Comicon Ruminations Part Three
A creator’s point of view.
There’s something about comics, if you grow up with them, that seems to make us fans want to make comics. I know that’s true of a lot of hobbies. People who like movies want to go into film. People who read want to write books. Sports fans want to play professionally. Maybe as an outsider to some of these other hobbies I don’t really appreciate it in the same way, but with comics it seems almost universal. I think maybe because it seems easy. With film or sports you need a lot of equipment, and eventually, a lot of other people. With comics all you need is pencil, paper, and a modicum of imagination.
I’ve always thought of myself as a creative person. As a child I wrote stories and had sketchbooks full of little drawings of my own characters. Sure, I drew pictures of my favorite heroes, but I was never really content with that. I wanted to make up my own. As far as I knew back then I was the only person who did this. Now I know better.
Back then, getting into comics professionally seemed to be impossible. There were only a couple of major companies, with established talent pools. They would look at submissions, but really, if you didn’t live in New York where you could be under their feet all the time, or already know someone in the business, getting work from Marvel or DC was unlikely. There were exceptions of course (Pittsburgh native Jim Shooter sold a Legion of Superheroes script to DC when he was thirteen, then went on to a lifelong career which included being editor in chief at Marvel for awhile).
Things have changed. In the 80’s there was an explosion of small press publishers, as well as a few very successful self-publishers (Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles specifically), that opened the doors for everyone in a way that had never been possible before. Suddenly, it seemed, everyone who could hold a pencil was publishing a comic. It felt like an unprecedented explosion of comics creativity (whether it was is debatable). Some truly brilliant comics came out of nowhere, from creators who would probably never have gotten a chance at one of the big publishers.
There was also a tremendous amount of crap. Uninspired, derivative, poorly written, badly drawn crap. Not that “professionally” published comics have always been stellar, but man, I mean some of this stuff was simply awful.
And I was almost a part of that awful crap.
More on that as I continue this long entry at another time.
There’s something about comics, if you grow up with them, that seems to make us fans want to make comics. I know that’s true of a lot of hobbies. People who like movies want to go into film. People who read want to write books. Sports fans want to play professionally. Maybe as an outsider to some of these other hobbies I don’t really appreciate it in the same way, but with comics it seems almost universal. I think maybe because it seems easy. With film or sports you need a lot of equipment, and eventually, a lot of other people. With comics all you need is pencil, paper, and a modicum of imagination.
I’ve always thought of myself as a creative person. As a child I wrote stories and had sketchbooks full of little drawings of my own characters. Sure, I drew pictures of my favorite heroes, but I was never really content with that. I wanted to make up my own. As far as I knew back then I was the only person who did this. Now I know better.
Back then, getting into comics professionally seemed to be impossible. There were only a couple of major companies, with established talent pools. They would look at submissions, but really, if you didn’t live in New York where you could be under their feet all the time, or already know someone in the business, getting work from Marvel or DC was unlikely. There were exceptions of course (Pittsburgh native Jim Shooter sold a Legion of Superheroes script to DC when he was thirteen, then went on to a lifelong career which included being editor in chief at Marvel for awhile).
Things have changed. In the 80’s there was an explosion of small press publishers, as well as a few very successful self-publishers (Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles specifically), that opened the doors for everyone in a way that had never been possible before. Suddenly, it seemed, everyone who could hold a pencil was publishing a comic. It felt like an unprecedented explosion of comics creativity (whether it was is debatable). Some truly brilliant comics came out of nowhere, from creators who would probably never have gotten a chance at one of the big publishers.
There was also a tremendous amount of crap. Uninspired, derivative, poorly written, badly drawn crap. Not that “professionally” published comics have always been stellar, but man, I mean some of this stuff was simply awful.
And I was almost a part of that awful crap.
More on that as I continue this long entry at another time.