I'm thrilled whenever someone offers me a comic
book job. Sometimes I'm excited because the job will give me a certain
amount of security (which, if I'm honest, is never quite enough security when
you're a freelance artist or writer), and sometimes it's because the project
really excites me creatively.
And you can always tell which way I'm excited about
a new gig by who it is that I want to tell first -- my parents or my best
friend, Dan.
If it's the security thing, I call my parents, who
are the only people who worry about my financial well being more than I do, and
are usually relieved to just know that I have a job, any job. And if the
project is something that really excites me creatively, it's Dan, an excellent
writer in his own right who somehow managed to be born with the other half of
my brain despite his birth taking place a couple of years before mine and on
the complete other side of the country.
(You think YOU have it bad slogging your way
through all of these thoughts? Dan's had to listen to me kick them back
and forth endlessly over the course of the last seven years. A feat of
such great friendship that it deserves countless plugs for his own creative
endeavors -- like his brand new novel, BREAK MY HEART 1000 TIMES. I got
an advance copy. It's good. Real good. Seriously. Comes
out in October. Go buy it. Daniel Waters. Hyperion Press. Oh,
look... here it is up for pre-order on Amazon.)
But when Chris Roberson asked if I'd be interested
in doing something through a new digital comic book company he was putting
together called Monkey Brain Comics, I didn't know who I wanted to tell
first...
Mom and Dad, or Dan?
As I worked out the details with Chris and his
partner, Allison Baker, it got even harder to decide. Was there the
security of something regular? Yep. As regular as I wanted it to
be. Monthly, weekly, anything I liked. And was I going to have the
opportunity to tell the story I wanted to tell, the way I wanted to tell it?
Most definitely. I was so overwhelmed with the creative freedom they were
willing to give me that I pitched them on a whole bunch of things I wanted to
do. Their response?
"Sounds cool. Go for it."
Of course, all of this was Top Secret, in big,
GIANT letters, so who I wanted to tell first was pretty much a moot point.
Everything about the deal was under a cone of silence until Chris and Allison
were ready to make the big announcement.
(I did tell my parents, though. Sorry. You
have to tell your parents when something like this comes along or you have to
turn in your family membership card, or at least, suffer the withering glares
you receive at the next holiday dinner. Parents don't like to find things
out about your life from your Twitter feed or your blog. Trust me on that
one.)
But the point is, I wanted to tell my parents AND
Dan, and right away.
When I turned 40, I celebrated that uncomfortable
milestone by using Kickstarter to fund work on my first novel, NIGHT FOLK.
That story was one of three ideas (four if you count Johnny Chaos which came a
little bit later) that I'd been carrying around in my head since the day I
started in comics. Work on NIGHT FOLK has taken a lot longer than I had
planned, partly because the middle bit needed some major revisions, but mostly,
if I'm honest, because of the weird, unpredictable life of a freelance comic
book artist.
The hardest thing for a freelancer to do is to say,
'no'. When someone offers you work, you just HAVE to take it, because if
you don't, you might not be eating that month. Or if you ARE eating, your
menu options run exclusively to which kind of Ramen noodles would you prefer --
chicken or beef?
The second hardest thing for a freelancer to do is
to say, 'I don't care what you think'. As a comic book creator, your
career lives or dies by what other people think -- editors, reviewers, fans,
and the higher ups who decide whether a comic book should continue or if somebody
should pull the plug. You need to keep these people happy, because these
are the people who keep you working.
But in my case, 'I don't care what you think'
translates roughly to 'I don't care if what I'm doing fits in with what you or
anyone else thinks a comic book should be'.
And that's been nearly impossible for me to say.
If you've been following this series of posts
you'll know how much I've struggled to fit in with what was going on in the
rest of the mainstream comic book world over the last 18 years, whether it was
trying to make my art 'slicker' and more 'superhero-y' or pitching stories that
were closer to what I thought other people wanted instead of the stories I
wanted to tell.
But now, with digital comics (as with their digital
predecessor, webcomics), creators like me have a chance to do the kind of work
we feel compelled to do, whether it fits in with what Marvel, DC, or even Image
are doing.
Nothing fundamentally wrong with those companies or
the kinds of comics the produce, mind you, but the stories I have to tell are
definitely outside of the boxes they've established for themselves.
And now, after all this time, I've finally learned
to say, that's just fine.
I've never regretted trying to fit in with the
crazy, fun, vibrant world of mainstream comics. Gotten frustrated, sure. And
definitely dissatisfied with the work I was producing from time to time. But
I've never regretted trying, and I'd like to think I've never been bitter about
not quite succeeding at fitting in.
But I have to admit I've been jealous of other
creators, the ones who stuck to their guns and produced the work the way they
wanted to. The Michael Gaydoses and the Ashley Woods, the Teddy Kristiansens
and Mike Mignolas. They make comics that no one could make but them, who
found their own path and stuck with it. That's the kind of work I like to
read, and it's the kind of work I've always wished I had the courage to do.
My experience working on NIGHT FOLK and writing
those WHO stories for IDW and BPE in the UK finally gave me the courage to say,
"I'm doing something I really like here and I want to do more stuff like
it". But as I've outlined over WAY too many posts, the more I
thought about it, the more I realized the only way I was going to be able to do
that is if I took a break from mainstream, work for hire comics.
And so here I am, taking a break from mainstream,
work for hire comics.
Am I done with work for hire comics? Not
quite yet and I doubt 'done' forever. I still have a digital comic book
project with my friend Ron Marz to wrap up for Amazon, and as we speak, I'm
finishing work on my last Doctor Who story (written by one of my childhood
comic book idols, Len Wein, which seemed kind of fitting for my last WHO story,
to me, at least). And I'd sure like to think I'm not completely done with
the Doctor, either. There are still some things I'd like to say with the
character if I ever get the chance, but yes, these are the last work for hire
assignments I'll be taking, at least for a while.
Every work for hire comic book is a compromise in
one way or another, creatively. And believe me, it's good to compromise
sometimes. There are few things more fun than collaborating with a good
writer or a good artist when you're making something as intricate and
complicated as a comic book. And more often than not, that collaboration
leads to a MUCH better book.
But there's something to be said for doing it all
yourself, too. Compromise is fine and good, but it can also be good NOT
to compromise sometimes.
If digital comics offer me the opportunity to tell
stories in my own idiosyncratic way, then Monkey Brain Comics offers me a way
to get those stories to the marketplace with a bigger splash than I could make
on my own.
Comics is a business, after all. I do want to
sell books. I just want to try making those books in my own weird way for
a little while and see what happens.
That means it's time to take my toys into a corner
and see what I can come up with. But thanks to Chris and Allison, and the
other talented creators they've lined up for Monkey Brain, I don't have to sit
in the corner alone.
NEXT TIME: You'll be relieved to hear there is no
'next time'. Yep. The long ramble is over, though I do plan to
share some more thoughts about digital comics, the industry in general, and my
career in specific, over the coming months. But I promise to be slightly
less long-winded about it. If that's at all possible. But I'll try.
I'll really, really try.
