Tyler Chin-Tanner scribe of A Wave Blue World, has funded this webcomic with his generous purchase of original art.
Please do feed the artist. The artist will love you for it, because the artist would rather draw all day, as opposed to working at the Piggly Wiggly and only drawing on weekends.
You can order my A Distant Soil graphic novel collections by clicking the SHOP link above. You’ll find dozens of books I have worked on for a number of other publishers there as well. Once again, we thank the anonymous person who clicked that link and purchased an A Distant Soil graphic novel yesterday!
Also, our warmest wishes to David Bird for his very kind mention of A Distant Soil on his blog. Adding A Distant Soil to your blog roll is good karma. Telling your friends about our webcomic is better karma. Spreading the good word about A Distant Soil is webcomic nirvana.
By the way, these pages were drawn quite some time ago and mark the only time in the history of my entire career where I made a real effort to use a background assistant. Traci J Summerall did a lot of the work on the top panel, though I didn’t know until much later that she had actually worked on the comic! It turns out the guy I hired to help me meet deadlines gathered a bunch of other people to do the work for him. What a surprise that was!
Anyway, out of roughly 1,000 pages of A Distant Soil, I think I used assistants on the background drawing of about 40 of them. Even then, I ended up redrawing major portions of it later -backgrounds, weapons, space ships, etc. Even the cover of a cereal box in Minetti’s kitchen. Almost everything the assistants worked on is gone.
However, Traci’s contribution on this panel remains largely intact, and I wanted to give her a mention. The other person who helped out was Skip Sonneson, with whom I shared a friendly correspondence for awhile.
I doubt if I will ever try using a background assistant again in future, except for tone sheets. The bulk of the tone sheet application is done by my mom now! That’s right, still using the hand tones instead of computer tones!
I prefer working alone on my drawings, and all drawing is done by hand. I do not use computer drafting tools on this book even now, though I have begun to do some painted work on computer. Next issue’s cover is a computer painting.
Hey Colleen, I haven’t checked in, in a while. I just wanted to say “hey”. It seems your new blog is more to the point. Which is good. it should be all about you, but it doesn’t seem like you are getting as many comments as your old blog. I don’t know, I guess I am just speaking out of turn here. Take care, Thomax
I don’t blog as much as I used to, and many of these articles are from the old site.
People tend to comment where there is something controversial to talk about. They just visit and read when they like what they see.
The traffic on the site has actually gone up over the last few weeks. I can see from my stats that every day, new readers are popping in. And then they go back and read the entire comic.
Does my heart good.
Yay! for more visitors!
Hey! I’m still here — I’ve been here since 1983. Or I woulda been if ‘here’ had been here in 1983… Well, you get the idea.
“It turns out the guy I hired to help me meet deadlines gathered a bunch of other people to do the work for him.”
We call that “The Colletta Effect”…
Yay!
And I am going over the MYSQL usage on the new server, and while the cpu hits are not ideal, they are not bad, either. Just a few hits per query above the ideal. So, I am not at all certain what was wrong on the old server. A site hack? Being used by Spam?
Dunno.
Hi Allan! Vinnie Colletta and his Legion of Super Ghosts!!!
I did not realize the assistant had negotiated a page rate with my publisher that was incredibly high: higher than inkers in the independent press were getting paid back then, and this for a smattering of background inking.
I had a MAJOR name inker offer to do background work for me last year for 25% of what this assistant was charging me in 1987. Didn’t take him up on his offer, but whoa, tempting.
I didn’t actually hire the assistant. My ex-publisher Starblaze did, insisting I use one to facilitate production speed. I have only the vaguest memory of ever meeting the guy. So, he worked for me, but I really had nothing to do with bringing him on the book, initially.
And to my surprise, that 1987 page rate came out of my royalties. Add in Fedex charges to ship back and forth and time spent doing sketches and writing out instructions and I not only saved no time, I lost a lot of money.
Then the assistant’s assistants came to me to complain they hadn’t been paid by the assistant. Except I had no idea who these people were because I had not hired them.
I called up the assistant to let him know I would no longer be availing myself of his services, and that was that. I took out almost everything the assistants had inked, or re-inked it later. I’ve never spoken to him again, so I don’t know how it all worked out from his end. I can’t even remember his name, actually.
When I realized I was paying him, I realized I had the right to get rid of him, and I did. My ex-editor, who had insisted I use an assistant had just been let go from the company, so I didn’t have to follow her instructions anymore.
I admit, the idea of having a background assistant ala manga studio style was very tempting, but I know of only a few cases where artists have tried it and gotten good results. Usually you just end up with a mishmash of styles, and very unhappy background artists who want their own books. In the whole history of Western comics, there has only been one Gerhard.
I did keep copies of the before-and-after on every page of production, so if this ever came up I could show what had actually been done by me. Some pages were turned in with less than 10% of the background inks completed.
I would have worked with Traci again, if I could have gotten in touch with her…or knew she was on the book. But when I later learned of all the doings from Skip Sonneson, both Traci and Skip had given up on art, according to Skip that is.
I just don’t have any incentives to work with assistants these days.
The only other major portion of assistant’s work that remains is in a later issue: my brother helped me out! His only published drawings! I will point it out when we get there.
For the record, I haven’t even used an assistant to spot blacks in years.
EDITED: Clarity and spelling.
And then there was Wally Wood, whose assistant’s assistants had assistants…
“In the whole history of Western comics, there has only been one Gerhard.”
Isn’t he available now? Y’know, if you ever changed your mind, or anything. Could be cool.
LOL! Well, I guess there’s a job for the guy!
The whole assitant thing is so goofy.
And the assistant – or one of the assistant’s assistant’s I never knew – would put these odd visual jokes in the backgrounds, or try to draw weird faces on magazines and products in various scenes. I spent a lot of time whiting them out and redrawing them.
Several times I found my designs for spaceships ignored and other designs drawn in which had no visual relevance to the cultures I had designed for the book.
The original pages are crackling with white out. I redrew every ship except for the only ship for which they stuck to my original design: the Siovansin.
I got the impression someone in the chain of assistants thought the whole gig was a real hoot.
Think of something like Oscar the Grouch from Sesame Street peeking around corners of street scenes in A Distant Soil, and that’s the level of cute visual in-jokes we’re talking about here.
Totally inappropriate for the story, and I was kind of pissed off. I have no idea who drew those things.
Oscar the Grouch I can deal with. But if Big Bird ever joins the rebels in the fight against the Hierarchy, I’m outta here..!
“An Avatar is a person in your neighborhood…
…. he’s a person that you meet,
when you’re walkin’ down the street,
he’s a person that you meet each day…”
Or the Count:
“One dead children… bwha-ha-ha! Two! Two dead children… Bwha-ha-ha!!”
etc.
OMG! That’s hilarious!!!!
OK, I got an email from someone who says they don’t want to register an account, but who wants to know how a publisher can hire someone you don’t even know.
It happens all the time. Not to me anymore, but publishers can hire colorists and letterers and all kinds of support on a book with or without you, depending on the contract.
If you’re a newbie, you get pushed around and you suck up this kind of crap. If you’re a pro with a track record, you laugh in the faces of people who try it.
Starblaze was pretty insistent that I have help. They were demanding (insisting? pushing?) that I produce dozens pages of finished comic art every month. My memory may be faulty on this, but I recall the editor claiming I ought to be able to do 60 pages a month.
That’s a lot of work for a lone artist, but the editor there had a vague idea of how the Japanese comics industry worked (though she was, on the whole, a lot more ignorant than she realized) and the company goal was to set up a bullpen of artists to work right there in the office. They were hoping a few key artists like me, combined with a stable of in house assistants, would make them a graphic novel powerhouse.
In the entire time I was there (less than one year) the company never hired another artist to work in that bullpen. I was paid a whopping $350 a month as an advance against my royalties, and was never paid for the art assist I did on a number of books when I worked in house. I packed up and left after many broken promises to put me on staff and on salary.
No, I am not kidding. I made $350 a month.
As for the pay for my assistant, the publisher had told me that they would pay the assistant on my book, which sounded like a good deal. Help on my workload and on the company dime! OK!
Instead, it was on MY bill. The publisher paid the assistant directly, but charged me on the backend of my royalties. I also paid the letterer and colorists – which is not customary – also out of my royalties. Every time the assistant (or one of his assistants) drew Oscar the Grouch in the background, I was paying for it.
When I figured out the company’s unique accounting system, I let go all the help on my book except the letterer.
So, I thought I was getting a good deal: help on deadlines on my work, which my publisher would finance. Not only did the help not facilitate production or quality, I ended up paying for ALL of it.
Pretty bad all around.
I quit, and in a few years was suing them as part of a class action suit with many other authors.
I wrote a long series of posts about it years ago. I should repost them. It is the 20 year anniversary of the Starblaze imprint going under.
(Ay yi, that’s all a lot to dump on people innit? Oh well, it’s sorta funny now. Sorta. Sob.)