If you pay attention to the monthly comic book solicitations, you’ll notice that my name is absent from the listing for issue five of Image Comics WOLF (the book i have been drawing with Ales Kot, Lee Loughridge, Clayton Cowles and Tom Muller). If you were to look into the future and see the solicit for issue six, you wouldn’t find me there either. And you might then think: ‘hey, what’s up with that?‘
So here’s what’s up with that. After four issues of surly private investigators, tentacled down and outs and, well, wolves, i am leaving WOLF for pastures new. Which I know isn’t all that common on Image books where you have a creative team locked in and they tell the story they wanted to tell. You’re probably thinking: “maybe there’s some behind the scenes shenanigans that they’re not telling me about.“
So here’s the behind the scenes shenanigans that they’re not telling you about. Comics are HARD WORK. And as it turns out, they’re harder work than i ever anticipated. Also harder than I anticipated: trying to maintain a full time gig as a freelance illustrator alongside a monthly book (in the same time I have been working on WOLF i have produced somewhere north of fifteen portraits, eight movie posters, four book covers, a bunch of editorials and comic book covers and full artwork for three albums). The reason for the full time job is because, I only got my first cheque for WOLF about three weeks ago and I’ve been working on it since January (that’s just the way it works with Image books, where you won’t see money until a couple of months after the first issue).
Even harder still: doing all of this with a new baby (her name is Nico, she is one year old, and she is wonderful - thank you for asking).
I’m pretty sure I should have listened when seasoned comics friends told me how much hard work comics could be, but I was way too confident that I could juggle everything and still get to bed before midnight every night. I have a newfound respect for monthly artists having tried and only just managed four months of it!
WOLF had a difficult birth with some changes in personnel as we were just getting started, then a first issue which was 28 pages, then 39, then kept on growing to eventually 58 (and there was some great stuff which was cut after it had been drawn and some sequences were reworked and moved to different places and in one case a different issue - including, i kid you not, a zombie Heidi Klum which was one of my favourite pages and I hope will surface somewhere). The release was initially scheduled for April, then moved back to July. None of this is uncommon, but for someone who is used to working on fairly rigid deadlines with illustration, being one part of a machine like this was a bit of a shock. And that’s before we even get to moments of my own stupidity like leaving half the pages for an issue on a different computer and completely forgetting to upload them to be coloured. Before issue one had dropped I was already very aware that it wasn’t going to work on an ongoing basis and so we agreed that I’d do the first arc and then hand over the reins.
I’m immensely proud of the story we have laid the foundations for and i’ll be continuing to read the book now that Ricardo Lopez Ortiz has joined the team.
And so for now, my brief flirtation with monthly comics is over. But not with comics in general because I have a few things lined up already to keep me busy over the next year. Things I can work on slowly and surely and not have a monthly panic attack over.
To be continued.
I started writing this blog a few months ago and then got distracted for the usual reasons (deadlines, holiday, my wife and I are having a baby soon, etc), but I was reminded of it today and as it turns out there wasn’t that much editing that needed doing to make it intelligible, so here it is:
It’s frustrating to me that this should even be a conversation we’re having about why design competitions are wrong, but I think it needs saying again, especially for the benefit of illustrators who are just starting out in this industry.
Illustration competitions that require you to create work on spec ARE A BAD THING. What is spec? Speculative work - ie: work that you create in the hope that you will be paid for it.
But why are they a bad thing? I hear you ask. At their best, they allow me to maybe have my work used by *insert-band-name-here* or used as an unofficial poster for *summer-blockbuster-of-choice* or on a t-shirt made by *your-favorite-brand*. They say I’ll get great exposure.
(Oh God, exposure. The dangling toxic carrot of the young illustrators life. If I had a pound for every time I had heard think of the exposure then I probably could afford to work for free. But I still wouldn’t. I’m starting to get off topic, but you should read this wonderful piece by the very talented Jessica Hische about working for free.)
Back to the point I was working towards. Yes, all those statements above are true, but they all hang on you doing a piece of work on spec, for free. They reduce our industry, our studies and our skills to a hobby that can be rewarded with shiny things.
I think that one of the (for want of a better word) ‘problems’ with creative industries is that ostensibly we enjoy what we do. We might even be inclined to do what we do for fun - I would certainly be drawing even if I was doing something else because I love drawing. But it is STILL YOUR JOB and you deserve to be compensated for you time. I hate to use the plumber analogy, but you wouldn’t expect a plumber to fix your cracked pipes for free 'because he enjoys it’ or because you would tell all your friends about his work.
If you’re thinking of running a design competition, here are some better things to try instead. Take the prize fund and use it to commission someone whose work you like. The end result will be the same - you have a piece of work you can use - but in the mean time you wont have wasted the time of EVERYONE ELSE WHO WOULD HAVE ENTERED.
But I’m only starting out you may say. You still deserve to be paid, don’t let anyone suggest otherwise. If you worked in a shop, you’d still get paid even if it was your first day.
Here are some things that are a better use of your time than entering a competition:
- set yourself a brief and answer it. be challenging (for example, if your forte is drawing owls, don’t set the brief: draw a cool owl). treat it like you would a job and then blog it - show your process maybe, sketches you tried before you settled on a final.
- practice your craft. spend some time drawing, researching. make a zine, make a product that you can sell through your website (preferably not infringing on someone else’s IP - that’s a blog post for a whole other time).
- bake a cake. personally, I find baking hugely satisfying and I do some of my best thinking when I’m doing something that isn’t drawing.
- look for potential clients and send them links to your work
- go and do some exercise. we spend most of our time sitting in small hot rooms, so make the most of the fact it’s summer and go for a walk. also, see above - if you’ve just made and consumed a cake you could probably do with some exercise.
I could go on and on, but you get the idea. As long as people continue to enter competitions, there will be competitions, so just stop. You’ll be better off for it. Value yourself. You and your skills are a commodity. This isn’t a hobby, this is a job and you don’t do your job for free.