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This was written a few years ago, but Ten Things Your Boss Hates About You is still on point!
Since I just spent a couple of months meticulously researching yet another project, gathering hundreds of pages of images, reading multiple books on the subject, and filling two shelves with piles of source material, it looks like nothing has changed much for me! However, I am once again working with Joan Hilty who is accustomed to my slow build, and who knows once I get going, it’s all pretty smooth from there.
The kind of research I do isn’t really possible on a monthly comic: and it’s expensive. Consider I don’t get paid to research, I get paid for the finished work. The more time I spend gathering info, the less time I have to draw. But for the type of period work I am doing, I doubt I would be able to do a convincing job had I not taken the time to do the ground work.
Someone once referred to me as a “method cartoonist”: I “get in character” on every job. That’s probably why my work varies stylistically from gig to gig so much.
Anyway, on to the article.
OK, this is interesting: a list of the top ten things that drive bosses crazy.
I am guilty of too much initiative. I have the absurd habit of over-studying, over-thinking, over-referencing and over-analyzing just about every single solitary thing I do. Getting started is tooth-pulling trauma. I can’t begin until I have data and reference and mood music at the ready, and have spent weeks immersing myself in the project by reading every possible book on it.
For a four page story on Joan of Arc that would pay me no more than $1,000, I spent over a week just READING books on Joan of Arc. This turned out to be handy, because when the writer depicted Joan as killing men in battle, I was able to inform the editor that Joan had never actually killed anyone. Go me!
But all this initiative also meant that I had spent so much time researching the project that it actually COST ME MONEY to do the project. Moreover, my client didn’t hire me to obtain encyclopedic knowledge of Joan of Arc, they hired me to draw four pages and get them in on time.
Another classic example of this is all the time and effort that went into designing Reign of the Zodiac for DC Comics. I spent four months just designing the damned thing. It lasted eight issues.
I have now learned to inform my editors to expect a slow start from me on every single thing I do, then to step aside and watch as I rebound and get on schedule with accompanying cliches about dizzying speed. The editor is pulling their hair out wondering what the heck I am up to until then. My old clients are used to this. My new clients fear me until they learn not to.
With reference files in hand, and all my thinking thought out, I comfortably settle into a routine and produce quickly and smoothly. But too much initiative is my curse. Or my editor’s curse.
Here’s one of the top ten I thought could use spotlighting:
Although none of the managers came out and said that they hated their staff for talking over them in meetings, pointing out their errors in public, or preventing the bonus-related project coming in on time, Mann says it’s a major issue.
OK, I have had to give this some serious thought, because on the internet it’s easy to gripe and moan about everything that ever happened in your entire career. When you do, it’s not over a drink with a few friends at dinner, it’s in front of thousands of people.
I can’t think of a single freelancer who would appreciate it if all their professional gaffes were aired in public on a daily basis by their editors, but it does seem that the dopiest and pettiest of difficulties with editors and publishers (and other creators) are quickly and openly discussed. The vast majority of this stuff ought to be settled in house, not in public.
If a client is making a habit of not paying freelancers it’s one thing to go public (it’s a service to your fellow creators, in my humble opinion), but it’s another to go gonzo if there’s been a minor trafficking error, or someone didn’t get a photo credit, or some editor didn’t say hi to you when walking by at a convention.
I don’t know if creators realize how much damage they do to themselves with the public airing of the little stuff, and how unfair it is to dish it out when there is no way on Earth any of them would take it. How would freelancers feel if there was a public forum where editors posted every time freelancers missed a deadline? Or had to redraw something because they didn’t follow directions? Or made a list of the dopey lies freelancers tell?
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