Batman in Pittsburgh

Courtesy of the Wise/Walker Studio

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.

Addendum: Dave Sim letters

Here are the letters from Dave Sim (Cerebus the Aardvark) I mentioned a couple of posts ago.

I especially like the last one.

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...