Breaking In To Comics (the inside word from a Marvel Editor)

Here’s some advice Marvel Editor Jody LeHeup offered a former student of mine on how to break in to comics. Since I get asked this a lot and never have a good answer, I thought I’d cut out the idiot middle man (me) and take readers straight to the source.

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First of all, it’s HARD. Just so you know that up front. Second, there are numerous articles online that go into much more detail than I can here. It couldn’t hurt to seek them out.

If you want to write for comics, I suggest you first decide what it is you want to do. Do you want to write super heroes? Crime comics? Slice-of-life stuff? Do you want to do creator owned work or work-for-hire? The steps you take to break in will be slightly different depending on what you want to do but for the most part what follows is a good way to get started. Let’s assume for the moment that you want to do commercial super hero work-for-hire since you wrote that Batman story. Well, the best advice I can give you is to either get produced or published in another medium (like novels or film or television, which is it’s own ball of wax) or you get published in comics and get an editor to notice your work. How do you do that? I suggest that you do some research and find some smaller publishers that are putting out anthologies. Study those anthologies and figure out what you can write for them. Once you get a sense for the kinds of stories they publish, write up a short story (Not only are shorts easy for an editor to read but shorts are very hard to do well and writing them will really train you to work within limitations. It will keep your storytelling tight and lean.) that’s along those lines, find an artist (this part is hard), get him to finish illustrating it (even harder), get it lettered, designed and packaged as a mini-comic and send it in as a submission to the editor of that anthology. Hopefully they are interested in publishing it. And to increase your chances you want to make sure that the story you’re submitting is as good a story as you can write and looks as good as you can possibly make it. Don’t settle for an artist. Find a good one that will make it sing. But at the same time, be reasonable. Jim Lee has no interest in drawing your comic. Once your short is finished you’re ready to show it to an editor. The reason I suggest giving an editor a complete comic is because reading scripts is work. Reading a comic is fun. And you won’t to make it really easy for editors (or producers even) to read your stuff. If the editor is not interested, that’s okay. Keep submitting it or keep it around as a portfolio piece then move on to the next short. If the editor IS interested then congratulations you’ve published a short comics story and you should be very proud of that. It’s no small feat, my friend. I know. I’ve been there. But stay humble. You’re work isn’t finished. Do it again. And again. Once you have some published work under your belt you can then begin to submit the published work (and only the published work) to big publishers like Marvel and DC. I recommend having at least two or three stories so that the editor can see that you’re serious. Hopefully by that point your work is impressive enough to turn some heads. If not, keep trying. Maybe a smaller press will be willing to give you mini-series which will build your audience and your portfolio. When it comes to dealing with editors, be persistent but not annoying. Be confident but not over-confident. Be professional but be passionate. Go to cons and talk to people. Network. You never know when a friend will be able to put your work on an editor’s desk. And most important of all, do not get discouraged and do not give up.