Steve Bissette is blogging about his days working with Allan Moore on Swamp Thing, and it’s fascinating reading. Three parts so far. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.
EDIT: I can’t tell what Bissette means when he admonishes people to not “lift text” – extensive quotes, in toto or what. I don’t like it when people crib my entire blog for their blog posts, either. I am going to assume he doesn’t mean a few sentences withing the bounds of fair use. Whatever, I’ll just paraphrase instead of quoting and let you know that Bissette recalls editors actively discouraging creators from speaking with one another. Trot on over to his blog to read his exact words.
I did have one old guard editor in the early 1980′s (who has since passed on) forbid my speaking to the author of the comic I was illustrating. But that was the only instance I can recall this ever happening at either DC or Marvel. However, Bissette is a good many years my senior, and had a longer history at these companies than I did. But for a few jobs, I didn’t start working on a regular basis at either company until around 1987, though I had had a few gigs at both companies prior to that.
Found a lot of articles on artists in the current job market, none of them good news. Artists are (not surprisingly) losing jobs at a higher rate than in the rest of the professional sector, and the rate would be even higher were artists not simply ditching creative fields entirely.
At the LA Times:
Artists are unemployed at twice the rate of professional workers, a category in which artists are grouped because of their high levels of education. The artist unemployment rate grew to 6% in the fourth quarter of 2008, compared with 3% for all professionals. A total of 129,000 artists were unemployed in the fourth quarter of 2008, an increase of 50,000 (63%) from one year earlier. The unemployment rate for artists is comparable to that for the overall workforce (6.1%).
You can find the study at the National Endowment for the Arts website.
Another article at The Christian Science Monitor. Same theme.
“Artists are entrepreneurs in terms of their employment character. They’re the equivalent of small businesses – they require a lot more investment up front. They’re already in a pretty precarious situation. And in a market like this, artists are really hit pretty hard.”
Gee whizz, I say that every week.
How the arts performed during the Depression.
If we look at the arts as a life-giving form of social therapy, many other fads and fashions of the 1930s fall into place. The thrust of the culture, like the aims of the New Deal, was to get the country moving again. At cross-purposes in conversation, Astaire and Rogers seem perfectly ill-matched. Endlessly bickering with each other, they can agree on nothing. But once they dance, a swirling poetry of movement takes over.
TS Eliot rejects Orwell’s Animal Farm.
“We have no conviction that this is the right point of view from which to criticise the political situation at the current time,” wrote Eliot, adding that he thought its “view, which I take to be generally Trotskyite, is not convincing”.
The Oresteia in plain English. Dear God, no. Please, no.
BEFORE:
Is it some grace — or otherwise — that you have heard
to make you sacrifice at messages of good hope?
I should be glad to hear, but must not blame your silence.
AFTER:
So you got good news?
You’re optimistic?
Tell me, unless you don’t want to.
I don’t normally advocate book burning.
