A Decade Of Making Comics - Part II
And you’d think I would have learnt something…here I talk about the first year where I had a one-shot comic and a pitch in my hand, and a dream in my eye
“I been in the game for ten years making rap tunes comics!”
Last time, I wrote about the long decade of writing I put in before I ever got anything to the page. Now, I’ll talk about those first experiences being published.
I can remember moments of FATHERHOOD coming together, and it still fills me with joy.
I had finally settled my brain down and was writing a one-shot comic. Something where a complete story could be told in…I wanna say I went for 24 pages, not 22, but that could be wrong. Some people seem to just remember that stuff, page counts, specific dates, man, I’m lucky to remember character names. Anyway…
I remember tinkering with the script and being really happy with how it came together. A story of a man trying to get his child a toy for their birthday, and when they don’t get the last one, they just mentally fold, and the story goes criminally sideways. I would go on to pitch it at cons, repeatedly, ad nauseam, as:
“It’s about a father who tries to get a doll for his daughter, and when he doesn’t, he has a breakdown and enters a crime story. It starts like Jingle All The Way, but instead of just turning into a shitty film, it turns into Sin City.”
The script polished up nicely, I don’t remember how long it took me to write it, and then I went to Daniel Schneider to see if he wanted to work on it with me. We had become mates through travelling within the same indie comic makers/hopefuls on Twitter.
Daniel was instantly down to do this and he started in on sketches, thumbnails, and excited chat.
Very early in the piece I knew that we should get the comic together and print it and take it to Emerald City Comic Con in Seattle. Looking back, I think this was bordering on a bonehead play - why fly across the country to sell a $5 comic when you hadn’t done anything else.
But I went anyway, and I’m really glad I did.
The deadline was a great excuse to knuckle down and ensure the comic was ready and the whole team smashed it on that front. Daniel’s inked pages were, and continue to be, beauty. Paulina Ganucheau smashed it on colours, and Brandon De Stefano wrapped up the letters. A good friend, Christopher Kosek, came on to design us a cover, because I wanted a real old paperback vibe to it, and the very negative space heavy art he ended up creating for us would go on to catch eyes for half a decade, and I’ll forever thank him for that.
Alongside FATHERHOOD, I was also prepping a pitch for a mini-series, and one I was taking to ECCC so the show would also feel like a chance to step ahead.
The pitch was HEADSPACE, and I was creating with Eric Zawadzki - another Canadian artist, and one I’d also met through Twitter.
Eric’s artwork is phenomenal, and we’d started chatting about maybe doing a short story together. I got a few little ideas together, but he rightly rejected them all. I don’t remember what made me think this was a good idea, but I asked if he’d want to work on a pitch together, and I pitched him HEADSPACE, the story of a sheriff of a small town who comes to realise he and the entire town are in the mind of a killer. He has to work out how to get out, but he also has to survive because the killer’s mind has discovered this intrusion and wishes to wipe them all out.
We put together a cover and 5 pages of art from the intro and the synopsis/pitch details and we printed them up as a short ashcan, I think it was 12 pages.
While both of these forays into comics were being made, I also prepped three other things.
I was going to a monthly drink ‘n’ draw of local comic peeps and we’d decided to put together an anthology to showcase our collective skills. I’d written a short story for that, which would be the first time any of my words would ever see a page bound for other eyes. The book was called BEGINNINGS, and I love that our group hustled to put this together.
I feel bad that I didn’t take more of a helpful hand in that one - visual works being a blindspot in my skills so I was unable to do anything to help assemble the actual book/print file, and alongside that I was also trying to write the above-mentioned comics, and write three reviews a week for CBR, and other articles for another site I wrote at [The Weekly Crisis], while parenting a toddler, and still being an Assistant Principal at school, and I dare say I was slowly climbing the beautiful peak we call ‘burn out.’ But the book is amazing, and it definitely showed me that all efforts can add up.
I had also spent this time writing mammoth essays about Matt Murdock/Daredevil that were going to form the backbone of a book of essays about Daredevil I was creating/editing for SequArt. You can scope out info about THE DEVIL IS IN THE DETAILS: EXAMINING MATT MURDOCK AND DAREDEVIL right here. That was an insane labour of love and hard work. I wrangled about a dozen other people to write these awesome takes on DD, and that paperback would also be available for ECCC, though obviously with a very different and limited audience.
I had also created a podcast about writing comics with Kurtis J. Wiebe and Jeremy Holt, called The Process. I loved doing that podcast, just chatting with two good mates, and it was through that show that we all got an email from Tyler James, the founder and publisher of ComixTribe. He was planning to do an anthology of short stories about this villain character he’d created, Oxymoron. He asked if any of we three would be interested, and I didn’t know it at the time but replying to him with a “Yes” would be a moment where I’d forge a profession and personal relationship that would span decades.
So when I rolled into ECCC 2013, it was two weeks after my second kid had been born, I had a one-shot comic, a book of essays, and an anthology in which I had a short on my table - and I was ready, or as ready as I’d ever be. Though I had to be ready without that anthology because my hotel could not find the box that had been shipped to me [it would turn up after the show so I’d make the hotel pay for shipping it back to me down in Australia].
The show itself was awesome - I tabled with Jeremy, and Ryan Ferrier, and Paul Allor and all of them are superb humans, with comics of which I’m all equally jealous and in love. We had a lot of fun that weekend, and a lot of sales, and I was pleased to see FATHERHOOD sell so well.
I also made time off the table to try and seek out some editors I knew would be there and I ended the show having met some really awesome people who would help me have communication with Vertigo, Dark Horse, Boom, Monkeybrain Comics, and some more.
It had felt silly to leave my newly expanded family for a very long weekend to fly across the world to sell single issue comics.
In fact, I don’t often reflect on how silly I felt about my writing about a decade ago. I mean, I took it seriously, I was dedicating time every single day to it, but I always felt like I was chasing some pipedream, and that others would probably see it through the clarity of real life and think I was being a bit silly [immature? unrealistic? stupid? Pick one or worse]. It didn’t ever stop me, but I was aware of this niggling thought.
The first step was quitting the gym and giving myself more time to write. Silly.
Another step was sometimes missing out on a night out with mates to stay home and write. I didn’t do it all the time, I had plenty of fun nights out, but there were times a story would slam into my brain and I’d have to, and happily, knock back an invite and just stay home at the keyboard.
Another step was to go to comic conventions, before being published, and wander artists’ alley with that hopeful eye of someone dreaming of one day also making images and words into four colour stories. I’d chat with artists, and dream big. I can remember going to a con just after I’d started dating the woman who would become my wife, and I didn’t initially want to tell her why I was going out of town that weekend. My instinct was to not tell her purely because I thought she’d think I was silly [or worse]. But I did tell her, because it seemed even sillier [and sowing the seeds of destruction in a relationship] to not tell her. I still thought she’d think I was silly, but I guess I was prepared for that - and she did not, or at least didn’t express that to me, so that was fine.
When I moved cities to live with this lovely lady, I remember telling people at my new school that I was focusing on writing outside of work. I still remember my boss at that time looking at me with that twinkle in her eye like I was a silly child. Silly to think that was possible, silly to go out of town for such things, silly to put a limit on my teaching roles/efforts to try and balance against the pipedream, silly to fly across the country and spend so much money on this thing. Now, I don’t begrudge her these thoughts, I’m sure she’d seen plenty of other early educators thinking and doing similar things to little avail. I know completely where she was coming from, and the thoughts were in my head, too - but I refused to actually let them control me. For some reason, I was already too stubborn to back away - a trait that’s probably been a bigger attribute for any success in this past decade than anything else.
I pushed on because I was sure there was no other way for me to live, and I had a wife who supported me an insane amount, and because I enjoyed it. So I spent a decent chunk of money, right on the birth of a second child, to leg it to Seattle with hopes and dreams and about 30 pages of comics to share. And it was one of the best decisions I ever made because the next year would prove to be an amazing set up for my next steps into writing comics.
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