Tekno, Defiant, Broadway: the Comic Book Shellgame

James Vance is chronicling his Brilliant Career at Tekno Comics over at his blog, and it should be required reading for everyone at the same time as Tim Perkins early days at Defiant Comics. Welcome to the 1990's my friends, or practically any other era where the dreams fly high, the money seems like it could actually come in, and the sales look like they might actually happen.

We creative types always fall for it. We're prone to it by virtue of creating fantasies in our heads for everyone else to read and live. And we keep thinking that, at some point, we might live one too.

I read Vance's columns and had a horrible amount of deja vu, listening to the editorial nit-picking that would ruin his Gaiman-bibled comic. I worked under Ed Polgardy at Defiant, and, sadly, Ed got himself into the same position at Tekno that he had at Defiant. He only knew one way to produce the comics, it didn't work the first time, and there was very little reason to assume it would work the second time. Training under Shooter was not the best thing that could have happened to him. Ed's boss at Defiant, Deborah Purcell knew next to nothing about creating good comics. Her background in editing may have qualified her for working with words, but there was nothing in her resume that would show that she could understand, nurture and comment correctly on the unique verbal/visual mix that is comics. Her later replacement, Pauline Weiss, came from an entirely different background, but Pauline knew, in her DNA, what could make good comics better, or fix crappy ones. Its a unique talent.

I vividly recall a meeting with JG Jones, Jim Shooter and Joe James in the Defiant era that would define the sort of "this will put you in your place" get together that you would have: I was asked to drop by the office for them to criticize the one line on the interior of the mouth of a character's face that was on a nine-panel grid page. Seriously. I'm sure the Joe knew it was a ridiculous meeting, but he had to go in with a straight face and critique it.

The worst phrase in corporate America is "value added", because it assumes that everyone has a valid opinion. And they don't. I hire someone to fix my sink, my comments, no matter how well intentioned, are not "value added". I'm not a plumber. And any number of editors and money men and financers and backers and girlfriends of publishers and wives of editors can have an opinion, but all they will likely do it ruin things worst than they already are. Your book may be crap, but now its committee crap, which is clearly worse crap.

I will eagerly follow Vance's next post, so that we can all follow the trail of failure and its lurid smell. And once again I will say, given all the talented people that I"ve met in the comics world, and the good will and the desire to do work that isn't crap, why does it all turn to shit every time we turn around? Read all the creative type's blogs and you'll see that the blame seems to fall squarely on the editorial shoulders, but its not that simple and you and I know it. I do know that if any of the editors have a blog that addresses their time in the comic world I would love to read it. Might balance things out just a little bit.

Getting Into The Business: Defiant Comics and The Commune

I've blogged a couple times over what it was like to finally get accepted into the world of being a comic professional, (just search my blog with "defiant"), and primarily to see if i could capture the sense of wonder and accomplishment that came with finally "making it" past the velvet rope. Now, my old friend Tim Perkins has started to do the same thing, and it is, of course, very interesting to read from his perspective. Worth a read, as he goes into more detail than I have done in my particular case, but his is rather more interesting as he was an Englishman coming to America for the first time, so there is an extra sense of "fish out of water" in the telling.

Pop on over if you get the chance!

Also, the underground instant classic horror film The Commune (reviews here and here)is showing opening night at Dances With Film in LA. For a solid dose of Wicker Man type horror, you need to get your butt over to the theatre to see this one. Those with sharp eyes will see my artwork for Pistoleras in the background of one scene, which will be pretty cool to see. This, however, is a badass film that is scarier in a far deeper way that another maniac running through the woods with a saw/drill/disc sander. Go check it out!

Short Takes: Steve Ditko and Defiant Comics

Carl Potts, has a great post on steve ditko on his blog here, the best part being this little bombshell:

In the late ‘80s, Ditko told me that, when he quit Marvel in the ‘60s, he didn’t turn in two Dr. Strange stories that he’d plotted and penciled. My jaw hit the floor.

This was amazing news and I urged (begged) Ditko to bring in the story! He politely declined, saying he didn’t want the pages to ever be published or copied. I told him that I’d be happy to look over his shoulder as he flipped through the pages/ That way the pages would never leave his hands, but he still declined to bring them in. Since then I’ve fantasized about what those pages look like and what the story was about. I wonder if I’ll ever find out!

I somehow doubt that we'll ever see those pages until Steve passes on, and i wouldn't put it past him to have it written into the will to have the executor have to shred them before getting anything else.!

My near-miss Ditko story: I started working professionally at Defiant under Jim Shooter in 1992, just as Ditko had finished drawing the promo-issue of Dark Dominion #0. Defiant had offices on the 15th floor of a building on west 36th st. with both an elevator and stairs. One time Steve showed up and was told that Jim was in a meeting and would be out in about 15 minutes and would he please wait? Steve, who had walked up all15 flights turned around and walked out. He declined to wait, but came back about 15 minutes later for the meeting. Now Ditko was notorious about not taking elevators. Did he just go down the stairs and then come back up? There really was nowhere else to go! Everybody there was convinced that he walked down, and walked back up.

Ditko's last day in the offices was the day before i got there. Argh. I felt like Steve was just out of reach, as if he was slightly at a distance and in shadow, like all those original panels hiding the identity of the Green Goblin.

Ditko's best work, in my opinion was most likely on Dr Strange, although i always see them as an extension of the short story monster work that prevailed in the Pre-Marvel line. Some of those litttle twilight zone scripts received rare treatment by Steve in terms of beautiful light and dark work. His story about the man who traps death in a stasis ray is a great little gem.

The Shooter Story: Beginning, Middle and End

Just a week or two after I make the comment on Jim Shooter's assertion that comic book storytelling should be done a certain way because "Its always someone's first comic." then this quyote shows up on the Comic Journal's Journalista site (as well as the Comic Book Guy site) :

"The art in comics is generally better than ever, the writing is often clever and glib, but in spite of that, far too many comics are utterly unreadable. Even hardcore fans find many comics daunting to follow! The craft of storytelling is all but lost. A who's who of industry big shots have privately agreed with me when we've discussed exactly this subject, but it's a tough problem to fix, given the often huge egos of the creators, general creative anarchy and lack of trained editorial people".

And he's right. I'm not going to argue with him on the main part of his message. However, I will make the case that there were plenty of hard as hell to follow '70's comics as well, when we had exceptionally talented editors and writers like Marv Wolfman overseeing the biz. The quextion is, what is a readable comic? Isn't a comic that a 7 year old can understand different from a comic that a 25 year old can understand? How about a literate, educatated woman of 38 who simply hasn't grown up with comic?

My focus group on comics generally comprises my almost-7 year old daughter, who is a voracious reader, and my wife, with a Masters in Journalism, who didn't grow up in a comic book world like many of us did. I keep a spinner rack in the TV room at home loaded with everything from '60's Marvel to Dodson's Wonder Woman and Cooke's New Frontier. And I've found poor storytelling in every era, regardless of editor, but obviously, different things jumped out at the 7 year old versus the 38 year old.

The panel to panel transitions on the modern Wonder Woman comic are clearer to the 7 year old than some of the transitions in the 60's and '70's, with their greater degree of story compression, as they depend on the captions to make certain elements of the story clear. Not fully understanding the vocabulary, she needs a greater degree of visual communication to make this work, and I'm not certain that Jim allow this degree of latitude with most of his artists. Certainly, Marvel in the 80's had the superstars who could experiment (it seemed like every issue Moon Knight was a Sienkiewicz experiment) regardless of the failure rate, and everyone else, who were ruled by an iron editorial hand. Perhaps if there is someone to who helped create the superstar system, it may have been Jim. Miller got to do what he wanted. Daredevil was either Frank's or Rogers, and as we saw, editorial went with Frank. As many times as I've seen Frank interviewed on the subject, I'm not sure I've ever run across a Roger McKenzie interview where he addresses it.

Having been around the comics for so long now, I see head editors that were editorial assistants or interns when i was inking books 10 years ago. If there is anything that comics doesn't have, its any sort of organized training system that addresses the twin disciplines that our medium encompasses, and that may be a huge failing point with comics direction. Some editors become traffic directors simply, some stamp their view point so strongly on the books that they may as well be a modern Mort Weisinger. Many fall in the middle, caught and pulled in many different directions, by the prevailing marketing conditions, the overall corporate direction, the whims of the writer or artist, the latest company crossover (Counting Down to the Crisis on Infinite Hulks), the modern editor might long for days of simply getting the writer and artist on the same page and turning out a nice monthly book. It can't be easy.

It will be fascinating to see if Jim's Legion harkens back to the '60's DC, '70's Marvel or 90's Defiant. Especially with editorial changes that pretty much everyone in comics is predicting will happen to at the DC offices.

Bits of the Past: The Comics that Neverwuz

Went searching for the damn Good guys origiinals in the closet and ran across other interesting stuff, pieces that I'd not seen in a long time.

Perhaps its the good red wine hitting me, but as I found myself looking over pieces that I had done 15 years ago or more, I found that I could remember a lot putting them together, perhaps more that I could remember about the times and places that surrounded the artwork themselves. I remember placing those blacks in just such a way on the page, or doing a trick to ghost in a hand that I couldn't quite pencil correctly. Holiday cards that bespoke of myself in college, living in some oddball apartment, surrounding myself with the oxygen that keeps a 20 year old alive: music, comics, scraps of paper with phone numbers, old grocery receipts heavy on Ramen, old running shoes under the bed.

And I stared at the lump of papyrus in my lap thinking, this is the most accurate way that I've measured my life: in lines on paper, in fantasies brought stillborn on the tip of a pen or brush. And its somewhat sad, in one way, since its filled with far more failed experiments that ones that work, but in another way I think: at least I have some way to measure; at least there is some path here.

lately I've been missing, again, youthful arrogance, in all its wonderful glory. Because, just as I can see the obvious lumps and bruises in Guy Davis' Baker Street, hear the frantic glory in the Jam's first album, I love these things that they were too stupid to know that the couldn't do. I love the bad posturing in Jim Starlin's early Captain Marvels, I love all the crazy little lines in Jamie Hernandez's early Locas stories that he would soon edit out, I love that someone believed enough in them to give them the opportunity to go and do.

As you can read in my earlier post about Defiant's Good Guys, it took years of going to conventions with my inks and having different editors say, "Well, that looks good." It finally took David Lapham looking me in the eye and saying, "This is really good stuff. Why aren't you working professionally yet?" and I looked him right back and could truthfully say, "I don't know. No one will give me a chance." and I knew that I wasn't hiding a single weakness in my game, I knew that I was ready. I had been ready. Perhaps thats why when Neil Pozner died, and practically everyone, it seemed, had a great note about what a wonderful guy he was, there was a contingent among us who knew that he was simply the gatekeeper to keep us out of DC, out of getting our work under the eyes of someone who could actually have given us work. I was jealous of the guys who had someone who would look at their work and say, "You know what, its not all there, but I'll give you a chance to get there. Here's the assignment."

At the top of this post is an early work, copyright myself and Todd Miro, that I still love. Just give it a click to see the larger version. I'll be raising my Led Zeppelin shot glass to toast all those who have helped someone along the way.

In Praise Of Mentors: Alan Weiss

The Wardancer panels are scanned from my original pages.

Like many comic artists, I was essentially self trained in the specifics of comic art. Like most I nicked a nose from Adams, a hand from Gulacy, a layout from Perez and tried to synthesize them as my own. As I worked more on my inking I studied different approaches, from the thick line approach of Dick Ayers and Jack Abel, to the studied contrast in Klaus Janson and Pablo Marcos' work, to the precision in Terry Austin's.

How cohesive is this really? I recall seeing the swiped Chaykin figures in Jim Lee's early work. How do we develop a style and a language that will allow us to actually critique our work and make it better?

Arriving in New York for my first comic book work back in the early '90's, I was fortunate to have the opportunity to work on the book Wardancer with Alan Weiss. Alan had been through the trenches of '70's Marvel with all the people that were my idols, creators of my favorite comics: Steve Englehart, Jim Starlin, Al Milgrom, Barry Smith, et al, and had a million and one stories to tell.

And he could draw. Oh yes he could.

It would end up being the best situation that I could have imagined. My ink work looked terrible on the pencillers who came up with outlines and no substance. (Take a look at the first half of Good Guys #4, or better yet don't) Alan's work was a substance and form, all muscle and sinew, light playing over the figures as they moved and breathed in a 3 dimensional space. It was both a joy to work on and pulling out my own fingernails tough.

After I did each batch of pages Alan and I would meet at a diner to have a bite, talk some life and go over the work. He had asked me to do less feathering and use more texture to round the figures. I ended using a combination of grease pencil and dry brush work to add the grain he was looking for. It made for absolutely beautiful originals; they had depth and clarity and fullness to them that is lacking on more graphic work. Given the color process at Defiant, it also led to horrible, horrible printed work. It was a shame.

Alan gave me the terms and verbage to adequately discuss the art of comics, the art of lighting a figure and how to, if need be, fix said art. I did as much fixing as I could along the way. I learned how to sculpt the figure with the brush, much you might sculpt stone in three dimensions. I also found that few editors have the knowledge and language to adequately convey what they want from artists, which is a huge issue when it comes to review artists work at con, or being able to actually discuss the work in the office. It may be one of the great failings of the comic biz, that there are very few Archie Goodwins nuturing new talent or tweaking existing talent to being better.

It was an amazing education in a short concentrated period of time, punctuated by lessons on the politic of comic books, as well as the brutal reality of the comic market circa 1993/94, which was not a great time for comics. I know that in talks with Alan, I saw an extremely creative individual with a number of fun, interesting ideas, many of which were simply too far afield to have worked in the "grim and gritty superheroes or bust" world of the 1980 and 1990's. In a world of Rocketo and Milk and Cheese, Steel Grip Starkey would certainly have had a better chance of finding the sales it needed.

While those days of living in New York are more than a few years in the past, I still remember so much of those afternoon sessions poring of the artwork with Alan, figureing out ways to make things better. I still look at my own work with that eye: does it have form? Does it have substance? Does it take life on the page?

RIP Dave Cockrum

I've waited a few days to get the chance to post this, but I wanted to say a few things about Dave Cockrum, and those things do not include any tirades against Marvel for not taking care of him until recently.

Personal story, enter at your own risk: My second or third day in New York, and in the comics industry as a whole, I was working at the Defiant offices on W36th St., when in comes Dave Cockrum, who proceeds to sit at the drawing board next to mine and look over recently inked pages of his Defiant work: Plasm: Home for the Holidays. Dave, wearing splints on both wrists for carpal tunnel, was clearly not in the very best of health, but was jovial, cordial, just plain fun to talk with.

His one complaint on the Plasm pages: that they had taken the tail off of Nightcrawler in the background of a panel. "He's my character, my trademark." Dave explained to Jim Shooter, "I always draw him into my work somewhere." The inker had taken the tail out, worried about copyright violation. Jim agreed with Dave saying, "he won't be colored exactly the same, I'm not worried about it." "Do we have to send this back to the inker?" Dave asked.

"There's an inker sitting there with a brush in his hand,"says Jim, looking at me. I quickly touch up the artwork and put the tail back in. And I'm thinking, HOW GODDAMN COOL IS THIS??

Somewhere out there is the original art for the cover which i had the pleasure of working on, art that eventually was used as the back cover. I really wish that I had gotten that artwork back.

Dave was a huge Star Trek fan, and entertained everyone in the office with his fluent Klingon and i got the chance to sit there and talk to him about Marvel and the different covers that he worked on that i remembered. He was a great guy, and I have a fond memory of that day getting the chance to sit and work and talk with a guy that somehow never quite became the legend that he should have become for his body of work. It was day 3 of being a peer rather than chatting over the table at a convention. It still makes me smile.

So there you go, just a small memory from the long ago year of 1993, but one that I hold on to. Rest in peace Dave, you go well remembered by so many of us.

I will get this out of the way: after getting a picture of just how bad comics were in trouble in '76 and '77 from guys like Chuck Rozanski, we perhaps should note that the All New, All Different X-Men changed the entire industry, and created the last Great Marvel Property. think about it: everything else that we really see as a Marvel Icon comes from Lee/Kirby or Lee/Ditko (and I don't have to go into the listing of any of those names, do I?) except the modern X-Men. For them, get down on your knees and worship Wein, Wolfman, Cockrum, Claremont, Byrne and Austin. The six of them may be the reason that you can continue to buy comics today.