPerfect and Oregon Trail, and I was pretty comfortable with a DOS command line.) We marveled at the in retrospect useless Encarta, made it about halfway through The Seventh Guest, and I became familiar with the DC Comics hub on AOL and web 1.0 usenet forums (Internet forums have been a recurring but far from constant presence in my comics fandom, thanks to the periods when no one I knew read comics, but it’s been a few years since I’ve looked at any regularly).

I bring this up to make the point that, while I have technically read comics longer than I have been on the Internet, the margin is pretty thin. So I retain a fondness for print, but the period in which I’ve been excited about the possibilities of digital comics is nonetheless longer than the period in which comics existed for me as an exclusively print phenomenon.

When Scott McCloud’s Reinventing Comics came out in 2000, I was ready for it. A devotee of Understanding Comics (like many people, my relationship with McCloud’s first book about comics has gotten more complicated over the years, but I still admire much of its thinking, and used it when I taught a high-school comics class for a year), I had been anticipating its release and grabbed a copy the instant it was available. I’m far from alone in having found it very different from what I expected, but I do recall that the second half, dealing with digital comics, had me pretty excited for the future of the medium.

At the time I’d have been reading comics about five years, and I’d already discovered a few webcomics. In fact, I had already been posting my own comics to the web as early as middle school. Unlike earlier entries where I’ve alluded to my old comics, these would require some real digging on my part to turn up, so today my laziness saves my dignity. These were straight comic strips, utilizing the computer as distribution tool but not getting into any bells and whistles, but I was nonetheless intrigued by the concepts McCloud put forth about the possibilities of limited motion, branching stories, panels embedded in panels, and what he referred to as “the infinite canvas,” the notion that comics on the web needn’t be restrained by an arbitrary page shape.

(more…)

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A Life Lived in Comics Day 11: How We Do it

April 25, 2012

Boilerplate

Still haven’t really gotten in the habit of noting for the blog what I do and when. Mostly I reconstruct my days from the email I sent and received. It’s a very e-mail-based job.

A few things: sent out some lettering for Eerie #1, approved the revised lettering for Conan the Barbarian #5, received a few blurbs for the back cover of Bucko, gave direction for the cover designs of Brothers of the Spear vol. 2 and Tarzan: The Russ Manning Years vol. 1, sent a script for Creepy #10 on to the licensor with notes, reviewed the iPhone version of 300, and did onscreens for Usagi Yojimbo Book 26: Fox Hunt. Jeff Parker stopped into the office for a meeting with another editor about an upcoming project, and we chatted a bit about his intro for Archie Archives vol. 7, Steve Lieber’s hilarious Bucko foreword, and other comics goings on.

I also wrote the letter column for Conan the Barbarian #5, a task I still haven’t entirely gotten used to, just because for all the years I read comics with letter columns they seemed like one of those things that happen by themselves. I’m ready to accept that I am a naive simpleton, but it often doesn’t occur to me until I am actually called upon to perform a task that it’s not something that happens automatically. The blurbs on the front flap of a book? Just happens. The incidental text on legal pages and backlists? Magic. The letter column is a particularly odd one because they often identify who exactly is responding to the letters, so in theory I knew that people wrote them and that there was a method to them, and yet faced with my first one I didn’t have a clue where to start.

I’m hardly an old hand at it now, but I’ve been writing the Conan letter columns for most of a year now, since Dave and I took over in July 2011. I’ve put together columns for other editors and creators who answer the letters, but Conan’s been my first book responding to letters myself every month. As of this month, assistant editor Shantel assembles the letters for me and does a preliminary pass on cleaning them up for spelling and grammar, so I get to focus on answering questions, making with the hype, and coming up with bad jokes. It’s fun to think about the books I work on from the reader point of view, and I’ve enjoyed having a discourse on subjects like how different art styles fit with certain characters and how the needs of different media shape the way adaptations are written. I’m still not entirely comfortable with my signature appearing at the end, as though I’m claiming the comic for myself, but it’s Dark Horse’s standard practice, and I’ve gotten used to it.

MIND MGMT Becomes Real

Today’s greatest sense of accomplishment came from the email list of which books had gone to the printer, which included Matt Kindt’s MIND MGMT #1. Finding a home at Dark Horse in part because of the success of Matt’s 3 Story, MIND MGMT was originally to be edited by Diana Schutz, but I ended up taking it over to ease her workload, which is currently dominated by the massive undertaking that is the Manara Library and some other prestige projects.

Matt and I find ourselves kindred spirits in this project, as it’s for both of us our first go at making a monthly ongoing series. Matt is of course well established as a graphic novelist, between 2 Sisters, Super Spy, 3 Story, and Revolver, but he’s never had a series of stapled comics before. It’s my first series as well, though that’s more to do with inexperience than success elsewhere.

At the stage where I came in, MIND MGMT existed as a series outline, detailing the overarching storyline of the entire cycle. Shortly after I familiarized myself with it, thumbnails came in for the first six issues, along with a breakdown of all the dialogue. Like many writer/artists, Matt develops the visual and verbal parts of the story side by side, so rather than just a script with descriptions of the action, we have the even better guide of seeing how everything fits. I’ve redacted the script ever so slightly for spoilers.

Before long, Matt had turned in the pencils for all six issues. Since he does everything himself—he’s even doing most of the design work on the book itself, including creating the logo, establishing the look of the copyright page and letter column, and building fake ads for the back of each issue, which contain a secret code when the first six are lined up—he’s able to develop the words and pictures together all the way through, so the pencils arrive with lettering created in InDesign. This page worked great the way he wrote it, so there aren’t many changes, and they’re Matt’s. The way the story evolved requires the Amnesia Flight to take place two years ago rather than in the present, and Matt’s spread out the passengers’ dialogue from panel 4 onto three other panels, but looking over the script again, maybe that was always his intent.

I gave Matt a set of notes on the penciled pages, but apparently I didn’t have many for this page. Still, Matt continues refining, as you’ll notice if you look at panels 4 through 8, where he’s reversed the positions of the couple in the seats, the woman now on the left and the man on the right. He’s also added the aged-paper texture and MIND MGMT Field Guide text that are two of the book’s visual motifs. The caption in panel 1 has changed color because of my concern that the time/date captions looked the same as Meru’s narration captions, but otherwise you are looking purely at Matt’s process. The work that Matt and I have done together has largely concerned the pacing of the first arc as a whole and how he’ll set up for the second arc, but for the most part MIND MGMT is Matt Kindt getting to be Matt Kindt.

Launching an ongoing series in the current market is no sure thing, and whether we go the distance will be determined pretty quickly by sales. Early numbers are encouraging. It’s a $3.99 book, but it’s content from cover to cover, and while it’s difficult for me to be unbiased, I think it’s a very good book, one which has only gotten better as Matt has refined his story. The extras are a lot of fun, and really add to the feeling of value, but in the end it comes down to the writing and the artwork, and Matt’s hit new levels with both. At least once an issue a great detail in the story makes me smile and a finished page makes me stare. Whenever I share a cover around the office, people are blown away. MIND MGMT is Matt’s accomplishment, not mine, but I can’t think of another series I’d be more honored to have be my first as editor.

If you want more MIND MGMT right now, pick up Matt’s excellent 3 Story: Secret Files of the Giant Man one-shot, which features a preview, or head over the Dark Horse Digital store for the free Dark Horse Originals 2012 sampler. Yes, that was hype. Whatever. I love this book.

And with honor, we lead directly into . . .

Shame Department

Somehow I have never really googled myself before. You’d think a self-obsessed guy like me would have by now, but somehow it’s never occurred to me. Sure, I’ve checked up on specific things I was involved with, and I’ve had a morbid fascination with the exploits of Irish gangster Brian Brendan “The Milkman” Wright, but I’ve honestly never made a serious search into “what does the Internet say about nascent comics professional Brendan Wright?” A surprising amount, as it turns out. Which maybe just speaks to my ignorance of how many comics sites there are and how thorough they are in cataloguing every scrap of trivia.

This came about because I searched for reviews of Archie Archives vol. 5, which came out last week. I’m always on on the lookout for reviews, because they yield blurbs that can be used in future Previews copy or back covers (see, it doesn’t happen automatically). The very first result that came up when I searched “archie archives 5 review” was a very favorable advance review on fanboycomics.net that happened to quote my introduction, which I confess piqued my curiosity. Where else did I come up out there?

Because of the aforementioned Brian Brendan Wright and a player for the Dallas Mavericks I searched for “brendan wright comics.” Most of the first results were either entries from the Wright Opinion or else links to it. Many were reviews or profiles of comics I’ve worked on, so weirdly detailed in their listings that they include the assistant editor. God bless comics people, but they are an obsessively detail-oriented bunch. I am on the list of editors for Creepy’s wikipedia page after only two issues, in a publishing history that goes back to 1964. I can only imagine what a footprint actually accomplished people must have left.

One nice thing was to see interviews with creators I’ve worked with who mention the editorial staff on their books. I’m still at a point where my contributions to most of the books I’ve worked on were pretty impersonal; replace me with someone else and the results would have been pretty much the same. Most fittingly, Patrick Reynolds (super nice guy the two times I’ve met him and a very, very good artist) jokes to ComicsAlliance about how many people he had to include on e-mails for Serenity: Float Out, an issue in which I was the fourth member of the editorial staff. But in keeping with the last subject, there’s also a good interview with Matt about MIND MGMT. Get excited!

Also, it’s possible I’ve married a woman named Julie Law?

In a bit: I should be over Before Watchmen by now. I’m sure they published it more to get people talking this much than to really add more evergreens to their backlist. And yet . . .

Why’m I doing this, again?

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