Catching a Vision 010
Breaking Comics Out: Teambuilding
Catching a Vision, the (sorta, kinda) weekly column on Comic Related from C. Edward Sellner, Founder and Creative Director of Visionary Comics Studio. CAV provides practical guidance on how to break into the comics industry, as well as insights into this medium we all love. With resources you can order online, interviews and debates with comic professionals, and online workshops, this is your best introduction into the wonders of creating comics!
First, let me offer another apology and a bit of explanation. This column is three weeks overdue and I want to apologize to Chuck Moore and you readers out there for that. Why so late? Life has been interesting.
Up until two years ago comics was the "job" on the backburner. I had another career that was my main specialty, professional ministry and outreach work. My comics, and broader, creative career, fit into the cracks of time left over. Two years ago I made a very major and conscious decision to flip that coin. My creative career became the primary goal in my life. I moved to California to pursue things out here, and then set about finding work that would be enough to pay the bills, but provide me the most time and energy I could to focus on Visionary and my own projects.
That road had some bumps. The first job I moved out here for, providing a home and perfect environment, fell through. I went to plan B, got another place and a job that worked okay but wasn"t great. In December, after an irreconcilable difference of opinion between me and my employer, I left that job. The last few months, I"ve been traveling, promoting VCS, my projects and laying the groundwork for future stuff... and also investing a LOT of time in finding the next "pays the bills" job.
The good news is I"ve found an excellent opportunity and have begun getting all that together. It will allow me to focus more time than ever on VCS and the creative career, working from the comfort of my new home, and will provide more pay and benefits than before.
The bad news is that as I"ve been setting this job in motion, I"ve been spending a lot of time on-site, where I will be moving to in the next couple weeks, but doing so without the advantage yet of having my computer and internet there. The result is, I"ve had all this time to think about what I would LIKE to be working on.
The end news is that should be resolved soon and I hope that with this, I will be back on track to stay. Time will tell. But this column is important to me and thanks to those who"ve posted on the boards, or emailed me personally, letting me know how much you enjoy it and how much you"ve been getting out of it. It makes me want to stick with it even more! So, without further ado....
Building A Team
If you want to break into comics your best bet is, simply, to create comics. As you continue honing your skills, continue picking up new insights, and continue to grow in your wisdom of the industry, it"s also a pretty smart idea to create content along the way. A portfolio is nice, but the best way to market yourself is to have finished comics you can put in a prospective editor"s hand and say "I did this."
So, unless you"re a writer-penciler-inker-colorist-letterer-editor wunderkind, chances are, in order to create comics, you"re going to need to either join with a team of folks, or form your own team in order to get that all-important finished comic out there to show. Doing so thus begins perhaps one of the most potentially frustrating, hair pulling, bang-your-head-into-the-wall jobs in comics.
When Visionary first started, being the naive, idealistic people we were, one of the services we offered was to handle all the recruiting and partnering for our projects. Meaning, a writer brought us a concept we liked, we offered to help develop it. We would then run it past artists we had recruited, and make a match. Looking back, I would say somewhere around 90% of our time was putting together creative teams. Half of that time was putting together multiple team matches for any one series.
Inevitably it seemed we would make a match between a book and an artist whose style seemed to fit perfectly. Then, either the artist would flake out and stop producing work, or the writer wouldn"t like their work, after we got into producing pages. If not that then the writer would go nuts on the artist with unreasonable expectations and scare the artist away or the artist had unreasonable expectations on the writer, or us, and things would spin apart. It would then be back to square one and we would have to start over.
This became so time-consuming we eventually changed our guidelines and now require creators submitting to us to come with a minimum of writer and penciler committed to the project. We also offer ancillary services as people are available, but let creators know they may be responsible for recruiting talent needed for their books.
So, what are the challenges here and how can you best overcome them in order to succeed and put together that dream team to get a finished comic out?
Know Thyself
A lot of people who want to work in comics never really think it through. They create portfolios, they pitch ideas, they run around and try a multitude of things, but never develop a long term strategy. Part of the problem for them is they don"t set goals for themselves and if they do, they are ideal, big picture goals that lack the forethought of the steps needed to get there.
Wanting to create a defining series like Watchmen or have a full-time career in the comics industry are great goals but they are big-picture goals. In other words, they are peaks that hopefully you can reach in your lifetime, but, it most likely is not going to happen on your first outing or attempt. So, how much have you thought about what you are going to do to get there? Ask these questions to a lot of creators and they will struggle to come up with the answers.
Don"t be one of those.
Sure, you can have the big pie-in-the-sky dream goals, but then figure out the road to reach them. Start with smaller, realistic goals you can strive for and accomplish. Once you"ve done that, you can then look at the next plateau, then the next, and so on until you hit those dream goals. You may even find a whole different set of dream goals along the way.
At Visionary we"ve had many creators who expect their first work in the comics industry to be page rate, paid jobs, on creator owned books. That"s funny considering the options for that in the current market are zilch. The only publishers who pay any page rate period are the top tier publishers and they pay for those rates for their company owned or licensed titles. The only real avenue here is to find a creator with money to spend, willing to invest in getting a book done, and will pay someone a page rate to do the work. Those are few and far between, and a good number of them flake out, or end up not paying what"s owed. Of course, if you"re one of those thinking of paying someone a page rate to work on your book, you may also face the reality of paying them for half a book, then they flake out and disappear.
Most creators get their first break in comics working what is called back-end projects. The fact of the matter is, back-end books rarely make money. Most smaller publishers and most independent comics are operating at either a loss, or barely breaking even after covering distribution and printing costs. So these deals are not to get rich off of, but to get that much needed exposure.
Furthermore, there is the ever growing web-comic venue, or the self-published books available for direct sales through digital printing through web-sites or at conventions. These are not projects intended for profit, but intended to create published portfolios for those involved to gain some exposure and credibility for them as individual creators.
For most aspiring creators, you"re going to have to do your time in those trenches before you start getting work in the bigger leagues. So, think it through, be realistic and be willing to work through those initial steps.
Be Smart
As you start looking at opportunities around you, you will find quite a few. Realize out the gate about 90% of those opportunities will most likely NOT work out. If you"re trying out to be on someone else"s team, you may not make the cut from all the hundreds of others who will likely try out as well. If you manage to get on a team, it may fall apart. Whoever is heading things up may drop off the face of the earth, or creative differences may cause friction, or too idealistic expectations may easily get frustrated when they don"t become reality and everything will be scrapped.
As the Creative Director for VCS, I spend a good bit of time monitoring goings on in the comics industry. I check out all the web-sites, read the news sites, check publisher sites, message boards, etc. I do this looking for opportunities for our creators and our properties. I look for promising new publishers, solid freelance gigs and so forth. I"d say for every one-hundred "opportunities" I see posted somewhere, three of them actually materialize down the road in the form of something finished. Out of those, maybe one actually goes on to produce something beyond an initial effort.
The reality is some initial, aspiring creators are so eager to get a shot at ANYTHING that they will invest time and energy on something that they should have seen from the beginning would never work. So, again, take your time and be smart about where you invest your time. If you"re attempting to network with other creators and get involved in a creative team for a project, don"t be afraid to ask some questions. What is the goal? How will that happen? What resources are being put into this plan? How committed is everyone? Have they had some success in the past?
Know the Others
If you"re the one doing the recruiting, use these principles in your recruiting. If you"re looking to join someone"s team, use these principles as benchmarks to gauge the opportunity and to judge how viable it is.
Okay, so once you do some self-assessing and make some decisions, you"re ready to either start recruiting your own team, or look for a solid team to try and connect with. What are some of the things to be mindful of and look for?
Quality
First and foremost, make sure everything you are part of is a quality production. It"s far better to have your name creatively attached to one high-quality project than a dozen mediocre ones. If your goal is to have a published portfolio realize that even though you may be representing your individual talent, most submission editors are going to look at the overall product and make their judgment based on the full package, even if they don"t intend to.
It"s impossible to really tell a good inker or colorist if the underlying pencil work is inferior. Likewise, a potentially good penciler illustrating a bad script is going to suffer in layouts or storytelling in the sequential work. A writer who accepts poor art just to get their script illustrated, runs the risk of the low art quality biasing anyone against the story.
Dependability
The second most critical thing is to find people who are dependable. The hands down best way to determine this, obviously, is their track record. Have they been dependable elsewhere? Of course, that"s hard to have if you"re just starting out. If working with new creators, you can start to see what kind of pattern they form pretty early. Do they follow up when they promise? Do they hit deadlines when they promise? Do they return phone calls and emails promptly? Now, of course, extenuating circumstances may periodically throw this out of whack, but if the person consistently falls short there is no reason to think that will change in the future, no matter how talented they are.
Maturity
I harp on this a lot, but it bugs me. If you connect with a creator who is immature, the chances of seeing a finished product is VERY slim. Someone who comes on as God"s gift to comics, or feels they should take control of a project that did not originate with them is bad news and inevitably the project will suffer as a result. Arrogance is one of the biggest pitfalls for comic creators, both aspiring and established. I"ve heard of and worked with creators who, while still very new to the game, feel as if they know more than far more seasoned professionals. I"ve also heard and worked with creators who felt their talent and vision were so great that they didn"t need to actually respect contracts, or contribute to the team effort. It was enough that they "established the business with their presence".
Sometimes, on the professional level, this is hard to spot until you"re unfortunately further into investing in them then you wish. However, there are some ways to find out quickly. Look at the bigger picture with the person. Google their name and see where else they pop up online. You might be shocked. I had one creator I worked with that after problems hit the fan, I googled their name and found outright embarrassing moments they had online with other companies and professionals FAR before they haunted us. For others this just showed up in checking their online presence and use of internet tools. When they consistently act like children in public arenas they usually act the same in professional ones.
Another good marker here is to get a feel for how they operate in other areas of their life. I want to draw a fine line here and not suggest that someone who lives a different lifestyle than you, or makes different types of choices than you is necessarily incapable of being a mature business person. But if you"re working with someone who makes questionable decisions or shows themselves to be inconsiderate, inappropriate, obsessive or otherwise odd in general, you can usually expect the same sort of thing in their professional work.
VCS had an incident where we had three creators get into a jealous little 3-way romantic triangle debacle that ended up spilling into the studio. It was crazy dealing with fallout from two guys, one considerably older and barely divorced, chasing a barely legal woman in the studio. That this should be something we even KNEW about, much less were called on to referee was maddening! VCS distanced itself from the personal issues completely...obviously. But all three showed themselves to be of the same mettle professionally. One was kicked out right away on grounds of misrepresentation, one left shortly after with us holding the door wide open pointing the way on grounds of broken commitments, then he later also violated contract clauses, and the third was removed later for contract violation.
Again, here, the most important thing is to move forward intelligently. Yes, you are going to end up with some fruitless pursuits. Yes, you will end up with some promises being broken and efforts being wasted. Just try to make them as few and far between as possible.
Know the Plan
Have a definite, realistic, and attainable plan that can be accomplished without unrealistic expectations forced on anyone.
Visionary requires anyone wishing to work with us to audition on a six to eight page short story. We don"t promise anything beyond exposure for those stories as they will at least be published digitally through our Digital Visions Anthology if successfully completed. We try and get those stories published elsewhere but no promises. This is an initial, short term, and easily attained goal. Finish 6-8 pages under editorial direction, that"s it.
Next, if creators come on board with a main property, we require the first release on that property be a 24-48 page, stand alone special. Our reasoning? Simple. It"s unrealistic for a writer to expect an artist to draw a six-issue mini-series on the back-end for an untried property, created by untried creators. The stand alone acts as a testing for the creators as well as the property in the market. It"s a reasonable expectation, without an overwhelming commitment to time or energy. It"s a set goal that should be able to be accomplished in a reasonable period. It"s also big enough to see how the creative team will work together, yet small enough to not burn them out.
Finally, it allows the team a gauge to judge whether to move forward or not. If the stand alone does well, they have a better idea what will come if more is published. If it doesn"t do well at all, and is poorly received, then they can make the decision to move in different directions.
If you"re looking to join someone else"s team and the plan isn"t realistic and viable, then why would you waste time on it? Again, many creators will because they are desperate for any chance, and suffer from the "what if this is the one?!" syndrome. But especially working in back-end deals, when you"re an un-established creator, most likely working with other un-established creators, on an un-established property, you want something you can step in, do, get the exposure you need and move on.
Someone pointed out to me some poor artist, who was obviously so impressed that someone wanted his art on their book, that he signed a three year contract, without any up front or page rate pay. This was with no publisher lined up, no established people on the series, and instead of doing a submission package, committed to doing multiple issues! Even worse, this was on a book whose title was already trademarked by TWO other comic companies. This was a plan?
In Closing...
So, when you hit the threshold of building a team, or joining a team someone else is building, it basically boils down to being smart, being careful, and being straightforward. Now of course, once you build the team...what do you do with it? That"s next week.
Next...
You know that long promised Submissions article? HA! You"re going to have to wait one more week. I decided this whole teamwork thing was so important it rates two columns!
This one ended up focusing on building the team, next week, we"ll focus on making the team work.
Also, next column will debut a new end feature: The Industry Round-Up
Since this column is about breaking into the Comic"s Industry, I figured it might also be a good place to give some of my views on various aspects of the industry, various other good sources of information, and cheers and jeers to various moves within comics. Got any news you would like me to comment on? Send it to me directly at my listed email.
Join the discussion and add your thoughts on this edition, or the column in general. If you have any questions or suggestions for resources, post them or email them to Sellner so they can be included in future columns. Are you an aspiring or up and coming creator and would like to share your story? Email Sellner and let him know who you are and what you"ve done.
C. Edward Sellner is the co-founder and Creative Director of Visionary Comics Studio, a studio that within its first three years has drawn high praise from the media and attracted the attention of legendary creators in the comics industry. They have been digitally and print published in the mainstream market and their creators currently work with over a dozen different publishers. Their work has been featured on television news shows, radio programs and internet podcasts as well as featured in every major comics news site online.
Contact him directly at cedwardsellner@aol.com
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