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UPFRONT: LYDON'S LAMENT "A Conspiracy of One" I've been working in the science fiction business for the last nearly twelve years, and when it comes to questions from people who want to start as writers, I can shuffle them into one of three piles. Since I only write nonfiction, I don't get the usual "Where do you get your ideas?" trope (I __do_ get the old "What were you smoking when you wrote that?", to which I reply "I freebase Preparation H to relax, and I sometimes do three tubes a day"), but I get variations on these three. The first is "Can I get the name of your agent?", the second is "Do you know if (choose your editor here) would be interested in my story?", and the third can best be distilled as "What do I need to do to get someone to accept my story?" Being the bilious and sociopathic individual I am, I won't gloss over these questions the way other writers will: they want new writers to like them, or at least keep from blowing up their cars. The first answer is "my agent is Shawna McCarthy, and she can't take on any unpublished writers", and the second is "Fuktifiknow." The third is relatively easy by comparison: "That all depends upon the editor or publisher, but I hear gold bars, diamonds, and blow jobs work well." The comics industry isn't any better than the science fiction industry: everyone's looking for that quick shortcut to the core of the business. All of the artists want their names to be spoken with the same level of reverence as Kirby and Eisner; all of the writers want to be on a first-name with Garth Ennis and Judd Winick; and everyone looks for that one code phrase that leads to a corner office at Marvel within 72 hours. The people in the business can scream until our eyes bleed that the shortcuts don't exist, and writers such as Steven Grant can recite the exact reasons __why_ they don't exist, but everyone keeps grabbing for gimmicks the way ordinary folks grab for gimmicks on how to beat the lottery. (I like to add that the odds of being hit in the head with an asteroid more than a mile in diameter within the next 100 years are much better than those of winning the lottery, and that smart money says that buying stocks in meteoric iron smelters is a better bet than buying lottery tickets, but try to explain that to the gimps who spend all of their time talking about how they're going to humiliate the boss the moment they win the $45 million jackpot on Saturday.) Nearly two years ago, I joking mentioned that becoming a pro science fiction writer required that the author be able to impersonate a cartoon character, and I locked up Beavis, Barney Gumbel, and Eric Cartman before anyone else, and some people actually believed me. Now, believe it or not, this is the bright side to that situation. The short-timers ask "How do I get fame and fortune?", the careerists say "Work your ass off," and the newbies return with "No, __really_. Who do I have to sleep with to get a gig in the comics industry?" When they don't get an answer that they like, half of the beginners begrudgingly take the advice given. The other half start mumbling in their Ovaltine about dark forces keeping them from their destiny. "Oh, the publishers are jealous of my ability." "The writers don't want anyone one-upping them." "The only way to become a published artist is to have the right connections." "I'd make everyone else look bad." (Out of all of the little interference fantasies that keep getting spat back, my personal favorite comes from the real whackos that are certain that centuries-old conspiracies block their fates, and scream about the Knights Templar or the International Jewish Conspiracy or the George Lucas Fan Club keeping them from being published. One such character started spitting at me - literally - about the Vatican conspiracy to dumb down American literature, and I responded that this was the reason why I quit the Catholic Church, because my being Catholic obviously didn't help my writing career at all. As can be expected, he didn't take to that answer all that well.) This isn't to say that outside factors unrelated to ability keep these beginners from their dream jobs. Anyone who ever worked for a daily or weekly newspaper will tell you all about the petty, pathetic intrigues going on inside, and look at the number of magazines that won't even consider touching a writer who didn't go to the editor's college. We also get the fact that some editors are living embodiments of the Peter Principle, and others are loath to take a chance on a new writer or artist when they know they can get good and dependable work from someone with whom they’ve worked for the last ten years. The entertainment industry as a whole is no more immune to petty politics than the tech industry or the airline industry, and established creators will go on and on about failed opportunities that crashed solely because someone in charge hadn't been laid in a few months, if ever. (Yeah, I can be bitter about it, but after seeing so many potentially good publications go under because the editor had hissy fits over the readers ignoring the 10,000-word editorials that ran in each issue, it's kinda understandable.) The trick here is realizing that talent seeks its own level. Talent all by itself isn't enough to make a career: the artists responsible for the Lascaux cave paintings probably would be sitting pretty if they'd bothered to have a few open exhibitions and invite a few critics from the "New York Times". Raw talent makes up about maybe ten percent of the effort necessary to sell something, trying to get a comics project going is selling something. Namely, your skills and energy. Editors and publishers aren't allied to keep you down: your responsibility is to prove to them why they should give you a chance. One thing that most newbies keep forgetting is that publishing, and any aspect of it, is a business. Yes, we all have these great fantasies of getting big checks with lots of zeros to the left of the decimal point, but the publisher has to make a profit to keep going. This means that a particular publisher has to decide whether a particular project has enough commercial appeal to bring in an audience: if things are good, the publisher can subsidize a work with limited mass appeal off the sales of more commercial projects until the smaller work has a chance to find its audience. In today's comics industry, everyone's hurting, so the publisher has to consider "Well, I have the old-timer and this new kid who wants to start with us, and I know that we'll make x amount of sales with the old-timer, so does the new kid have something that'll draw in new readers?" Welcome to the basic law of depression economics: while something new may bring in more money, it's also a bigger risk, and publishers can't be blamed for deciding that taking a chance may backfire. Another point about bouncing into the comics business lies with it being a business, and that's the need to ship product out the door on something approximating a regular schedule. On the ground level, we all see the guys walking into the local comic shop on New Comics Day who whimper and whine if something they expected to arrive that day isn't in the shipment: now multiply that by the number of comic shops on the planet and realize the amount of stress that each publisher faces with an artist or writer who can't make deadlines. An editor will usually stick with a particular set of artists and writers because s/he knows that these folks can meet their deadlines and won't come up with excuses as to why it's late. The editor may give work to someone who can't meet deadlines, but that's usually because that artist or writer is a Known Quantity who may bring in enough business to offset the grumblings about punctuality. You, as a new writer or artist, are an unknown quantity, and so very few editors will take a chance with someone without an established track record. As an aside, Alex Robinson of the exemplary "Box Office Poison" once related a story that probably every artist asked to evaluate a beginner's art has faced, and that they all dread. In this situation, Mr. Robinson saw any amount of art from obviously talented beginners, but single pages that the artist worked on for six months or so, solely to have a sample to show at a comics convention. Well, do the basic math of the situation: a typical comic has 22 pages of art, and if each page takes six months of work, anyone wanting to see a new issue is going to be waiting a depressingly long time. We see people who throw tantrums if a comic gets delayed by a week, so just imagine how many orders won't get filled by a comic that has an 11-year lead time between issues. Talent won't come close to filling __that_ gap. Okay, so you're talented and dependable, but the obvious concern is that your work may not be suited for the comics company to which it's being submitted. This happens all of the time: Jamie Rich at Oni pointed out in a recent interview the number of standard superhero projects he received, even though the Oni submission guidelines specifically point out that the company has absolutely no interest in superheroes. In this case, a rejection isn't necessarily a slam on the quality of the work; the best option is to shelve that particular project for a while and work on something else. It isn't going to go anywhere, and if that other project becomes successful and another publisher asks for a follow-up, drag it out and go "Huzzah!" It worked for Alan Moore and David Lloyd with "V For Vendetta", which was definitely way ahead of its time. (Still yet another concern is the depressing but very likely concern that your work may not be recognized until well after you're dead. This isn't being cynical, and it isn't intended to dissuade anyone, but one just has to look at the examples of Van Gogh, Lovecraft, and Poe. Your work may be absolutely brilliant, but the rest of society may not develop a taste for it for another century or so. In this case, your heirs will be very glad you expended the effort, but unless someone manages to perfect the revivification of the dead, it won't do you that much good at all.) All this ties right back to the comics business being a business. Most reputable publishers receive dozens, if not hundreds or thousands, of project submissions a month, and they have to sift through each and every one. They aren't conspiring to keep you down: they're looking at a limited number of titles they can publish in a year, with an eye for projects that hope to cover production costs and overhead, pay the creators and the publisher, and maybe leave a little extra to go into publishing more titles. If there's a conspiracy going on, it's with the industry's lack of promotion outside of comic collector circles, or a distribution model that encourages getting comics into the hands of new readers, or the media reportage that consists almost solely of laughing at the local shop Cat Piss Man and implying that everyone else reading comics is a fortysomething dork still living in his parents' basement. Of course, what may appear as a conspiracy usually turns out to be a combination of ignorance, laziness, and stupidity that gives the impression of active involvement, but that's to be expected. All this said, we haven't even touched the last obvious question about why a project or a creator is being rejected. However, since this column has gone on for far too long as is, that'll be the subject of the next column, so head on back in 30.
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