New Podcast!

I was recently interviewed by Genevieve Barbee for the AP Collector Podcast. You can listen to the whole thing at the following link.

http://www.apcollector.net/ap-collection/2014/3/8/wayne-wise-author-comic-guru

The AP Collector was recently featured as one of "Sixteen Pittsburgh Social Media Mavens To Follow" at Pop City Media.

http://www.popcitymedia.com/features/pghsocialmediaites022614.aspx

Small Press Interview: Scott Hedlund

Scott Hedlund is a Pittsburgh-based small press comics artist. I first met Scott as a customer at Phantom of the Attic Comics and in the course of the last fourteen years we have become friends and artistic collaborators. Several years ago our mutual friend, writer Brian Babyok, asked if I would ink Scott's pencils on a comic called Chaos Punks. This was a project that was not only a lot of fun, but very seminal for me as well. After many years of not working on comics, this project got me back to the drawing table.


We worked at a rate of a page a week. Each Wednesday on new book day at the store Scott would bring me a new, completed page of pencils. I would return them, fully inked, a week later. This weekly deadline and expectation was a key for both of us in terms of production. Over the course of forty-eight weeks we both grew as artists and learned from each other.




Scott continues to grow as an artist and to work on a number of projects.

1) Tell us a bit about your comics and where they are available.

I like to draw a lot of different genres mainly because I'm interested in story-telling. I typically work with a writer on stories. I think it adds something to comic books to have more than one creative person's input on the project. I like to let the story influence me as far as page layouts and finishing techniques play out. This keeps me entertained and challenged to improve my work. Check out Weirdlings Press (www.weirdlings.com) for most of my comics. Some of the more notable projects that I have contributed to includes: Weirdlings, Chaos Punks, World of Orenda, and Fairhaven.

2) Why comics?

I love the art of telling a story. And drawing comics is one of the easiest forms of expression. I put pencil to paper and I am doing just that. It's very satisfying to me personally and I enjoy the community that goes on with other comic creators and comic fans in general.

3) Who have been your biggest influences, both in writing and in art?

Ron Frenz was my first favorite comic book artist with his run on Marvel's Star Wars comic. Later I got into John Romita Jr's Daredevil run. Nowadays I'm inspired by people like Terry Moore, Adam Hughes, Yanick Paquette, Edward Risso and Guy Davis. As far as writers go, I like Peter David on X-Factor, Jonathan Hickman on Fantastic Four, Mark Waid on the new Daredevil, Brian Azzarello on 100 Bullets and Wonder Woman, and Scott Snyder on SwampThing.

4) What are your favorite comics (whether you consider them influential on your style or not)?

Currently, my favorites include: Swamp Thing, X-Factor, The Walking Dead, Wonder Woman, Daredevil, Fantastic Four, Ultimate Spider-Man, I, Vampire, Justice League Dark, Rachel Rising, Voodoo, Avengers: The Children’s Crusade, FF. I don't even want to get in to past comics. There are too many!

5) Have you studied art or writing in college, or are you self-taught?

I went to the Art Institute of Pittsburgh and received a degree in Visual Communications. Drawing comics though pretty much comes from "How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way" and then I went from there.

6) What’s your normal process for creating your comic?

I guess I answered some of this in question 1 as far as how stories come together. The actual drawing part starts with a script, finished or loose and I break down the script into thumbnail drawings. This part defines story-flow/pace, overall page layout, character positions and space for word balloons. I then move right up to the full-sized 11x17 page and draw in the details. I use reference when possible. A little bit of accuracy doesn't hurt but I am also conscious of keeping the lines loose and I try to avoid stiff poses. In the last year I have been inking and coloring using the Wacom: Cintiq 12 using Adobe Photoshop. Then I do the lettering in Illustrator and place it into the Photoshop file.

7) How do you promote your work?

I promote through social media and person to person. I cohost a Comic Book Podcast called the Comic Book Pitt (www.comicbookpitt.com) and I make sure to mention any comic projects that I am working on. I use Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Google+, and of course Weirdlings.com is where most of my work is on display. In person, I go to a handful of comic book shows every year. Whether it's as an exhibitor or fan; I always bring something to give away that mentions my next/current project and what website to go to for more information.

8) What do you enjoy most about being a comics creator?

I enjoy the story-telling and the community of comic shows. The friendships that I have developed through this common love of the medium are what give me purpose and satisfaction in life.

9) What do you find most difficult about being a comic’s creator?

Probably the long hours it takes to draw a story and the low return financially. I see so many artists that make an easy buck on pinups of established characters. 22 pages of sequential art carries a lower value than one slick image.

10) What's more important to you: Telling a story or pushing the bounds of comic book art?

Ha! Probably telling the story, since I keep blabbing on about it! I think the art should serve the story, but there is an infinite amount of ways to push what works artistically and still tell the story.

11) Why self-publish instead of submitting your work to the majors?

Honestly I don't see myself succeeding in the professional market. There is a consistency of quality while maintaining a grueling schedule that I don't think I can live up to. Maybe I'm just a realist.

12) What are your long-term goals with comics?

I don't have any long term goals beyond next summer's comicon season. I have a few books that need printed. I will be working on a new story in the New Year and I'm excited about drawing it!

13) I've personally seen your work improve dramatically in the past few years. It seems like there was suddenly a point where you made a quantum leap in ability. What do you think happened to make this take place?

Thanks Wayne! That means a lot to me. I could name a few things that happened. I think our team-up on Chaos Punks helped me to improve my line work. Drawing for an inker is a whole other mindset than drawing something that I would ink myself. I also started using some photo references to get the character's looks and personalities down, as well as settings. It could also just be the volume of pages that I have drawn over the years and I finally drew enough bad ones. Ha!

14) Where can you be found you on the web if anyone wants more info?

Most of what I have drawn can be found at Weirdlings Press (www.weirdlings.com). Also the Comic Book Pitt podcast (www.comicbookpitt.com) airs pretty regularly. Thanks Wayne!

This is a page from Chaos Punks, written by Brian Babyok,
pencils by Scott and inks by me.

Pencilled panel from Weirdlings

Finished inks and colors by Scott

Pencilled page from Weirdlings

Finished page

Finished page from Weirdlings

Book Review!

I received my first book review for Bedivere: The King's Right Hand, and it's 5 stars! You can see it near the bottom of the Barnes and Noble page for the book HERE.

Or for convenience, just read it here.

donnamab

Excellent- highly recommended

I've read many versions of the Arthurian story and this ranks with the best. The author has done an excellent job of weaving together traditional legends with original storytelling. The characters are well-drawn and fleshed out. and the action kept me turning the pages even when I should have been studying for a test. I particularly liked the way he acknowledged the opposing forces at work - pagan vs. christian, masculine vs. feminine - using the tensions to move the story with out taking over the story. All in all, an excellent effort. I'm looking forward to the next installment.

Small Press Interview - Nick Marino

Nick Marino is a Pittsburgh-based creator involved in a wide variety of comics related endeavors. He is a writer, an artist, and a podcaster, among many other things. Nick stays very active in the small press scene in Pittsburgh, working with an assortment of other artists. He's up for this installment of my small press interviews. You can see samples of Nick's work at the end of the interview.

1) Tell us a bit about your comics and where they are available.

Super Haters is an irreverent superhero satire webcomic that runs Monday-Friday. http://comics.superhaters.com/

Time Log is an (almost completed) weekly webcomic about time travel and music history that runs (somewhat) weekly on Thursdays. http://timelog.audioshocker.com/

Stick Cats is webcomic about stick figure cats that's just been bumped up to a Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule. http://stickcats.nickmarino.net/

And those are just my current webcomics... you can check out more about my past, future, and side projects (as well as my print comics) at NickMarino.net. http://www.nickmarino.net/

2) Why comics?

Time and space.

3) Who have been your biggest influences, both in writing and in art?

I have two types of influences -- professionals whose work I find inspirational and friends whose work I find compelling.

Friends go first because they're the most important! They include Shawn Atkins, Ross Campbell, Dan Greenwald, Justique Woolridge, Nate McDonough, and lots of other local Pittsburgh comics creators.

The professionals I'm inspired by are a mix of superhero comic book storytellers, cartoonists, and comedians. They include Matt Groening, Max Cannon, Jim Starlin, Grant Morrison, Chris Bachalo, Chris Giarrusso, Zucker Abrahams Zucker, Bob Layton, Chris Claremont, Paul Fusco, Dave Chappelle, Tim Meadows, and the Farrelly Brothers.

4) What are your favorite comics (whether you consider them influential on your style or not)?

I love all comics!

Okay, not really. But I do appreciate all kinds of comics, even if I don't love every single story. My favorite works inspire deep thought, push my imagination to new limits, and tug at my heartstrings.

So, basically, Garfield.

Just kidding! Although I do appreciate the more ambitious Garfield strips, here are a few of my favorite comics: We3, The Thanos Quest, R. Crumb's "Joe Blow," and Ral Grad.

5) Have you studied art or writing in college, or are you self-taught?

I never studied creative writing in a classroom, though I've done extensive independent research on character and story structure. However, I did take screenwriting classes in college. I enjoyed those because they were technical -- they focused on formatting and pacing.

As for art, I studied drawing off and on for years. I learned enough to know the basic elements of anatomy and composition, despite the fact that I like to ignore most of that when I sit down to draw.

In general, I've had a hard time learning creative skills in the classroom. I've studied graphic design, animation, filmmaking, cartooning, and illustration throughout the years, and I've found the school setting to be very discouraging.

But I love learning through trial and error! (Mostly error...)

6) What’s your normal process for creating your comic?

"Normal" process? HAHAHA!

I have no one process for creating comics. Each one of my comics has a different creation process, and even those evolve over time.

I tend to be very collaborative, so I'm often consulting other writers and artists from the beginning. I also do most of my writing and art digitally, especially for Super Haters. In particular, I like to write in Google Docs because it affords me the ability to work from anywhere with an Internet connection.

I tend to draw on paper and scan it in. Then I tweak the lines on the computer. I normally draw in ink and skip the penciling stage. I've never liked pencils. They're too smudgy and gray. Yuck! Most of the time, I letter and color digitally. I've never enjoyed doing either of those on paper.

But I'm generalizing. There's no single process that I use over and over again. For example, Stick Cats was created as a reaction to my reliance on digital methods. So I write that one as I draw it and I do everything by hand on paper.

As for comics that I only write and don't draw, my story proicess goes something like this: I identify my beginning and end first. Sometimes I'll outline, sometime I won't. I do A LOT of research when I write. I enjoy that part.

I typically write the first draft of my story in loose prose. Then I edit things and tighten up the pacing as I convert the story into script format. From there, I'll edit another couple of times before I give an artist my finished script.

7) How do you promote your work?

Relentlessly! Mostly through the Internet. I link to my comics from every social media imaginable. I also podcast about my comics work, and interact on message boards and blogs about other comics.

In person, I do conventions. I drop my books off in stores when I have a new title, or if I'm in a new city. In Pittsburgh, I stay extremely active in the local comics scene, working to promote my comics by simply being everywhere that I possibly can!

8) What do you enjoy most about being a comics creator?

I love telling stories, and I love the way that comics carry my stories. More than anything else, I delight in the finished product. I enjoy promotion, although it's daunting. And I love creating!!! It's so hard to pick just a few things that I enjoy because I enjoy so much about creating comics.

9) What do you find most difficult about being a comics creator?

The printing process. It's frustrating, time consuming, and expensive.

Also, I sort of hate drawing. But not nearly as much as I hate printing!!!

10) What's more important to you: Telling a story or pushing the bounds of comic book art?

Storytelling. If I push the boundaries in the process, then that's an added bonus.

11) Why self publish instead of submitting your work to the majors?

Most of my work is "not ready for prime time" either in its themes, content, or quality. However, I'm still pretty new at self-publishing -- I just printed my first minicomic in 2008.

I have plenty of plans for submitting my work to publishing houses. I'm not sure that I'll be going to the "majors" (at least, not off the bat), but I'll definitely be approaching smaller publishing companies within the next few months.

12) What are your long-term goals with comics?

Creatively, my goal is to tell stories that resonate with readers and excite them to pick up more of my work. Professionally, my goal is to forge a sustainable, lucrative career by publishing a large body of work that meets my creative goal.

13) You are pretty heavily involved in the world of podcasting, about comics as well as other topics. What can you tell me about that? What got you interested in that in the first place?

I love working with audio, and I have long history of recording and editing. In the early 00s, my friend and I tried to start an "audio magazine," but it never really got off the ground.

Years later, I discovered comic book podcasts. Inspired by what I heard and aching to put my stamp on the medium, I contacted my friend and we revived our "audio magazine" idea as a general pop culture podcast in 2007. We've been going weekly at AudioShocker.com ever since. http://www.audioshocker.com/

However, I struggled for years to find the right podcast forum to discuss comics on a regular basis. After tons of trial and error, I settled on two shows that focus on comics creation -- Sequential Underground and A Podcast with Ross and Nick.

14) Where can you be found you on the web if anyone wants more info?

NickMarino.net is the best place to find links to all of my work, as well as links to my social media profiles. http://www.nickmarino.net/

Also make sure to stop by the AudioShocker and give us a listen! In particular, make sure to check out Wayne's recent guest appearance on Sequential Underground #25. You dropped some serious self-publishing knowledge on that episode, Wayne!!! http://www.audioshocker.com/2011/09/21/sequential-underground-25-self-publishing-with-wayne-wise

Time Log

Taste of the Sea

Super Haters

Stick Cats

This Creature Fair Interview

Another interview with me has been posted online. This one is primarily about This Creature Fair.

Check it out at:

http://wordsbywilliams.blogspot.com/2011/10/author-interview-wayne-wise.html?spref=tw

Scratch gets a shout out!

My novel Scratch was featured on a book review blog. You can take a look at it at;

http://indiepublishers.blogspot.com/2011/09/scratch-by-wayne-wise.html

Thanks to Lisa Graves. Lisa is also an independent Ebook publisher. Take a look at her novel, Atlantis.

New Podcast Interview

I was a guest on today's Audioshocker podcast (Sequential Underground #25). I was interviewed by Nick Marino and and Shawn Atkins. These guys post a number of podcasts every week on a variety of subjects. Sequential Underground covers the topic of comics, primarily. We had a great conversation about my history in the comics industry, focusing on self-publishing and how that has changed over the years. We jumped from minicomics to my experiences with the Xeric Grant and, of course, talked about my new excursion into the world of Ebook publishing.

A couple of my drawings have appeared in the Project Basement section of their site.

You can listen to the Podcast at:

http://www.audioshocker.com/2011/09/21/sequential-underground-25-self-publishing-with-wayne-wise

You can find out more about Nick and his various projects at http://www.nickmarino.net/

You can see Shawn's work at http://weirdlings.com/eotu/ and

http://www.drunkduck.com/Gello_Apocalypse/

Pittsburgh Zine Fair

I went to the first ever Pittsburgh Zine Fair last night at AIR (Artist Image Resource) on the Northside last night. Once again I am highly impressed with the sheer amount of great material being produced in this city and the community that supports it. The variety of topics covered in the zines represented is amazing. There were mini-comics, poetry chapbooks, art books, music zines, zines of political activism, and those that deal with all of the above and defy easy categorization.

I was intrigued by some of the conversation about the role of the internet in this sort of DIY atmosphere. It's been said that writing/producing is 3% inspiration and 97% staying the hell offline, and I think there's some truth to that. It can be a tremendous time-waster, I do see the internet as a great way of increasing the visibility of your work, finding a bigger audience for whatever you have to say, and most importantly, networking.

As my posts here indicate, I'm an old guy when it comes to this type of scene. I was putting together mini-comics by hand and selling them through the mail before a lot of the people at last night's vent were born. That is not meant to be an insult or demeaning to what they do. This is their t ime and I support the effort because I remember what it is like to want to get your work out there. I still do.

But I remember the days when it was really difficult to find an audience, or to let anyone else know what you were doing. When I was doing mini-comics and contributing to zines it was all through the mail. Today, one status update on Facebook lets more people know about your product than did in the entire time I was involved in the scene. It's easy to get overwhelmed by the sheer amount out there, but it's possible to get it out there!

There is also the community. There were probably lots of other people in Pittsburgh doing the sort of thing I was in the early 90's. I knew about six of them. To walk into AIR last night and see that many people involved in this was remarkable. We were far more isolated in our efforts back then, simply because there weren't as many avenues of communication.

What an awesome display of creativity and mutual support. One more reason to celebrate Pittsburgh's scene.

Here's a view from one of the show's organizer's, Nick Marino.

King of Summer (Writing Part 8)

I talked about my publishing experience with King of Summer, but I really didn't discuss the experience of writing it. I'm not sure what I have to add. At this point it was around 10 years ago that I began the project, and some of the details and specific memories are hazy. But, it's worth dredging the unconscious to see what I come up with.

Like I said, at some point after seeing the Guardians short stories printed and collected I realized that I was capable of writing at length. That was an important insight and led directly to my decision to once again attempt to write a novel. I had tried this many times before, of course and never got very far into it (the Knight and Armour manuscript I wrote when I was 15 notwithstanding). I'm not sure exactly what it was but KoS felt different from the beginning. I had more actual writing experience under my belt, for one thing. By this time I had had many articles published and paid for. I was a “professional” writer, at least in terms of selling my work. I was more confident when I sat down at the keyboard, and though the articles were different than fiction, through them and the Guardians I had finally begun to hear my own voice in my writing rather than a bad imitation of whoever was inspiring me at the moment.

I think I began KoS with humbler aspirations than previous efforts (if that can truly be said about anyone who sits down to write a novel... there's something inherently a little arrogant about the attempt). Before this I wanted to write something for the ages. I wasn't content to simply write a novel. I wanted to write the kinds of things I loved. I wanted to be Hermann Hesse, or Henry Miller, or J.R.R. Tolkien, or Robert Pirsig or... you get the idea. I was frustrated in my writing because it didn't live up to the impossibly high standards I compared myself to. In Hesse's Steppenwolf he talks about his own efforts paling when compared to those he called “The Immortals.” Hesse had become one of my own Immortals, and his voice, among others, while inspiring, was preventing me from hearing my own.

Writing articles about music was immediate and transient. Writing about the Guardians was fun. Both of these helped me to put aside my aspirations at being an Immortal and let me just write. It was with this in mind that I began KoS. For once, rather than wanting to write the great American novel and being paralyzed by the enormity of that expectation, I simply wanted to tell a story.

I'm not really sure where the original idea came from, or how the story developed. I'm a terrible notetaker and I've always had the bad habit of organizing things in my head rather than writing them down (bad for a writer). I am not an outliner. I get an idea for a story and it just sort of develops in my head. Characters appear and some of them work and some of them don't. I usually “see” several key scenes in a story, and have a general idea of the direction I need to go and the ending. I don't often write any of that down ahead of time. As a result not only am I sure that I've lost brilliant ideas, I also have very little in the way of records of how I work.

In the case of KoS I have a single page of notes.

I knew I wanted to tell a modern fantasy/horror story using kids as the protagonists. I wanted to give it a little more resonance and depth, some kind of mythological underpinning (I said I wanted to just tell a story, I didn't say I had given up aspirations that it would mean something). I have long been fixated on the legends of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. I have read many, many novels based on this, as well as the literature and history and the psychological symbolism involved. One of the things I am fascinated by is how this core story can be reinterpreted time and again and still speak to our modern sensibilities. The symbols, the relationships, the stories, feel universal to me.

With this in mind I decided to use the Arthurian legends as a map for the story I wanted to tell. I knew I didn't want to simply retell the specific tales, but reference the symbols and relationships in a modern context. The challenge was to encode this information into the story in such a way that those who know Arthurian legends would go, “Aha!” and those who don't know them wouldn't be lost or even know they were missing anything. The story needed to work for anyone, not just those in the know. I didn't want to deal with the idea that my characters were specific reincarnations of the knights, or that they themselves would ever know they were in an Arthurian pastiche. They were kids, in a modern setting, who embodied the archetypes without actually being the Arthurian characters they resembled.

This was an idea that Matt Wagner had used in his comic, Mage: The Hero Discovered. It was also an idea borne out of Jungian psychology. There is a book by Dr. Carol Pearson called The Hero Within (and a followup called Awakening the Hero Within), that addresses the idea of embodying heroic archetypes. These were ideas I wanted to play with.

On that single page of notes I have a list of some of the major Arthurian characters and next to each I have the name of one of the kids who ended up in KoS. This was the first attempt to figure out the roles each of them would play. I didn't want this to be glaringly obvious, so other than Artie none of them have a name that directly correlates to the character they represent (though there are some other clues with some of them). Also on the page are a couple of notes about how the classic elements of Arthurian literature would manifest in the modern world. A 12-year-old couldn't very well be wielding Excalibur in small town America.

There are a lot of hidden Arthurian tidbits encoded in the manuscript, and I'm not going to give a list here, though I want to address two of the main ones. I wanted to imbue the everyday with magic. The kids needed to encounter the fantastic in the guise of known items. Excalibur appears in KoS as a pocketknife. This seemed reasonable to me. Lots of young boys, at least where and when I grew up, were given pocketknives very early as a sign and test of responsibility. On a more personal note, my Dad is a dealer in pocketknives (not a collector... he buys them and then resells them for a profit). He knows a lot about the history and other minutia of knives, and I have been around this forever (just as an aside, I don't carry one, a fact that completely befuddles my father who doesn't understand how I can get through a single day without needing one in some capacity).

The Holy Grail appears as a tarnished baseball trophy. The obvious cup-like nature aside, this became an important symbol in the novel of the unity of past generations. When I was little there was an older man at my church named George McNeely. His wife had died and he lived in a small 2-room building near me. A friend and I would go to visit him occasionally and he always welcomed us with snacks and pop and told us stories of his youth. I realize now just how lonely he must have been. In his living room there was a large baseball trophy he and his teammates had won sometime when he was young. It was an item of great pride for him and he told us many stories from those games. In my mind, this symbol of his youth and a better time in his life became the Grail of my story (and George became a character in my story as well).

So, armed with these few notes on paper and a larger story in my head I sat down to write.

I don't know exactly what was different this time, other than some of the vague notions I have outlined here, but for some reason this time I wrote. And wrote. And stuck with it and wrote some more. My goal was 1000 words per day, and I wrote almost every day. There were slow periods, of course, and days when I didn't write because the rest of life got in the way. There were days when I wrote well over my daily goal (one magical Saturday when I was writing what would become the final chapter of part one of the novel when I topped 6000 words, to date my record, and they were all pretty good words).

The story took on a life of its own. It's cliché to say that, but it's true. The outline in my head grew, Characters began to say and do things I never had planned. Vivian in particular, simply wouldn't shut up and made me write her a bigger role than I intended when I introduced her (and as a result she is the character most people have commented on when all was said and done).

One of the problems I had before this was second guessing every sentence. I would write one and then immediately attempt to polish it into perfection. I would introduce a minor character, one who played no role beyond set dressing, and then become paralyzed by the need to find just the right name for this nobody. My internal editor wouldn't allow my writer to write. Somewhere during the articles and The Guardians and Grey Legacy I had learned to differentiate between the voices of my internal editor and my writer, and when my writer needed to work I simply didn't allow the editor in the room. His job isn't creativity. If anything, he is a detriment to it. His job is to clean up after the writer is done. It's an important job (and one he's more lax at in this blog, given the number of misspellings I find when I reread my posts), but only after the writer does his part.

It's a little schizophrenic, but I find this division of labor essential.

I wrote the first draft in about 5 or 6 months, then spent considerable time with the cleanup. In the end I was very happy with the results. I reread it in its entirety recently when I got the rights back back. I'm still happy with it, though there are some edits I would make. I'm a better writer now, but I'm not embarrassed by my first book.

At the top of this page there is a link to a King of Summer specific page. There you will find the back cover book description and a collections of online reviews the book garnered. As time passes I will update this page with any new information or reviews I receive.

And if anyone reads it and wants to know more about the specific Arthurian Easter Eggs, ask me. I'll be glad to bore you with them.

More Grey Legacy Promo Stuff

Back in the mini-comics day we released an 8 page introduction to the characters and setting of the Grey Legacy universe called the Grey Legacy Primer. None of this info was essential to understanding the comic, but it gave some insights into our plans and where we were going.

None of these are available for sale any longer.

This is a 4-page promotional flyer we made to promote the Xeric-funded publication of Grey Legacy #1.

We repurposed this image a number of times. It was the cover of the first mini-comic. A color version of it served as the back cover of the actual comics. The characters on top were our main cast. The ones on the bottom pointed to stories and ideas that would eventually expand our universe. I mentioned that Brix was seen in the background of a single panel of the first story and completely forgot she was on the back cover in full color.

The last page was our vanity page of quotes and reviews.

More images

This is a promotional flyer for Wavemakers #2, listing all of the contributors.

This is our certificate for winning the Best Mid-mag category.

Writing Part 7 (Comics Part 4)

Continued from my previous blog...

I'm a little fuzzy on the dates of some of the following, but the general sequence of events is correct.

In the summer if 1991, I believe, I was reading an issue of The Comics Buyers Guide, a weekly newspaper dedicated to comics fandom (one of the first and longest running mags about comics). There was a brief, two-paragraph article announcing the formation of the Xeric Foundation. Peter Laird, artist of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and multi-gazillionaire by this point had formed Xeric to fund charitable organizations in his home state (Vermont at the time, I think, but don't quote me on that), and to give money to comics creators for the purpose of self-publishing. There wasn't a lot of specific info but there was an address to write to for more information.

We literally had a letter in the mail the next day. Within a few days we received a packet of information giving us the guidelines. Essentially, we had to write a full grant proposal. We needed to submit a publishing plan, a proposed budget, story outlines, artwork, a marketing plan... the whole bit. The deadline by which all of this had to be turned in by was the following January, I think. We were good to go with the story outline and artwork, but the rest of that stuff was a little out of our area of expertise. I had had a grant-writing class in undergrad, but remembered very little of it. We asked around for some input, but essentially we figured a lot of it out on our own.

Let me stress again, this was pre-internet, so the option of typing a few questions into a search engine or sending emails simply was not an option. I'm not even sure how we figured some of this stuff out. We wrote to several of the comics distributors (this was in the day when there were several distributors, instead of just Diamond), and received packets of info from them in terms of what they needed from a new publisher. After talking to a couple of local printing companies we discovered none of them had the slightest clue of how to print comics. Somehow we found out what printer Fantagraphics used to print their books (we had decided on a black and white magazine-sized format like Love & Rockets was printed). I don't know if there was an article someplace, or if the printer was listed in some of their comics, or if there was an ad, or if I simply called information and got Fantagraphics number and called them. I was much better at doing that sort of thing in those days. I spoke directly to the guy who printed L&R and he knew exactly what we wanted. He sent us paper stocks to compare, both interior pages and cover stocks. He explained what he needed for the color covers. He told us what a print run would cost and how much they would charge us for shipping to the various distributors.

So we wrote the proposal, using all of this information to come up with a budget and a plan. After a lot of sweat we sent it in. We included copies of our mini-comics to show what the final product would look like. Then we waited.

I honestly don't remember if we found out through the mail or a phone call, but sometime in 1992 we were told we had been awarded the Grant.

Xeric has funded eight projects a year (two sets of four every six months or so) starting in 1993 and continuing up until this year. In July, 2011 it was announced that the Xeric Foundation was officially coming to an end. Some figures say they awarded over two and a half million dollars in the course of their existence. I know of two other Xeric winners in Pittsburgh. Tom Scioli won in 1999 for Myth of 8-Opus. Tom has gone on to work for the major publishers, most notably on Godland for Image. Rachel Masilimani won in 2000 for RPM Comics. Many of the recipients went on to regular comics careers.

We were one of the first four projects funded. Now all we had to do was publish the book.

Our contact person at the Xeric Foundation was a lovely woman named Kendall Clark Engleman. We never met, but she was amazingly patient and helpful in every phone conversation we had. She let us know that since this was the first time the Award had been granted they were all completely new to this process and were learning what to do the same time as we were. It made the experience less stressful somehow, knowing that they were, at times, stumbling for answers as well.

Fred and I actually filled out the paperwork to become a Limited Partnership. We got a tax ID number, a business bank account, and a giant checkbook. During this time we were both working as temps, and doing freelance art and writing, as well as this business endeavor... our taxes were a giant pain in the ass the next year.

Around that same time I started teaching a class on Comics for Kids through the Community College of Allegheny County (CCAC). I answered an ad looking for people to teach various specialty courses. The proposal I sent was for an adult class, but I think someone there just couldn't imagine that comics could be for adults. Imagine my surprise when I showed up for my first class and it was a room full of ten-year-olds. This was not the class I thought I was teaching and I was simply not prepared with appropriate material at all. But, the class was scheduled to run for 12 weeks or so, and they were paying me at a time when those temp check were spread pretty thin. So I improvised. I improvised every semester for the next three or four years. It was a good experience. One of my students was Eddie Piskor, who has since gone on to a career as a professional comics artist. He has worked with Harvey Pekar on American Splendor, The Beats and Macedonia. He has created his own series of graphic novels called Wizzywig, and did the character design for the Cartoon Network Adult Swim series Mongo Wrestling Alliance. I'm incredibly proud of Ed, and happy that now he is an adult we have developed a friendship.

Anyway, back to the Xeric experience...

The size we had published the mini-comics was proportional to the magazine format we wanted, so we really didn't need to change the art (that was planned from the beginning for just this reason). We planed on using the first two stories we had published, You Make Me Feel Like Dancing and Wild Universe for the Xeric issue. It would have been easy to simply use the already finished pages. But no, we had to make life difficult for ourselves. By this time it had been a year or two since we had drawn that minis and we knew we were better artists. So we redrew the entire first story. When that was done we redrew the entire second story.

Madness!

But it was worth it. We really were better artists the second time around. We didn't change the layouts or page design or elements of the storytelling at all, but Fred re-penciled and re-lettered, and I re-inked every bloody page. If you compare the two versions side-by-side you can see the difference. We can, anyway. We added a couple of new intro pages, as well as a couple of chapter headers, wrote an editorial, designed and produced the front and back covers and we were ready to go.

While we were doing that we were also doing the business end of things. We wrote to the distributors again to see exactly what we needed to do to solicit a comic through them. There were very specific guidelines from each company. In the end I believe we were carried by four distributors: Diamond, Capitol City, Heroes World, and Styx Publications, a Canadian distributor. Diamond was the least helpful of them all. The others sent very professional packets of info to us with everything we needed to do business with them. Diamond returned our original letter with brief answers to our questions hastily scribbled in the margins. As a result our info got to Diamond a couple of days after their deadline (which they hadn't bothered to tell us). Were still included in the catalog, but were in the “other comics” section in the back instead of an alphabetical by company listing in the main part of the book. Capitol City and Heroes World both hooked us up. At both companies someone on staff really took a liking to the packet we sent them. Not only was our listing in the main catalog but in both we received little promo boxes as one of their Indy picks for the month.

Styx solicitation page.

This has the solicitation for issue #2 as well, which makes me think

we solicited through them a little later than the others.

Heroes World solicitation.

Diamond solicitation.

Capitol City solicitation.

At the same time, Comics Buyers Guide was running sample pages of indy comics in their weekly paper. We sent the entire first story and they printed it. I have to believe that got us some notice and sales.

Finally, we sent it to the printer. It hit the comics shops in June of 1993 (it was drastically overshadowed by the same-day release of the first Batman/Grendel crossover by Matt Wagner). The Xeric Foundation paid all of the bills and we got to keep the profits from whatever we sold.

You can read the entire issue at Drunk Duck, as well as see a whole bunch of other Grey Legacy related artwork.

We didn't exactly light the 90's on fire. If you know anything about the comics scene in 1993 you know that small press, black and white books from unknown creators was not what was hot at the time (Jeff Smith's Bone notwithstanding). We weren't Spawn or Youngblood, and we hadn't killed Superman in our pages. Our book, while I believe in it, was never going to be the biggest thing in the comics market, but man did we pick a bad year to be Alternative.

We did signings at several local comics shops, including my current place of employment, Phantom of the Attic. We appeared there with artist Steve Lieber who was drawing Hawkman at DC at the time. He's done a ton of stuff since, including the art on the comic Whiteout which became a movie. We did a few conventions, this time with an actual book in our hands. We met Wayno (he was in Wavemakers with us) at a Pittsburgh Con and discovered he lived here too (I still see Wayno on a fairly regular basis at comics events). In 1994 we were among the dozen or so publishers at the very first Small Press Expo in Bethesda, Maryland, along with Dave Sim, Steve Bissette and a small handful of others. SPX still exists. The last time I went there were dozens and dozens of publishers represented (take a look at this year's enormous guest list here).

We went to a huge Philadelphia convention to promote the book. We weren't official guests, just attendees, but we had a book and a lot of flyers, and we wanted to show it to some people. Peter Laird was there, so we got the chance to thank him in person. He told us he thought we had a “really good book.” Scott McCloud was a guest in Artist's Alley. This was the year that his acclaimed Understanding Comics was published. Unfortunately for him, fortunately for us, far more people were interested in getting their picture taken in the Spawn-Mobile than in talking to him about comics. So while the line for that wrapped around the convention center we pretty much had Scott all to ourselves. I had been a huge fan of his book Zot! and Scott was one of the creators who had always written back to us offering encouragement and support. While looking through Grey Legacy he paused at what was then, and is still, my favorite page from the book. He said, more to himself than to us, “Wow... this is really strong work.”

My knees went a little weak. We gave him a copy of the book, but he bought a t-shirt from us.

Given everything we had going against us we did pretty well. We made some money, some from the distributors, some from selling our books by hand, some through the mail. More importantly, we received a lot of feedback, most of it overwhelmingly positive.

We started production of issue #2. Two-thirds of it had appeared in the mini-comics. But, we were burnt out. One of the lessons we learned is that there was no way we could produce a book of that size on anything resembling a regular schedule. Fred and I, for the first time, started to get on each others nerves. The deadlines and pressure to produce, coupled with the need to promote our work, and the need to pay our bills (still working as temps and living check to check at this point, even with the bump in our finances from the comic), really started to show. I want to stress that even with this, he and I never really fell out or fought. The friendship was and is more important. He hit a fairly major artist's block that I know frustrated him far more than it did me. It took him a long time to work through it. He did though, and these days is working pretty regularly as an artist for Topps Trading Cards doing Wacky Packages and Garbage Pail Kids (check out his stuff here). I'm sure I brought my own issues to the table as well.

I'm sad to say Grey Legacy #2 has never seen the light of day. To save our sanity and our friendship (though, really, that part was never in question), we backed away from it. We still have the pages, and periodically we both talk about finally finishing it. I would like to, and so would he, and if the time is ever right it may happen. But it's not as important to me now as it was then.

In the meantime, we didn't come close to selling the entire print run of Grey Legacy #1. Someone else paid for it, and after the initial set-up costs of the printer additional copies were negligible. So we way over-printed. Fred and I both have unopened boxes of the first issue in our basements. Someday I'll figure out a way to sell them online that doesn't involve more envelopes and stamps than I want to deal with (though a SASE with cash in it would be a return to the starting point of all of this).

Other than random drawings here and there it would be the fall of 2009 before I produced another full comic book, this time on my own. I wasn't idle all those years. My art took a back seat to my writing.

More on that next time.