A Distant Soil by Colleen Doran

Monthly comics are near-instant gratification for both reader and creator. Back in the day, monthlies ran so close to the deadline edge you could finish a book and see it on the stands two weeks later. Ideally, you worked at a 6-12 month lead, but that almost never happened. My earliest (now defunct) A Distant Soil publisher started off working well over a year ahead with me, but at the end was pushing for bimonthly release, with comics slapped out mere days before the on-sale date.

Cash flow was a major consideration. The longer it takes a book to come out, the more time your cash investment takes to get back to you. Distributors would solicit based on nothing but a synopsis and cover sketch, so a publisher could skirt payment dates and not pay a creator a penny for work until the book was on sale…or later.

Once in awhile, someone asks me why I do so little work these days.

I don’t do so little work these days.

I work on graphic novels almost exclusively. Because comics publishers push graphic novels into the mainstream book trade instead of just into the comics market, these books need to be finished almost an entire year in advance of the sale date. Salespeople want a finished book in their hand before they present to book buyers.

Each of the graphic novels I work on right now is about 120 pages. 120 pages is the rough equivalent of penciling and inking a bimonthly book.

If I work on four graphic novels over a two year period, that is the same amount of labor as if I had produced pencils and inks on 2 monthly comics. But you don’t see me every month for two years, and you don’t see 24 comics.

At the end of two years, I pencil and ink 480 pages.

What you see are four books. To some people, four books of 120 pages is not as much work as 24 comics. Even though it is.

If I finish two of my graphic novels this year (and I will,) you won’t see any of them for over a year after completion.

480 pages in two years is not difficult for me. When I was a spring chicken, I produced more than 350 pages per year.

I usually did full pencils instead of pencils and inks. I no longer take the time to pencil. I save hours per page by going to inks straight from roughs.

Since I also get a higher page rate these days, I can afford to take fewer assignments, but spend more time per page.

I never hear “your old work was better” because, clearly, it wasn’t. I was a beginner mainstream artist trying to make a living at rates as low as $65 per page (pencils and inks) in the 1990′s. If I worked all day on a page of comic art, I made a pittance over minimum wage. I had to do at least two pages a day to make ends meet.

The quality of my work suffered. A lot.

Starting in late 2011, my graphic novels will come out, and I think you will like them a lot.

The books are written by Warren Ellis, Barry Lyga and Derek McCulloch. They are some of the best writers in the business, and I am deliriously happy to be working on such stimulating, satisfying, and entertaining works.

I am doubly happy that I get paid a good rate so I don’t have to crank them out at $65 per page. I can afford to take the time to do my best.

I know it looks like crickets are chirping over here because you haven’t seen anything new from me in awhile, but later next year, people will wonder how I do all that work. Because, you know, about four GN’s will come out in two years, and won’t some people be surprised.

And then, some people will complain I didn’t draw 24 comics instead.

Whatever.

EDIT: I suppose I should add that my work is drawn by hand, and I don’t use stats of head shots with mouths added or blinking eyes added to pad the page count. Some people do that sort of thing. Because it is easier than drawing a proper head with a proper expression on its face.

Graphic novels are hard when you put in the effort, and I’d rather put in the effort.

Just sayin’.

Here’s some interesting articles:

The Guardian on Harvey Pekar.

The New Republic on Harvey Pekar.

“Why are Artists Poor?” at The Telegraph.

Ironically, for all the insurrectionary rhetoric of the digital revolutionaries, the Internet is actually emerging as nothing more (or less) than a sales and marketing platform for physical products – a medium to create demand for concerts, readings, speeches and seminars.

Thus, Jonathan “I don’t consider it my job” Littell is absolutely wrong. For better or worse, the reverse is actually now true. The job of all artists is now self-promotion. In an age in which the old cultural gatekeepers are being swept away, the most pressing challenge of creative artists is to build their own brands. And it’s the Internet which provides creative talent with easy-to-use and cheap tools for their self-promotion.

A TV Producer claims a stalker made a hash of her life and career.

Then things started to escalate further. Deprived of our new telephone numbers, my phone stalker got himself an e-mail address virtually identical to my own. I began to receive sexually abusive ramblings apparently from myself, accusing me of having sex with everyone from Angus Deayton to Gary Glitter. His favourite target was Shane Richie, who had just made his debut on EastEnders as Alfie Moon. The press were enthusiastic about my first new character, but my success seemed to incense my stalker. The messages were most frequent whenever I’d won an award. I’d come home happy and excited, to find e-mails reminding me how ugly and repulsive I was. I dutifully forwarded them to the Investigations Unit.

I can relate.

At NPR, speculation that author Agatha Christie suffered from Alzheimer’s.

Lancashire took 16 of her novels, written over more than 50 years, and fed the text into a computer program. The computer then spit out data about the vocabulary of the works, such as the frequency of different words and the number of different words used in each text.

When Lancashire looked at the results for Christie’s 73rd novel, written when she was 81 years old, he saw something strange. Her use of words like “thing,” “anything,” “something,” “nothing” – terms that Lancashire classifies as “indefinite words” – spiked. At the same time, number of different words she used dropped by 20 percent. “That is astounding,” says Lancashire, “that is one-fifth of her vocabulary lost.”

Historians claim King Arthur’s Round Table was a Roman amphitheater.

If Arthurian legends claim Arthur had 1,000 knights, running around Great Britain looking for a venue that would seat 1,000 people strikes me as pretty silly. Those legends were written hundreds of years after whomever the historical Arthur was based on would have lived. He probably sat in a hut with his muddy brood.

That doesn’t alter the fact that my King Arthur wears 12th century armor and does all those nifty chivalric things Hal Foster said he did.

This is what the world of King Arthur looks like. Anyone who says different is a schmuck.