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

April 30, 2012 by

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 15: Little Brendan in the Town of Stumps

April 29, 2012 by

2012 is the ninth Stumptown Comics Festival and my sixth. In 2004 when the show began, I lived in Los Angeles for college, which explains my missing that first year. However, I graduated in May 2005 and the show was in fall back then, so I have no explanation for being unaware of the second and third Stumptowns.

I first attended in 2007 while interning at Top Shelf and did so zealously. One of the rare periods in my life when I’ve had regular access to a car, I tried to do everything, stopping in Friday night at both the pre-Stumptown party at Top Shelf co-publisher Brett Warnock’s house and the official launch party at Guapo Coffee and Comics. Saturday and Sunday I was at the show, then in a small space at the DoubleTree hotel by Lloyd Center, from open to close, a good chunk of that time manning the Top Shelf booth, but also getting out for panels, mingling, and shopping.

In 2008, the show moved from October to April, meaning it was only a six-month wait for my second Stumptown. This time I’d been invited, as a fledgling comics blogger, to sit in on several meetings of the Stumptown planning committee, not actually reporting much, but becoming familiar with the key players and occasionally dispatching something, like a photo of Mayor Tom Potter’s official proclamation that April was comics month in Portland. That year, my internship over, I attended as a volunteer, working most of Saturday, with a two-hour break in the middle, during which I interviewed Brian Michael Bendis (the day that several sites linked to that interview is still, years later, the busiest the Wright Opinion’s ever had). Sunday went to socializing and shopping. My internship at Top Shelf, friendship with a few well-know cartoonists, and my presence at so many small events as a result (I didn’t exactly crash Steve Lieber and Sara Ryan’s 2007/2008 New Year’s party, since Brett invited me along, but he was already gone by the time I arrived, and I’m pretty sure Steve and Sara didn’t know who I was) granted me a small amount of cred, and I was beginning to get to know many of the people in the local comics scene. It’s amusing, in looking over past write-ups, how many of the artists I now work with I met while I was just starting out and to read myself describing them as strangers.

2009 was the last year that I attended as anything other than a fan. By then I worked at Dark Horse, but I’ve never actually worked Stumptown for DH. My role as official sitter-inner had turned into a spot on the planning committee, running the portfolio review table for the show. I staffed it largely with DH editors, Periscope Studio artists, and a few other local experts, then found myself not actually needed at the table much. I stuck around for a few shifts, but was mostly shooed away by Christina Crow, who was helping me out and was content to man the table most of the two days. The fest changed leadership that year, as founder Indigo Kelleigh stepped down (though he has since returned) and it felt like a transitional year. The size of the show was beginning to strain the space at the DoubleTree, but it was kept there one more year to avoid moving from a space slightly too small to one much too large. By the time the jump was made to the Oregon Convention Center last year, the show comfortably filled an exhibit hall. Still drunk on the newness of having an actual paying job in comics—I’d just started in September—that year I packed in even more than usual, partying late into the night all three nights and soaking in every moment of the show itself. A few weeks before I’d gone to Seattle’s Emerald City Comic Con and was newly appreciative of the intimacy and localness of Stumptown.

I remember those three shows so well because I wrote each one up in this space. All three posts are still up, for the curious, and it’s interesting, to me at least, to see my focus change throughout them, from wide-eyed 23-year-old actually referring to Stumptown 2007 as my first real convention (much of my event reporting from the time is also embarrassingly hypey, but that’s another matter) to just-starting-out professional wistful at the smallness of the show in 2009. Stumptown is, of course, a real con, distinct from shows I’d been to before in being more than one day and featuring a full schedule of panels and associated parties, but even compared to a regional mainstream show like Emerald City, Stumptown’s scope is incredibly small.

Today, as a familiar (yet in some ways even more wide-eyed) presence in the Portland comics scene, I find myself peripherally involved in official things, even as I attend the show mostly for fun rather than work. I sit in panels related to books I edit or assist on, check in at the DH booth now and again, accept a pitch packet or two, receive contracts from freelancers who’ve brought them with them, and take on small tasks like escorting Stan Sakai from his spotlight panel to his table (Stumptown is still the kind of show where many of the headlining guests spend much of their time meeting fans at their tables rather than having just one or two signing periods).

Taking Saturday morning easy and writing a bit before leaving, Stan’s 2PM panel was actually the first thing I did at this year’s fest, not counting the Friday night drink and draw, touched on in the previous post. Arriving at 1, my first order of business was to immediately leave and get lunch with some friends down from Seattle for the show. Getting back just in time for the panel, I enjoyed Stan’s stories about traveling with Sergio Aragonés, both of them cramming as much work into every trip as possible, his descriptions of researching stories, and the enthusiastic questions from kids in the audience.


With Stan Sakai at the Dark Horse booth.

As it turned out, walking Stan back to his table turned out to be the closest to anything official I did at the show, which was fine with me, and I enjoyed getting to talk to him a few times throughout the show, especially at the afterparty at the Jupiter hotel, where he won the Stumptown award for Best Letterer. There are a lot of folks who people call “the nicest person in comics,” but by definition it can only really be true of one person, nearly as nice though the others may be, and in my experience that person is Stan.

Other than that, I walked the floor and caught up with all the people I mainly see at shows, as well as chatting with folks I hope to be able to work with on something before too long. I’m going through a bit of a broke period, so I didn’t buy much, just the third issue of Katie Longua’s Rök. Basically Thor, if Thor were a woman in her twenties and in a band (incidentally, exactly the formula for getting me interested in reading Thor), I picked up the first two at Isotope Comics Lounge’s APE afterparty last year, where Longua won that year’s Isotope award, and was excited to see the third issue, which was new for the show. Other than that, I bought one of Liz Conley’s paintings of food she eats as a birthday gift.

I’m not an exhibitor, so I don’t really know, but it looked like things were selling, and more than just the featured guests had interested people crowding tables. Wide aisles and a clear floor plan are Stumptown staples, so it was easy to move around, and the place felt full but not overcrowded.

The party at the Jupiter seemed more successful than last year, with side rooms keeping the main area from getting as crowded and the cool addition of Mike Alled’s band the Gear playing until the awards presentation began. Dark Horse was nominated in most categories, and it was gratifying to see Jonathan Case recognized for his great work on Green River Killer with awards for Best New Talent and Best Artist. I don’t know if there was an official plan for if Dark Horse Presents won Best Anthology, but I positioned myself near the stage so someone from DH could say something in case nobody else was available, having edited a few stories for the book. However, as we did not win, I did not risk embarrassment and job loss.

Finally, the Comic Art Battle came up, with fairly evenly matched teams led on one side by Cat Farris and on the other by Patric Reynolds. The teams were once again Boys versus Girls, which is a crowd pleaser, though I feel it’s less interesting than previous themes like Print Comics versus Webcomics. Rowdy and raunchy as usual, though with less near-violence than last year, it came down to a tiebreaker, after which the Girls came out victorious. At that point the party was declared over, though many people migrated across the street to Galaxy. A friend and I returned to the West Side for the final night of the New Old Lompoc before it is closed for two years while condos are built. Filled with Lompocalypse ale, I was asleep at home soon after.

At this point, Stumptown runs very smoothly and is an excellent local show. A visitor can get a very good sense of what the Portland comics scene is about from a few hours in the exhibit hall and a panel or two. Dark Horse’s presence has long emphasized more indie-style books, but this year a concerted effort was made to push the Dark Horse originals line, with booth art spotlighting festival guest Peter Bagge’s Reset, the upcoming volume of Blacksad, Erika Moen and Jeff Parker’s Bucko collection, Matt Kindt’s MIND MGMT, and Gilbert Hernandez’s Fatima: The Blood Spinners, as well as Usagi Yojimbo, which is not a DHO book, but Stan’s presence made it a natural.

I confess that a part of me misses the rougher show of years past, though I’m willing to accept that it could just be nostalgia for my earliest con experiences. Still, I think it’s unfortunate that the show no longer has a Best DIY award, even if Best Small Press is nearly the same thing—it still implies a different spirit to me—and I was one of those who enjoyed the goofiness of the Trophy Awards, both the name and the concept. That earlier incarnation of the Stumptown awards was voted on the day of the show, after which the winners’ names were hastily carved into plaques attached to secondhand trophies of all kinds—little league, golf, chess, whatever—bought at Goodwill and wherever awards host Shannon Wheeler stumbled upon them.

For Stumptown to grow, it probably had to leave details like that behind, and the show inarguably runs smoother after years of refinements, but part of me’s always going to prefer my comics goofy.

The fest is more centralized this year as well. In previous years, much was made of the mayoral proclamations declaring April to be Comics Month, and Stumptown was the culmination of a month’s worth of comics-related events, many of which were not directly connected. The city’s involvement peaked last year when Mayor Sam Adams appeared at the show in costume as Samdroid. A play for the nerd vote, I guess, though he ended up not running for reelection this year. His time running out and an election on to replace him may be the reason that there’s no proclamation this year, or the committee may not have pursued it since that publicity is no longer really necessary anymore. What events there were seemed closer to the actual weekend and were hyped on Stumptown’s own site.

A new show is debuting (I think this is the first year, anyway—see the first paragraph of this post) in the fall in Stumptown’s old stomping grounds at the DoubleTree. Rose City Comic Con seems to be positioning itself as the mainstream comics answer to Stumptown, though still with a local bent, likely because of its newness. I don’t know if there’s the same audience or need for that in Portland, but it is a little strange that there isn’t another show in as big a comics town as this, so maybe it could work. I’m totally lazy, so if in a few years I could get the Emerald City experience walking distance from my apartment, that’s okay with me. But Stumptown’s place in my heart is safe.

Tomorrow: Secret Origin part 2: Title to Come! Unless it ends up being the next day for some reason.

Why’m I doing this, again?

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Posted in Events, One Month of a Life in Comics, Peter Bagge, Stan Sakai, Stumptown | 2 Comments »

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

April 28, 2012 by

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 by

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.

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A Life Lived in Comics Day 12: I Add My Voice

April 25, 2012 by

I’m trying to not get into trouble. I really am.

I’ve been ignoring Before Watchmen for the most part, because I still can’t entirely accept it’s real. It does seem implausible when you stop and think about it, doesn’t it? But I’ve followed Chris Roberson’s admirable decision to break from DC over it, and today’s interview with Roberson on The Comics Journal put it back in my head.

It’s weird: I’m not even that big a Watchmen fan, to be honest. I mean, I have the Absolute Edition, but that’s more because of my sense that it’s an important addition to a collection (and my buying it before they announced the cheaper hardcover edition) than my overwhelming love for it. For supposedly the best graphic novel ever, it’s not that hard for me to think of others I prefer. Hell, I can think of other superhero comics I prefer, and other Alan Moore comics. But publishing a prequel still seems so tasteless, obscene even. Not to mention publishing seven, which just really underlines the complete crassness of the whole program. You don’t even test the waters with one? You pump out as much as possible all at once? Doesn’t sound like a publishing plan meant to do anything but take the money and run before the readership realizes they’ve been duped.

Because here’s the thing: it doesn’t matter if I love Watchmen. I love the idea of proper stories, the kind that have a beginning, middle, and end, and before Watchmen—shit, those two words used to be things you could just type; now they’re gross—UNTIL Watchmen, that wasn’t particularly valued in comics. The important thing about Watchmen isn’t that it’s the greatest, but that it is a complete story. Truthfully, I can’t help but feel that saying it’s the greatest works against it both by sounding like hyperbole on one side of the argument and justification for making more on the other. What matters is that more isn’t necessary. A novel doesn’t have to be your favorite to not need to be messed with.

DC has taken a huge step backwards in the way they discuss the reasons for Before Watchmen. It’s not being sold as a continuation of a great story, but as a continuation of great characters. But the characters aren’t all that great. Out of context, they’re pretty interchangeable with dozens of other superheroes, and a Rorschach story or Night Owl story outside of Watchmen are just two more superhero stories, hardly worth the attention these are getting.

It ignores the fundamental, inconvenient truth: whatever value Watchmen has comes not at all from Doctor Manhattan and the Comedian and entirely from Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. The book hasn’t stayed in print nearly 30 years because of its characters, but because of its perfectly controlled artwork and intricate writing, because even for someone like me who’s never been all the way convinced, it rewards rereading and has passages revelatory in their thematic and emotional payoff. By contrast, DC’s barely even hiding the fact the Before Watchmen is solely a cynically produced product.

I don’t know this, but I believe that everyone who signed the original contract for Watchmen, Moore/Gibbons and DC alike, thought that the deal would result in the reversion of rights to Moore and Gibbons within a few years when the book went out of print. No comic book have ever stayed in print longer than before. I can’t know what debate when on within DC when it became clear that they would benefit in an unforeseen way from the language of the contract, but the ultimate decision was to not renegotiate, even though it was on the basis of Moore’s and Gibbons’s talent that the book has remained the success it has. And that decision was made again and again over the years.

So now, insult to injury, the instant that Paul Levitz, who held firm against prequels and sequels, stepped down, the process began. It’s been a mix of the predictable claims that good characters shouldn’t be left on the shelf, despite Watchmen’s consistent sales surely beating so many newer properties hardly qualifying as being “on the shelf,” the thoroughly shocking claims that the past outright theft from Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster mitigates this unethical behavior now, and a series of frankly irrelevant attacks on Alan Moore.

(Seriously, the use of public domain characters is comparable to the creation of unwanted “official” prequels? Honestly, contributions to characters like Swamp Thing that were created to be part of a shared universe is indistinguishable from expanding on a novel with a beginning, middle and end? Really, the fact that Moore has had fallings out with other creators is somehow at all relevant? I once had an argument with a prominent comics journalist about Moore and DC, and she kept trying to push me to acknowledge that some of the things Moore had publicly said made him sound like a jerk. Sure, I said, he had said mean things in public. As far as she was concerned, she’d now won the argument, regardless of the fact that we were talking about the ethics that DC was displaying in their treatment of Moore and the fact that he had reason to doubt DC’s honesty in its dealings. Oh, well, he’d made reference to hack comics writer Geoff Johns being a hack comics writer, so whatever.)

Chris Roberson derived a portion of his income from DC, and given his contract to write an arc of Vertigo’s Fairest, DC was apparently happy to continue paying him, but Roberson decided he preferred to take the risk of losing that income by breaking with the company. I’m very happy that it seems to have paid of with offers from other companies, but I admire him for making the decision even though that wasn’t a certainty. My relationship to DC is the opposite; I sometimes give them my money, but if Roberson can make the move he’s made, it’s considerably less onerous on me to not buy their comics, and I wonder if it’s something I should consider.

Not withstanding the fact that I would never read, much less pay for, Before Watchmen, I’ve already opted out of any Superman comics after DC’s disgraceful behavior regarding the Siegels’ and Shusters’ claim to the copyright of Action Comics #1 and share in derivative concepts. It’s not really a debate with two sides. Copyright law is very clear that, in cases where copyright has been transferred, the original copyright holder has the right to reclaim copyright during the period of renewal, and the Siegels’ half of the copyright to Action Comics #1 was granted to them in court. It is only the fact that Time Warner and DC have the money and lawyers to throw at the case that there is even still any contention over the matter. The subsequent countersuits directed at the families’ lawyer is nothing but malicious obfuscation of the legal process. When the original ruling came down, it was part of a period of things in comics starting to feel better and more just, and a lot of what’s happened since feels like losing ground.

The upshot is that, as much as I love Grant Morrison’s work, I have skipped his, by all accounts, excellent work on the relaunched Action Comics. I’m also missing Art Baltazar and Franco’s Superman Family, which I would certainly pick up under other circumstances. I’m not someone to tell other people what they should do, so it’s not really a boycott, but it comes down to the fact that I would feel bad buying these comics that I would otherwise love to read.

Which makes me wonder, if I can skip these comics that I would surely enjoy if the ethics of the situation didn’t make reading them unenjoyable, maybe I can skip the rest of DC’s output too. I’ve been looking forward to Morrison’s relaunched Batman Incorporated, but if I’m not missing Action Comics too much, maybe I won’t miss that either. Bob Kane’s family is fairly well taken care of, but that’s a fluke of him being able to consult a family friend who was a lawyer and getting to renegotiate his contract under threat of it being void, since he had no birth certificate (it was destroyed to help him avoid the draft). DC and Marvel both still make most of their money on characters created before the more favorable deals offered to talent today. Is it possible that they put more marketing muscle behind those old characters because their success is more profitable than the success of new properties? I wouldn’t put it past them.

I’ve generally felt okay about buying creator-owned series published by DC and Marvel, under the theory that part of voting with your wallet is voting affirmatively when a company does something you like. If sales of Superman went down while sales of Jeff Lemire’s Sweet Tooth (a favorite of mine) went up, the smart company would do more of the latter and less of the former, right? I’ve also really enjoyed the first two issues of Paul Cornell and Ryan Kelly’s Saucer Country, and have been buying Matt Fraction and Gabriel Bá’s Marvel series Casanova digitally. This is one I’m still wrestling with.

Don’t get me wrong. There are things my own employer does that make me uncomfortable (does anyone agree 100% with everything the company they work for does?), but those things aren’t remotely in the order of magnitude as DC and Marvel continuing to deny proper compensation to the families of the men who created their foundational characters. Marvel owes the vast majority of its characters to Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, yet Lee had to sue for proper compensation and Kirby died never receiving his. DC has a better track record after a certain point, but its treatment of the Siegel and Shuster estates and of Alan Moore are bringing the period before that time back to the forefront.

DC can legally publish any kind of Watchmen-related material they want, but it is unethical to do so under the circumstances that they came to hold those rights all the way through 2012 and it is immoral to do so in the face of Alan Moore’s very public wish that they not compromise his novel. I hope Chris Roberson is only the beginning.

Tomorrow: less of a bummer, I hope.

Why’m I doing this, again?

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

April 25, 2012 by

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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A Life Lived in Comics Digest 1

April 23, 2012 by

It’s official: You kind of like me. You really kind of like me!

It’s been ten days, and I’ve been astonished that I’ve had enough to say to fill them. Here’s what I said:

Day 1: What the Hell Am I Doing?

I explain what this is all about. Basically I haven’t blogged in a long time, and it’s never been about me, so how about a monthlong diary? Can I actually do it? Also, I meet Jim Lee and run the first-ever photo of me on the Wright Opinion.

This is a medium that we all come to for personal reasons, and the experiences we have within the field are unique. It also never hurts to do a little self-promotion, something I had to get good at to get the job I have now, but haven’t done any of since. If I wrote a little about who I am and why I’m here and what I do every day, what would happen? Assuming it isn’t boring, let’s find out.

Day 2: Bridgetown vs. Stumptown

Since getting a job in comics, I’ve been on the lookout for a new hobby. Standup comedy seems like a pretty good one, and I compare the unmediated rawness of standup to minicomics. And I pretend that a Serenity comic is relevant. More interesting than it sounds.

When’s the last time a studio comedy or superhero comic really, genuinely surprised you? You might not see the plot points coming, but you never get the gut punch of something that just shouldn’t be happening in front of you the way that an outsider form like standup can deliver. These forms exist for their familiarity, not their surprises. Live standup is essentially the minicomics of the entertainment industry: people speaking directly an an audience with no outside filter, just their ability to connect and make people laugh at the bullshit of their lives, our lives. The people who are into it often turn hardcore, much like comics fans. Not coincidentally, live standup is not for everyone, and 99.9% of the time it is immensely less lucrative than gatekeeper-based media, but just like yesterday’s minicomics artists are tomorrow’s Architects, what people say and do in those small rooms for a handful of people is what we’ll be seeing in movies, in family-friendlier form, in a few years’ time.

Day 3: When I Was a Cartoon

What I got up to on a Monday at Dark Horse. My relationship with Archie Comics and my Tarzan reprint workload are introduced. It’s the beginning of a necessarily abridged but hopefully honest portrait of how comics get made at a large publisher. I’m also reading Planet of the Apes, and my last diary attempt, when I created extravagantly self-loathing comics, is eviscerated. Includes seven comic strips drawn in 2006/2007.

I’m at a funny point in my career, next in line for promotion to associate editor, but still very conscious of how I balance my time between the projects I assist on and those I edit. I’m also at the point where I’m being urged to utilize newer assistants to help me get books done. So far, everything that credits me as editor I’ve done myself, which has been a pleasant learning experience, but I’ll soon have enough assignments that it won’t be practical to do it that way. Delegating is like everything else in my job so far: you learn it from experience. I’ve always had guidance when I’ve needed it, but the ethos at DH is that you learn by doing, so I’ve picked a few of the books I’m in the process of starting, and they’re going to be the books I use to learn how to let someone help me.

Day 4: Pages Filled with Red

How Dark Horse editors keep up with deadlines, the challenge of Tarzan, Stan Sakai is the best, a junior assistant sasses me, and the reach of Locke & Key. Most interesting for being a plain old day.

The plan is to leave promptly at 5, as I’m visiting my parents to catch Sunday’s Mad Men OnDemand; I don’t have cable. When the show’s on, I see them once a week for dinner, a pleasant, if by the end of the season, slightly stifling arrangement. I never really planned to continue to live so close to where I grew up, but Portland is where the comics scene is, and thank God for that. While I work with a lot of people who moved out here without any promise of a job simply because this was where Dark Horse and a few other publishers were, I just don’t see that I could have done the same. I think I’ve been able to make a few bold decisions for work projects and in other areas, but for better or worse when it comes to my personal life I’m not much of a risk taker.

Day 5: The Wednesday Crowd

I helped a super talented cartoonist make a new comic. Also, it’s Wednesday, and the New Comics Day Posse head across the street to see what’s what. I get sentimental (again) about Twin Spica.

Don’t get me wrong. Andi is an enormous talent, and once we got started there was very little I needed to contribute. I gave pretty minor notes on the three stories, and when the one-shot came around I gave a small amount of direction on the cover and put together the sketch section, but this was Andi’s show. An editor is basically a helper monkey, but monkeys with the great fortune in many cases to get to choose who we help. My greatest contribution to Skeleton Key was my very first one, when I advocated for a favorite cartoonist to get a slot in DHP (Andi and I had previously worked together when he wrote and drew a two-page story for MySpace DHP featuring his character Hen). After that I contracted Andi and trafficked the art and gave the barest guidance on stories, but the beauty of the job is that at the end I get to claim undeserved credit for a comic with my name in it.

Day 6: No Lunch! No Lunch!

I guess this one’s interesting if you’re a completist, but I’d probably skip it. I do note a rarely commented upon motif in Frank Miller comics, but you’ve probably already noticed it. You’re smart.

Day 7: My Place in All This

Not much about the day’s work here. More to do with standup comedy and whether or not I fit in in the larger comics scene around me. I make dubious claims about my own geekhood and talk about the comics social scene in Portland inasmuch as I’ve removed myself from it, likely from fear of rejection.

Certainly you make friends everywhere you go, but in Portland in particular you can easily spend weeks on end going to book releases, art openings, readings, conventions, the local comics shop, etc., and bump into someone you work with, either a freelancer or someone from the office, every night.

Day 8: The Hard Sell

I’m late on my solicitation copy (called tip copy in-house), and instead of catching up I write a bit about what goes into putting it together and what it’s about.

I’ve never worked in a comic shop, but I’ve been a comics reader since I was 11, so writing for retailers took some adjustment on my part, and I still occasionally forget what’s relevant to whom. On a recent revival of an old series, I initially noted how many years it had been since the last issue, since as a reader seeing a beloved character I hadn’t seen in years would get me excited, but it was pointed out that for retailers this isn’t a selling point, since it raises the question, “How do I sell this thing when there are no recent sales figures and that many new readers are unfamiliar with it?” By contrast, in writing the tip sheet for Skeleton Key, I made a point of drawing retailers’ attention to the fact that the book would be in stores the Wednesday before Free Comic Book Day, so they should stock up in order to have plenty of copies on hand when a greater number of children then usual come through the store on that Saturday (this is also why I scheduled the book for that week in the first place). Information not especially relevant to a reader, but important for retailers to consider.

Day 9: Secret Origin part 1: They Make Me Think of You

Traveling back in time on a lazy Sunday, learn how I started reading comics. It’s probably a lot like your story, but just that little bit different. Includes two comic strips drawn in 2001/2002.

Owned by Jim Walker, Sandy Grand Slam’s original location was above a gun store, but it soon moved to a bigger location nearby, before leaving town altogether and becoming Interzone Comics in Gresham. After a few years, Jim sold Interzone and opened a store back in Sandy specializing in gaming. For a while during college I maintained a pull list at the Sandy store before it too closed. Years later I ran into Jim again at the Portland Comic Book Show, where he shared a retail booth, and I got to tell him I now worked in the comics field thanks to the passion for the medium his store had originally instilled in me nearly a decade earlier. He seemed proud, and telling him about my job felt more important than telling anyone else I could think of.

Day 10: The iPad, and All That it Implies

My growing preference for digital comics, and how some comics, like Butcher Baker the Righteous Maker, seem to actually read better on the iPad. Plus, the various approvals stages for editing comics at Dark Horse, and I put MIND MGMT #1 to bed.

That’s right; technology is now at the point where it is easier and faster to download a brand new copy of a comic than walk across the room and pick up the one I already have. Even before buying an iPad I had pretty much stopped reading my print Dark Horse comps once our comics went day-and-date digital. Not even counting the fact that my employee account lets me read most DH books before they’re released and in some cases even printed—way better than waiting for comps, which sometimes come weeks after release—if I’m already in my chair with my laptop, why go all the way to the other room, where I may have to actually look around under other comics for them or even—gasp—have to get them out of boxes?

My God, 20 more days to go!

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A Life Lived in Comics Day 10: The iPad, and All That It Implies

April 23, 2012 by

As I feared, having the ability to instantly buy and read a ridiculous number of comics from the lazy convenience of my chair has not exactly curtailed the impulse buying habit. But Saturday was my first experience rebuying something digitally that I already own in print, and it was kind of . . . awesome.

A longtime fan of Joe Casey’s weirder superhero comics like Automatic Kafka, The Intimates and Gødland, last year I picked up his new series Butcher Baker the Righteous Maker, with its swaggering tone, backmatter that I find hard not to read as a parody of Matt Fraction’s Casanova text pieces, and Mike Huddleston’s American-flag-rock-candy colors. I was a little surprised to find myself not engaging with it—perhaps I just wasn’t feeling much swagger myself at the time, I dunno—but I dropped off after the third issue.

A year later, I’m lying in bed, reading Tarzan of the Apes on the Kindle app, as I figure with all the Tarzan material I’ve put into Dark Horse’s costing process, it’s time to actually read the original (downloading public domain books rather than buying them or getting them from the library is an enormous perk of owning a tablet). Taking a break from the research, I open up the Comixology app to find that they’re running a 4/20 sale on Casey, Jim Mahfood, and Ziggy Marley’s Marijuanaman, and that several of Casey’s other Image books are on sale as well, including Butcher Baker. I’ve never entirely trusted my original reaction to the series, so I decide that now is the moment to try again. Rather than get out of bed and retrieve the comics from the “for eBay” longbox, I download the free issue #1 without moving an inch.

(That’s right; technology is now at the point where it is easier and faster to download a brand new copy of a comic than walk across the room and pick up the one I already have. Even before buying an iPad I had pretty much stopped reading my print Dark Horse comps once our comics went day-and-date digital. Not even counting the fact that my employee account lets me read most DH books before they’re released and in some cases even printed—way better than waiting for comps, which sometimes come weeks after release—if I’m already in my chair with my laptop, why go all the way to the other room, where I may have to actually look around under other comics for them or even—gasp—have to get them out of boxes?)

I wasn’t entirely sure I was sold after issue #1, but damn if #2 wasn’t only 99¢! I bought #2–#4 and read them in a go, finding that the story works much better that way. Convinced, I purchased the remaining issues as well, having spent a total of $5.94 on seven comics.

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A Life Lived in Comics Day 9: Secret Origin part 1: They Make Me Think of You

April 22, 2012 by

I came to comic books slightly later than many do, and I came to them backwards, by way of a younger sibling rather than an older one. Before that, my interest was exclusively in newspaper comic strips, and as late as high school I likely expressed a preference for strips, my ambition at the time to be a newspaper comics artist. I grew up surrounded by Calvin and Hobbes books, and that strip in particular was among the most important things to me in the world.

I distinctly remember my sixth grade classroom getting a daily copy of The Oregonian, which we students completely ignored, except for the comics. My best friend and I would both race into the room in the morning to be the first to get it. Probably most of the time one of us walked in to see the other already reading, but my mind latches onto the times that it came down to seconds, both of us risking censure by running, and who prevailed could be decided by where exactly the paper had been placed.

The Oregonian ran two pages of comics, but at that age and after that level of competition, sharing was unthinkable for either of us. When I lost, the wait before my turn was excruciating, more to do with the loss than the comics themselves, which even then I knew mostly didn’t deserve the love I heaped on them. My very first website, made around this time, when I was learning HTML, contained my first piece of criticism, a condemnation of Jim David and Garfield. It would later house some of my first tries at comics, and for that I am glad no trace of it remains.

By now I had started reading comic books as well, but only just. My first comics purchase had been the previous year, when I was 11 and my brother Dylan was 9. We both attended the same school, after which we would be picked up by Nick, the au pair who lived with us, and taken to Sandy Grand Slam, our long-gone first local comic shop. I was merely dragged along at first, staring into space while Dylan bought X-Men and Spawn, until one week out of boredom I selected one Batman comic and one Superman one, neither one anything special, yet somehow capturing my imagination.

 
Despite not being that great, these two comics are probably the reason I’m not a lawyer.

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A Life Lived in Comics Day 8: The Hard Sell

April 22, 2012 by

I’ve been using the term “solicitation copy” in the past few entries when I’ve referred to the text that goes into Previews saying why you and your retailer need to buy a particular Dark Horse book, but in-house we call this “tip copy” and write it into a form called a “tip sheet.” I’ve never really asked why we call them that, and I don’t know if other publishers do too, but it’s one of those terms that, even though you’d have to stop and think to guess its actual provenance, pretty much sounds like it makes sense, hence my never asking. For this entry I looked up the term on wikipedia, and while we’ve adapted it for our own use, it’s pretty much what I’d have guessed.

So for the purpose of this post, we’re going with “tip copy.” No big.


“It looks like it’s just stapled paper with the hero’s latest adventure, but that’s not it. It’s about when we were helpless, and our fathers were heroes. Sometimes they saved us from pain, and sometimes they brought these silly things home and the world was good. This is a time machine, taking us back to when we know we were loved.”

I am currently late on my tip copy, though I’m caught up with the copy I write for editors Diana and Dave, because my assisting responsibilities still come first and I have less leeway to be a screwup there. I do a pass on all of Diana’s tip sheets, which are usually approved without revisions, and all of Dave’s that aren’t Star Wars–related, as assistant Freddy Lins works with him on those books (I’ve pinch-hit various tasks on a few Star Wars comics and been amused to see my undeserved credit in them, but for the most part there’s a firewall there). Those usually require a little more revision because, as a non-gamer, my total ignorance of what I’m writing about sometimes shows through (more in a bit). I’m not very late on mine, which include some archives, MIND MGMT #6, and Creepy #10, and I’ll finish some of it up today and the rest during the week, but I am behind.

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