Writing Part 5 (Comics Part 2)

Continued from my previous blog...

So Fred graduated high school and moved to Edinboro University of Pennsylvania while I graduated from Waynesburg College and started work (first as an administrative assistant to my local State Representative and then as a counselor at an ARC group home). During the two years we lived apart we engaged in regular correspondence. This was in those halcyon years before email or the internet, and long distance phone calls were expensive. So we wrote real letters. Lots of them. In addition to writing about our day-to-day lives (relationships, school/work, comics, movies, books and music), we began to seriously develop the Shadowlock world.

Our letters were full of character sketches, ideas and designs, back-story and plot ideas. We started to see Shadowlock as a more serious vehicle for the kind of stories we wanted to tell (though not too serious... there are lots of remnants of the Hitchhiker's Guide influence). We were young and finding our voices and styles. A lot of what we were reading at that time made it's way into the work. Philosophy and psychology and science fiction and everything else we were into at the time. This was in the mid-80's when the birth of the Direct Market had opened comics up to a whole new world of small press publishers. We were devouring this influx of material from new creators and seeing possibilities for comics beyond what Marvel and DC had offered. All of this went into our work as well. Books like Love and Rockets, Nexus, Grimjack, Elfquest, Cerebus, Mage, Grendel and Zot! (among many, many others), provided a direct influence on the way we wanted to make comics, if not in terms of actual content or art, then in terms of storytelling and approach. There was an unprecedented movement in the small press that allowed for more idiosyncratic visions and creative control and we wanted to be a part of it.

In 1986 I was burned out with my job at the ARC and decided it was time to avoid the real world for awhile and go back to grad school. Edinboro was an obvious choice. Fred was there. I had made several trips to visit him and met a lot of people. There was an open space at the apartment he was living in (Fred, me, and four other guys... it was one of those college apartments. Lots of stories and possible fodder for further blogging). Edinboro also had a pretty highly-rated graduate Psychology program (plus, they gave me an assistantship that paid for most of my tuition there and gave me a stipend to live on), though, to be fair, that was really a secondary consideration. I moved there in the fall of 1986.

It has been said that 1986 was “The Best Year in Comics, Ever!” and I'm inclined to agree. There are lots of reasons for this. Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen were both released. The John Byrne relaunch of Superman came out. The first trade paperback collection of Maus came out (it would eventually win the Pulitzer Prize).

But another reason for that was what has come to called the “Black and White Comics Explosion of 1986.” The first black and white issue of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were first printed in 1984, and by 1986 the creators, Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, were well on their way to becoming millionaires. There are lots of reasons for this that are too complex a part of comic book history to go into in detail here (ask my students). One of the results of this success is that everyone who could hold a pencil wanted to produce a black and white comic with the belief that they too could become fabulously wealthy. In the short term comic shops stocked everything so they too could cash in on the next big thing. By doing so they created a market where almost anything of any quality, or lack thereof, could be moderately successful.

Jumping ahead for just a moment, in the long run the market simply couldn't support it, most of the books were crap, and though a few significant creators got their start here (Jim Lee and Guy Davis come to mind), most people didn't become millionaires. This collapse led to what has become known as the “Great Black and White Comics Implosion of 1987.”

It was fun while it lasted and Fred and I were in the thick of it. This had been going on for a little while by the time I moved to Edinboro, so we had already been making plans. We put together a proposal package of art and story ideas and began sending them out to every small publisher we could find an address for. In fall of '86 we got a bite. We received the following letter from Showcase Publications:

Don't try the phone numbers.

I'm pretty sure they don't work anymore.

We were stoked, to say the least. Now I'm pretty sure that unless you knew us then, or have heard my stories before, you've never heard of Showcase Publications. Even in the middle of the B&W explosion they were pretty small potatoes. But it was a chance to be published. We called and talked to Brian (whose last name I don't remember and can't decipher from the letter), and signed a contract with Showcase Publications. Shadowlock was about to become a published reality.

Somehow, in the middle of both of us being in college (my first semester of grad school, the most difficult academic semester of my life), we managed to write and draw thirty-two pages (a main story and a back-up feature) of Shadowlock #1.

We were still finding our style (as the following pages show). This was at a point where we both wanted to do a little bit of everything. As a result the art is a mishmash of styles. There are panels that I pencilled and Fred inked. There are panels that Fred pencilled and I inked. There are panels that are a mix of both.

The inking is a mix of tech pens, quill pens and brush. Neither of us had really developed that skill set with any tool yet.

Other than that it's difficult to break down who did what in our creative process. We worked on layouts and dialog together, just doing thumbnails and throwing words at each other until we agreed on something. We never really had a problem with egos on any project we've ever worked on together. In general I'm willing to say that probably the majority of the characters (and at least their initial design), and the overall, long-term plot of the book came from me. Fred was much better at the details, fleshing out the cultures and their philosophies, as well as the architecture, clothing styles and the spaceship designs. He added personal details to the characters. This is a generality and Fred certainly created his share of characters (Lesterfarr key among them), and I added my share of the rest of the stuff.

Somehow it all came together. We mailed our package of materials to Showcase and waited for the first issue to hit the stands. In the meantime, we were out there promoting our book. We had met a number of other small press publishers and creators at conventions. That was a magical time. We all believed we were on the forefront of something big in the comic book world. At Mid-Ohio Con in 1986 there was a tremendous sense of small press and community and camaraderie. We were all mutually supportive and excited to be a part of the process. We exchanged artwork, writing and art tips, and experiences with publishing. We hobnobbed with the big name stars at the Con (we had drinks with Frank Miller at our table at the Holiday Inn in Mansfield, Ohio), and they were friendly and supportive.

Fred and I were actually the featured guests at a few local cons. This was a mixed blessing. It was cool to finally be on the “comics professional” side of the table, and promoting our work was important. But, the downside is, other than our art, we had nothing to show. Shadowlock #1 was still being produced at the time this was all happening. We didn't have the actual comic book in our hands to promote.

We never got one either. Showcase Publications, like a lot of other companies, went belly-up during the“Great Black and White Comics Implosion of 1987” before our book was ever sent to the printer.

We were devastated, of course. We weren't the only ones. The next year at Mid-Ohio Con, 1987, there were a lot of disappointed small press comics creators. The excitement of the previous year was gone and so were most of the books. We all commiserated, supportive in our failure as we had been in our dreams.

We got our art back from the publisher. I knew some people who didn't. We lost no money, only time, and I still see that as a worthwhile investment in our art. We produced a lot of pages and met a deadline. We learned a lot about the art of comics.

In retrospect, as disappointing as it was at the time, I'm glad no one actually saw the finished product. Shadowlock #1 was incredibly amateurish. Like a lot of the people who published B&W comics in 1986 we simply weren't ready. We weren't working at a professional level, and Showcase Publications was simply trying to cash in on a fad while they could. This disappointment forced us to retreat and to rethink our entire approach to the story.

The B&W small press comics phenomenon also retreated, went underground and became the mini-comics movement of the late 80's. By then we were better artists, better writers, and better storytellers. We were a little smarter for our experiences as well. Shadowlock had morphed into a bigger, better project called Grey Legacy.

More on that next time.

Writing Part 4 (Comics Part 1)

As I've said, I've always known I wanted to be involved in the world of comics (Mission Accomplished!). I learned to read from comics. There was, and is, something about that magic interplay between images and text that appeals to me like no other art form. When comics are done well they work a very specific kind of magic that no other storytelling medium does (and this is where I point out that this is true of every storytelling medium at it's best). But in addition to being a fan of comics, I have always wanted to create them as well, long before I knew anything about the process of actually doing so.

My earliest memory of “creating comics” was in church with my grandmother when I was little. I mean really little, like four or five years old little. The memory is vague, of course, but I'm making the assumption that I was fidgeting and bored. She gave me a notepad and a pencil (maybe a pen) to keep me occupied. What I drew is the primary part of the memory, and I'm sure my mind's eye and the many years since have warped the actual visuals, but... I rendered a stick figure rendition of the Fantastic Four.

As a child, and on into my teens and adulthood (I still do this...) I filled sketchpads with drawings of superheroes. At first, like so many artists, I copied my favorite drawings from the comics, as well as from other sources (I remember doing a decent reproduction of Sequoia from the cover of one book of a series of American biographies for kids I was devouring from the library at the time. This would have been around third grade). These were not tracings. I would look at the art and draw it freehand. I was determined to someday have drawn every superhero that had ever existed (at the time I had no idea what that would actually entail).

Not content with the number of characters that already existed, I also created my own. Lots and lots of them. I think most people who read comics at that age have done something similar. Some of them go on to professional work in comics and introduce characters that had their origins in the brains and sketchbooks of ten-year-olds. I wanted to create my own stories, with my own characters, not simply write what other people have already created.

Flash forward to my late teens and early twenties. I met Fred Wheaton around that time and the first thing that bonded us as friends was our mutual love of comics. Thirty years of friendship later, with lots of shared life experiences, comics is still one of the topics we discuss pretty much every time we talk. Fred also drew comics, and wanted to create his own. We very quickly embarked on a series of collaborations.

I want to go on record here, and this may embarrass Fred (though this is the least of the embarrassing things I could say here)... Fred has always been a better artist than I am. When I first met him, he was younger than me and as crude as we both know his art was then compared to what it became, he was better than me then. He's better than me now. He has a sense of composition and a surety of line I envy. He simply sees better than I do, and is able to translate what he sees onto the page with more assurance.

Anyway...

We co-wrote part of an X-Men/Micronauts crossover and drew a few pages (Marvel actually did this series, much better than we could have done, a year or so later). We started creating characters for other series. We really only had a vague idea of how to go about making comics. In 1981 we attended PittCon '81, our first ever comics convention, and met a lot of comics pros and learned a lot about the process. Scripting, pencilling, inking, layout and design, storytelling. It is a complicated craft and we're still learning it, but that Con connected a lot of the dots for us very early on.

Somewhere in there Fred began writing a series of short SciFi prose comedy stories (inspired by Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) featuring himself and his friends as main characters. They were full of in-jokes and Pop Culture references that no one but a few of us would get today (and don't ask either him or me... you're not going to get to read them). He wrote three and then I wrote a fourth one. I introduced a ridiculous villain by the name of Shadowlock, the most feared man in the universe. He had a robot companion named 7Q9 and carried the Necroblaster, a gun of limitless and completely undefined power.

So of course he became the star of his own comic. We made him a little more serious in tone, though the comedic elements certainly remained. Fred was still in high school at this time, and for some kind of art project we wrote and drew a short story (8 or 10 pages... I don't remember) and printed and bound a few copies.

Spiral Bound. I'm pretty sure this is my

pencils with Fred's inks.

This was the beginning of what would eventually turn into our Grey Legacy universe, the very same universe that my current Brix comic strips (accessible elsewhere on this page) takes place.

It has changed a lot over the years.

This would have been 1983 or '84. In 1986 we had a contract to do a full-fledged, nationally-distributed comic book series called Shadowlock.

But that's the next blog...

Join us next time, same blog channel, for Writing Part 5 (Comics Part 2)!

Writing Part 3 (Getting Paid)

I'm going to go a little out of chronological order with this. My experience writing, drawing, and eventually self-publishing comics sort of falls into the general category of “getting paid” but it's a story in and of itself. I'll come back to that later.

I moved to Pittsburgh in the early 90's for a job. Lots of people in my life at present don't know that have a Master's Degree in Clinical Psychology. It doesn't surprise me that they don't because that feels like a lifetime ago to me, another life entirely. I had followed the path of getting a good education to get a good job and at the time I still thought that being a Psychologist of some kind was my primary vocation. I don't regret the education, or the time spent getting it. Some of my best memories are of that time period. But the jobs... well, let's just say that Psychology was not my primary vocation.

One day, in a fit of pique... rage is a better word, I walked out of my professional career and never looked back. I had some money in the bank, but not another job to go to. Not having anyone other than myself to support allowed me to make this hasty decision. It was one of the two or three best decisions of my life.

So began six or seven years of living from paycheck to paycheck from unpredictable temp jobs (including the seasonal job of department store Santa... If you saw the Pittsburgh Christmas parade around 1993 or 94, that was me that John Fedko interviewed on the float). It was stressful and maddening and free. Within the first six months of leaving my career I had sold my first freelance art and writing. Now, I want to stress, I never made enough from either to live on it. But I was doing it.

The art was mainly comics related stuff, so that belongs in the next blog.

The writing, like a lot of things in my life, seemed to fall in my lap (people say I'm lucky, and maybe so, but I believe a big part of luck is putting yourself in it's way. Make connections, reach out, let people know what you're doing. Every bit of luck I've ever had can be traced back to specific connections I've made to set things in motion). The Spirits of Independence Tour came to Pittsburgh. This was a small press comics con, featuring Dave Sim of Cerebus fame, among others. Phantom of the Attic Comics (my current employer, though not yet at that time) was one of the only retail sponsors of the show. A friend of mine, Dean Focareta, was writing an article about the con for In Pittsburgh Newsweekly, the free weekly City Paper kind of thing at the time. Another mutual friend, Chris Potocki, was working as the assistant Arts and Entertainment editor for the paper and had given Dean the assignment. Dean called me up and asked if I would introduce him to some of the comics pros at the show (I had met and befriended a number of them over the year at various conventions). I said sure. I also asked Potocki if I could write something as well. Chris said to give him a couple hundred words as a sidebar for the article.

On the Friday night of the show, Steve Bissette (artist of Alan Moore's Swamp Thing, among many, many other things), was giving a slideshow lecture on the history of the Horror genre in comics. Dean was unable to attend this, and Steve is one of those artists I had befriended, so an article was born. I wrote it over the weekend and sent it to Chris. On Wednesday of the following week it was published exactly as I had written it, with no edits whatsoever. A week or so later I received a check for fifty bucks. In those days of temp work, fifty bucks was significant. I called Chris up and asked what I needed to do continue writing.

So began several years of being a fairly regular contributor to In Pittsburgh. I guess I should address that, yes, Chris was a friend of mine and he was doing me a solid. That said, he was an assistant editor with people above him who also liked my work. Chris left the paper not long after, but I kept on writing for it. I went through several editors; Margie Romero, Steve Segal and Mike Shanley. They were all very light-handed when it came to editing my work.

I wrote mostly entertainment based articles. CD reviews and concert previews for the most part, sprinkled with the occasional local comic book themed story. The pay wasn't great (though broken down to an hourly wage it wasn't bad for the time I actually spent on it), but the swag was great! I received a lot of free CD's to review. I saw a lot of free concerts. I went out to more concerts during this time when I was working as a temp and had no money than at any other time in my life. I interviewed the singer Jewel when she was 18 years old, about six months before she broke really big onto the national scene. My first cover feature was a phone interview with Frank Black, lead singer of the Pixies. The Pixies rank pretty high on my list of all-time favorite bands, so this was amazing. A couple of years later I met and hung out with him with a group of friends at the Squirrel Cage (a bar in Pittsburgh, for you out-of-towners). I met and hung out with Alt-Country star Robbie Fulks a dozen times or more. There were others. No one really, really big or famous, but in the world of Indy Rock they were people I was pretty excited about.

In Pittsburgh was eventually bought out and closed down by the City Paper. Within a year, maybe a little bit more, a new independent newsweekly called PULP came to life in Pittsburgh. Mike Shanley was Arts editor for this and called me up to see if I wanted to write for them. I did for the whole two years of the paper's existence. During this time I also sold a couple of articles to Pittsburgh Magazine, and had a few articles published in two different nationally distributed music magazines, Kulture Deluxe, and the Alt-Country bible, No Depression.

About the time PULP went out of business I was feeling a little dry. I felt like I had said pretty much all I had to say in that format and that, even though I was writing about different bands or subjects, I was writing the same old things over and over. By that time I wanted to move on to other projects.

This was a great experience for me. Getting a financial reward (as well as CD's and concerts) is always motivating. Seeing your work in print is always a good feeling as well. It's validating. For awhile I was one of the voices of Pittsburgh. Every so often someone still recognizes my name from something they read. It also taught me some discipline. I had deadlines I had to meet, and though all of my editors will tell you I pretty much always sent articles the day they were due (I had usually written them that morning), I never missed a deadline. It was good working with editors. Though they left most of my work unmolested they did occasionally ask for changes, or edit my work. I can only think of one time that I really disagreed with their choices, and even that was a good learning experience.

I'm not sure I'll ever go back to it. Nothing against it, but I just don't feel the motivation the way I did then. I might not turn down a gig if it was offered, but I'm probably going to need more than CD's and concerts at this point.

Writing Part 2 (sort of...)

King of Summer wasn't the first thing I wrote. There are notebooks and digital files full of unfinished projects that span the course of my life. It wasn't even the first thing I had published. First novel yes, first professional writing, no.

I'm not sure when I decided I wanted to be a writer. It feels like it has always been a part of my identity, not something I made a choice about at any point. I love to read. I love story. Being part of that world, whether I was “successful' or not, has always felt like the most natural thing in the world to me.

I learned to read very early, mainly from comic books. Mom is an avid reader and always read to me as a child. Comics were simply part of what she read to me, along with children's books. I remember drawing superheroes in notepads at a very early age, and even then I knew they weren't simply drawings, but part of a story. Because of comics the idea of images and text coinciding has always been the way I viewed the world. I am a very visual thinker and when I write I see everything very clearly. I know how I would lay out the comic version of anything I write. Then it's a matter of describing that in words.

I graduated quickly to “real” books. By third and fourth grade I had read Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and Howard Pyle's Robin Hood and loved them. I'm pretty sure I didn't pick up the deeper layers of Huck Finn and read it as a boy's adventure story, but I read it. Robin Hood was a huge influence on me (and I'm still drawn to the imagery). In delving into my memory this may have been responsible for my first attempts at writing. I wanted to stage a play of Robin Hood and cast all my friends in the roles. This was not simply playing in the woods. This was an actual, “hey, let's put on a play in the barn” moment, only I didn't want to do it in the barn. No, this was going to outdoor theater-in-the-round. I wrote scripts based on the novel and cast my friends (I was going to be Robin, of course) and gave them lines to memorize. Though some of them seemed excited by the project and others indulged me nothing ever came of this. It was way beyond my ability to organize and make real.

But I wrote.

As an aside... in sixth grade I was cast as Will Scarlet in a musical version of Robin Hood that my school put on. I'm pretty sure being the only redhead in the class was my primary qualification.

In my early teens I read a lot of bad Westerns and “Men's Adventure” series. My favorite Western was a series called Edge (the main character's name). I read series with such testosterone-filled names as The Death Merchant, The Butcher, and The Destroyer. These were probably... no, they were definitely inappropriate material. They were filled with over-the-top gratuitous violence and graphic sex (this at a time when I had yet to experience either of these at any level). These weren't the only types of books I read. I did eventually discover Lord of the Rings and various good Science Fiction. Somewhere in there I read Shogun and Roots. But, I read a lot of these adventure novels. So many that I decided to write one.

So when I was fifteen I started filling a notebook with the chapters of the first book in my proposed Men's Action/Adventure series called Knight and Armour (the main characters were named Todd Knight and John Armour... anyone notice a theme that still runs through my life?). They were ex-Mob hitmen, on the run from their former employers. It was, and I quote myself here, “filled with over-the-top gratuitous violence and graphic sex (this at a time when I had yet to experience either of these at any level)”... and it shows. While it was probably pretty good for a fifteen-year-old, it was terrible, by any real standards of writing.

But when it was done, and I did finish it, it was 90-plus pages of single-spaced type. Not a bad achievement for a kid.

After that was the aborted attempt at poetry (all bad), and some fantasy short stories of the barbarian/sword and sorcery type. I had been sucked into the worlds of Fritz Lieber and Michael Moorcock by then. I sent some comic book mini-series proposals to both Marvel and DC.

By my mid-20's I had discovered Hermann Hesse and Henry Miller and Jack Kerouac and spent probably the next ten years trying to write like them. My friend and collaborator, Fred Wheaton and I spent a tremendous amount of time creating what was to become the Grey Legacy universe and wrote and drew an issue of a book called Shadowlock. We both also began contributing short comics to some late 80's 'Zines, as well as publishing our own mini-comics. As a result of this, Matt Wagner (creator of the comic book series Mage and Grendel) asked us to submit a proposal for his Grendel Tales series. At the time he said he liked what we sent him, but a decade-long copyright dispute prevented him from publishing the series for a while.

And I kept trying to write novels. Eventually, finally, in the 90's, I began to get paid for my words and became... Ta-Dahhh!!! A professional writer!

If getting paid is the primary definition of that.

More on that next time.

Make It So

My friend Margaret Bashaar has recently edited and published a book of poetry based on Star Trek: The Next Generation. She asked me to draw a cover for her several months ago. The book is being released this week. You can see my cover image and get more details on the contributors and how to order the book at:

Hyacinth Girl Press

Margaret is a wonderful poet in her own right. Check out her other projects while there. Her blog, Plucked From Ogygia is always a good read as well.

All this and she's an awesome friend as well.

Congrats Margaret! Thanks for making me part of this. Much love to you, as always.

My First Novel Experience

For those who don't know, back in 2002 my first novel, King Of Summer was published in a trade paperback format by PublishAmerica. I recently reaquried the publishing rights to the work, so I thought now would be a good time to reflect on the whole experience.

It was, overall, a good one. I didn't get rich or make any bestseller lists. I did make some money and get a lot of positive feedback from readers. I also learned a lot about the publishing business. I went to some writing conferences, met editors and agents and, of course, other writers. It was good to share our stories.

I guess I should address the nature of PublishAmerica. It has been controversial over the years it has existed, and in some cases, rightfully so. PublishAmerica (PA) is a Print-On-Demand, or POD publisher. What this means is they utilize modern printing technology so that rather than committing to a huge print run for an author they only print the number of copies they actually have orders for. This, in theory, cuts down on expenses. They are not, or at least when I first signed up with them they weren't, a vanity press. They are a royalty-paying publisher, and on record here I never paid them a dime when my book was in print. They had editorial services for many of their authors. My book was pretty much published as I wrote it, so I didn't have any editorial input (though I have talked with other PA authors who did). I was sent PDF proofs of my book and had a lot of input into the cover design (I liked the photo they used, hated the bad Photoshop elements they added to it). They made my book available to Amazon and Barnes & Noble online. My book was distributed by the two largest book distributors, Ingram and Baker & Taylor, and I made a few overseas sales through them as well. I received royalty statements/checks every six months. Like I said, I didn't make a lot of money, but I made some.

There were some good reviews posted. You can view them at these three places (there are used copies still for sale here, but no new ones are being printed, so I won't make any money off new orders. If you want to read it stay tuned to this space for some announcements in the next few weeks).

Amazon

Barnes and Noble

The Copacetic Comics Company

Now on to the complaint department. My book was overpriced. I'm sorry, but $21.95 is too much to pay for a trade paperback of any book, let alone a short one from an unknown author. This had to have a negative impact on sales. PA did nothing to actually promote the book other than list it as available. I realize that promotion is at least partially the responsibility of the author these days, and I did some, but would it kill you to send out a few review copies? They made copies available to me at a significant discount which I could then resell at a higher profit than my royalties, but the number of copies I could move myself was limited. If I didn't work at a comics shop that agreed to put my book on the shelf (and a legion of loyal friends I could guilt into buying it) I wouldn't have sold half the personal copies I did. As time went by PA sent more and more “deals” to me to get me to buy more copies myself. It was evident to me that I was the only customer for my book I had left and they would rather keep trying to sell to me than promote it to anyone else.

So anyway, my contract with them is over and I have full rights to King Of Summer again.

This has all been about the publishing experience, and not so much about the writing experience. I'll talk about that later. I don't think I came up with any great insights from this, but ti was good for me to put it into perspective. Whatever frustrations I may have had with the experience, or with PublishAmerica, I'm still glad it happened. It felt like an accomplishment, and the feedback on the work itself helped me firm up my identity as a writer. I'm not sure I would have continued and produced more work if the book hadn't been published. It provided the inspiration to write more. Once I finished one and had some positive reinforcement it was easier to go on to the next project, and the one after that. While nothing has come of those yet, it's really about showing up and doing the work (and yes, there are days I'm much better at that than others).

I write, I draw, I create because I simply don't know how to live any other way. While in the process of creating it's never about what monetary reward awaits at the end. It's about the act of creation. When it's going well very little feels more rewarding to me (and nothing more frustrating than when it's not going well).

Of course, I wouldn't turn down a multi-million dollar book and movie deal if it came my way. In the meantime I'll keep creating.

So, what's next?

Stay tuned.

Interview

I was recently interviewed as a small press comics creator/publisher. You can read the whole thing at http://www.silbermedia.com/qrd/archives/51wayne.html. If you poke around the site you'll find interviews by a number of Pittsburgh small press affiliates.