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.

Another Addendum: The Fred Files (more images and scans)

Among the various skills that Fred has that I lack is the ability to be far more organized about keeping stuff. He's been reading the blog and this morning I woke up to an email from him that included several files of some of the things I've been talking about.

This is the front of one of the postcards we received from Matt Wagner.

And this is the back (that address isn't good anymore, by the way). This was obviously after he had asked us to submit a Grendel Tales proposal. This was the beginning of a long copyright dispute for Matt (he eventually won and got his rights back). I talked with him about the whole thing at a con years later. He really liked our stuff.

In 1993 or'94, when I was shopping my inking samples around I met Bob Schreck, then editor at Dark Horse Comics (and Matt's brother-in-law). I had all of our Grendel sample pages with me. Bob recognized all of them. "Hey, I saw these in Matt's living room a couple of years ago!"

This is the front of a postcard from Scott McCloud. I know we received several pieces of correspondence from him.

And this is the back (this address doesn't exist anymore either).

My next written blog has a Scott McCloud anecdote.

This is the fan letter from Denmark I mentioned. This guy didn't order a copy of the mini-comic directly from us, so I have no idea how he ever saw out book.

That's it for now. There are a couple of Dave Sim letters I need to scan.

An addendum: Scans and Images

So after writing my last blog I was motivated to dig through some of the boxes in my basement to see if I could find any of the small press things I talked about. I'm not very organized, so this could have been quite the challenge. Thankfully, when I moved to a new house last year (after 17 years in the same place), I put a lot of this stuff in one box (not everything, apparently... grrrr!). This isn't everything, but I wanted to put up some samples. So, while this ties in, this post gives you all a rest from my long-windedness.

One of the characters I created for The Plain Brown Wrapper was Buggly, The Inbred Bear. I wrote and drew five Buggly stories that appeared. Eventually I collected all of them in my own mini-comic edition. This was the cover.

I haven't reprinted the stories anywhere yet, and I don't want to post them here. I want to keep this blog relatively PG-13 or R-rated, and they do not qualify.

The following is a sample of the kind of listing/review we would get when we sent copies to mags like Factsheet Five. I can't find any actual copies of F5.

This was from a mag called Comics FX.

In 1993 we were nominated for several small press awards in Comics Feedback magazine.

We came in second for Best Small Press Comic. The winner, Adventure Strip Digest was really good.

We only came in 4th for Best Writer, but notice who did win. Troy Hickman has written a number of titles for Image Comics in the last few years. We won the Best Mid-Magazine format handily.

The following is a copy of a pretty long interview we did for a 'zine called Webline. This is the first time I've read this in years. Interesting now to see where we were and what our plans were, especially now that so much of it didn't happen. It's also interesting to note that we both still list a lot of the same influences as we did then. Hooray for consistency. Anyone who comes into Phantom will also recognize my rants about the state of the industry. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose...

That's it for now. If I find more stuff I'll post it.

Next time, back to the writing.

Writing Part 6 (Comics Part 3)

Continued from my previous blog...

In the wake of the Black & White implosion Fred and I retreated. We were a little burnt out from the wicked pace we had set producing Shadowlock #1 and to have it come to naught was frustrating. One of the most valuable lessons we learned though was that we were just not ready, and neither was the product. In the process of developing a back-story for Shadowlock, the universe in which he lived had expanded dramatically. I'm not sure exactly when it became clear, or which one of us suggested it, but we realized that the story we wanted to tell didn't start with Shadowlock. It actually began with his father, Greylock in a time time period that predated Shadowlock by 20 or 30 years.

This was a giant leap for us, and gave us a freedom we hadn't had before. We realized our story wasn't simply about one man, but about where he came from, and his entire universe. A lot of the universe he lived in had been influenced by Greylock and the legacy he had left behind. The title of the first issue of Shadowlock, Grey Legacy, became the title of our entire series. This insight led to an unprecedented (for us), burst of creativity as we expanded our ideas into this new concept. We did tons of sketches and filled pages with notes (most of which survive in a couple of 3-ring binders we jokingly refer to as the Grey Legacy Bible). But for all of this creativity, we knew we weren't ready to actually produce the book yet, and decided not to attempt to do so until we had improved our skills.

One of the first issues we had to address was the mish-mash of styles that contributed to the amateurish look of Shadowlock. We couldn't both keep on doing everything. As I've said, from the beginning Fred has been a better artist than I am. Since his pencils are very detailed and precise and mine are a lot more sketchy we decided to let him do the pencilling stage of Grey Legacy (and the tedious job of hand-lettering... that's a skill I've never been able to master). It was at that point that I decided to hone my skills as an inker, and to do so I needed to settle on a tool.

Once, at a convention, I heard a fan ask John Totleben (inker of the Alan Moore Swamp Thing issues and artist on many other comics projects), what was the best tool to use for inking. Totleben is a master of the quill pen (quite honestly, he's the master of any art tool he touches), but I liked his response. He said, “Anything that leaves a mark on paper. What kind of effect do you want?”

Tech pens always felt a little dead to me, and in my hands a quill pen is an ink-spattered blob of a mess waiting to happen. While I still believe that John's answer holds true (and some of my favorite inkers, John included, use different tools), I have always loved the effects that good inkers achieved with a brush, so I decided to make it my inking tool of choice. Talking about inking is a huge topic, and that's not what this whole blog is about. Like any skill it takes a lot of hours, a lot of practice, and a lot of ruined pages. But over time I learned it, and while I still believe that overall Fred is a better artist than I am, I'm pretty sure he would agree with me that I'm the better inker.

While we were reworking Grey Legacy we didn't retreat from publishing entirely. While still in Edinboro Fred and I discovered the existence of The Plain Brown Wrapper, a music and humor 'zine published in Erie, Pennsylvania. They were looking for comics to include and found a whole apartment full of us. Fred and I, as well as roommate Gordon Nelson and friend of the apartment David Matthews (not that David Matthews, as he's fond of pointing out), began to contribute short single-panel gags and one page stories. This kept expanding until we were doing three and four page stories with a variety of characters and ideas.

Through The Plain Brown Wrapper we became aware of the vast underground network of self-published mini-comics and 'zines. This sort of thing had always existed in some format, from the Tijuana Bibles in the early part of the 20^th Century (look them up, but beware! Most are definitely X-rated and NSFW). The underground comix scene of the 60's produced Robert Crumb and S.Clay Wilson and a host of others. But it seemed like there was an explosion of these in the late 80's. Easy access to printers and copiers was part of the reason. Anyone could go to their corner Kinko's store and get cheap reproductions of their work. I don't know if there is any provable direct connection between the collapse of the B&W comics and the rise of the mini or not, but it seems likely to me. 1986 proved that anyone could make comics whether they made money from them or not.

There was a magazine called Factsheet Five where anyone could send their 'zines and mini-comics for a free listing and a review. We began to produce our own minis and to submit them. We would get orders for our books (usually people would just stick some money in an envelope to pay for the book and a stamp). Trading comics was a big part of the scene as well, so we ended up with stacks of poorly-drawn, poorly-written, cheaply-produced comics.

It was wonderful. This was the Do-It-Yourself Punk Rock ethos being applied to comics. It was the Wild West... anything went. Very few people producing mini-comics had any delusion of ever working as a comics professional. They simply wanted to make comics, and in spite of what I've said above, some of them were actually pretty good.

When the time came to publish Grey Legacy this seemed to be the logical first step. We had built a small audience, we didn't have the money to start a publishing business or print a traditional off-set press book, and comic shops and distributors, having learned their lesson in '87, were simply not interested in a small press black and white book from unknown creators.

In spring of 1990 we published Grey Legacy #0. The zero numbering was a play on a trend that was happening comics at the time, but it was also a little bit of presumptuous arrogance on our part. We knew that the eventual plan was to publish actual comics, so we didn't want to confuse future readers with different #1's (are you listening Marvel and DC?). We published #'s 01, 02, and 03. Pretty quickly we were the darlings of the mini-comics world (at least the part of it we were involved with). We were featured in articles and interviews in the scene and sold quite a few copies (we spent a lot of time at Kinko's, this in the pre-computer graphics days of type-setting and manual paste-up). We received a fan letter from Denmark and to this day I couldn't tell you how someone there stumbled across a copy. Not to sound too arrogant, but Grey Legacy was simply a better quality comic than most of what was coming out of the scene. By this time we were working at the professional level we hadn't achieved in the Shadowlock days.

We sent copies to a number of comics professionals whose work we admired, just to see if we could get some feedback. We received a number of very supportive letters and postcards back from Dave Sim (Cerebus), Scott McCloud (Zot! And Eventually Understanding Comics), Mike Allred (Madman) and Matt Wagner (Mage and Grendel). It was during this time that Wagner asked us to do the Grendel Tales proposal I mentioned a couple of blogs ago.

As a result of all of this we were invited to participate in an actual comic book anthology series called Wavemakers. Editor Mark Innes had seen our minis and asked us to do a Grey Legacy story for him (and actually offered to pay us!). We jumped at the chance, of course. This was a book that was going to be distributed to comics shops, and our first stab at real publishing since '87. At first we weren't sure what to do. He had asked for Grey Legacy, and we certainly wanted to pimp our primary project. But, the first few issues were pretty tightly planned. We didn't want to do something from the main story that wouldn't appear in our book. The benefit of expanding our fictional world though was that we now had lots of secondary and tertiary characters to play with. We decided to tell a story set in that world, but not about our main cast. We settled on Brix.

Brix was scheduled to appear in a Grey Legacy story (and if you look really closely you'll see her in the background of page 10, panel 4 of the first Grey Legacy story). She was meant to play a small, but very important role in the overall saga. That said, she was a character I was very fond of. Her role in the main story may have been small, but we were aware she had a life and other stories outside the main narrative.

So we wrote and drew Brix's Bane, a nine-page story, sent it off to Mark Innes, and received a check. Wavemakers #2 came out in January, 1991. Also appearing in the issue were such small press comics luminaries as Evan Dorkin, Matt Howarth, Harvey Pekar and Wayno. This is the first page of the story. You can read the whole thing at Drunk Duck.

This all took place right after I had walked away from my “career” in Psychology. Fred was working a crap job at a mall store and I started my career as a temp. He was doing some freelance art on the side, commissioned paintings and a few illustrations and book covers for a couple of local Pittsburgh companies. Through his contacts I sold some illustrations as well. Buoyed by the success of Brix's Bane I decided to start shopping my skills as an inker around to comics publishers. I did samples and sent them to most of the major publishing houses. DC is the only one that flat-out rejected me (though they did give me some very specific tips and critiques). Most of them, Marvel included, said they liked my work, but they simply didn't have any open assignments at the time and asked me to check again in a few months. This may have been utter crap, but it felt good to be told I was working at a professional level.

I finally received a phone call from Tom Mason, editor at Malibu Graphics. At that time Malibu was in probably the top six publishers in the business and they were publishing a lot of books. He gave me my first professional inking assignment. I inked a three issues mini-series called Invaders From Mars II. It was a comic book sequel to a 1980's remake of a 1950's scifi movie called, you guessed it, Invaders From Mars.

It was pencilled by someone named Sandy Carruthers and Written by Lowell Cunningham (creator of the comic book version of Men In Black that the film was loosely based on, also published by Malibu), with a pretty cool cover by Mike Grell.. I never met or spoke to either of them during this process (I met Lowell at a con years later). Sandy did the pencils and then they were sent to the letterer, then they were sent to me. I inked them and sent them back to the editor. The series appeared and I got paid. Not phenomenally well, but it was better than the temp work for three months.

When that was over I received my second assignment for Malibu. At the time they had licensed the rights to publish comics based on the movie and TV series Alien Nation. I inked a four-issue series (also by Cunningham and Carruthers) called Alien Nation: The Public Enemy. This was drawn on something called duotone board. There are two different shades of gray embedded in the paper that can be made visible using two different specific chemicals. In the hands of someone who knows what they are doing you can get some really great effects. I had never used it before in my life, and was given only two random pages to practice on before the first issue showed up in the mail. I think my lack of experience with this technique shows. But, like before, I got paid. Four more months I didn't have to rely on the temp work.

That was my last work for a comics company, but certainly not my last comics work. Grey Legacy was about to move into a whole new realm.

Need I say it?

To be continued...

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.