The Scarecrow vs. Moon Knight

The Vengeance of the Moon Knight #5. Today.

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.

Favorite Christmas Gift From Guess Who?

Hulk No Go Backward!

LOVE SANDY: First Edition Michael Connelly and Holiday Irritation

This from an article I wrote last year – thought I’d repub it here in the tradition of holiday un-cheer.
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Aside from the occasional Red Sox game which my father, transplanted from Boston to the Bay Area, allowed to grace our television, my sister and I weren’t allowed to watch “the Plug-In Drug” growing up. Perhaps because of this, she and I are book people. As in, Book People. We love the smell of books, the feel of them. We can’t travel without books or go to sleep without reading first. When we were younger, we brought books to camp and sleepovers. We brought them on car rides, to the beach, to doctor appointments. We’d go to library sales and buy used paperbacks for a quarter each, go home, and devour them like kids popping candy after a fruitful round of trick-or-treating. And then we organized and reorganized them endlessly—by color and size, alphabetically, by genre and series. (Yes, there is an OCD strain in ye olde gene pool). When we were well-behaved, we’d get to go to the book store (Walden, anyone?) where we’d run the aisles like berserking junkies.

As we grew older, we grew more concerned with the state of the books we bought. New hardcover: good. Putting book facedown to hold place: bad. Whispering sweet nothings to your books: good. Loaning them to book infidels who touch the pages with Cheeto-fuzzed fingers: bad.

So you can imagine my delight about five years back when I strolled into a used bookstore in Brentwood and came upon a mint-condition hardcover first-edition of The Black Echo. I already owned said book, but my sister did not. Christmukkah was coming up, and I’d yet to buy her a gift. With excitement, I checked the title page and there, lightly penciled (and erasable), was the price: 5-.

Now, Mr. Connelly’s Edgar-award-winning first novel, as many of you know, is worth quite a bit more than that. I snapped it up eagerly and went home to wrap it (taping the brown-paper bag closed at the top).

When my sister opened the book some weeks later, she regarded it with great delight. She thumbed through it. Sniffed the pages like a book pervert. And then she turned to the inside front cover and her face fell. Magic Markered in messy cursive was a note. DEAR JANE, HOPE YOU LIKE THIS BOOK. ITS [sic] ONE OF MY FAVERITES [sic]. LOVE, SANDY.

I don’t know how I’d missed it, but I knew one thing: I hated that dumb-ass Sandy.

To this day, when my sister and I give each other gifts or send emails, we sign them LOVE SANDY. It keeps us mindful of those finest of holiday traditions: holding on to resentments and making fun of others.

Wednesday Dec 16, All Hell Breaks Loose

Vengeance of the Moon Knight #4, cover thanks to Leinil Yu. Now we’re at my favorite part of an arc – endless kick-ass action.

Jump on it now since the first three sold out their first day.

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