The Comics Journal's weblog — which is well worth a daily stop, by the way — linked this morning to my earlier item about how I don't recommend the current comic book industry as a career. This prompted an extra number of hits, as well as e-mails asking me to elaborate. So I will.
In this world, it's always great when you can turn your hobby into your occupation; when you can make your living doing something because it's a passion, rather than just a means of paying the mortgage. The trouble is that you need it to be both — and lately, I know too many very talented writers and artists who are scrounging about for work. I don't mean just beginners. Some of them are long-established talents who are almost certainly qualified to be doing Superman or X-Men or any of those books. A few have been deflected by simple, sometimes openly-admitted ageism. For others, it's simply a matter of X number of qualified people seeking work where there are Y number of openings — and X is 3 to 10 times Y. I gave up editing comics some time ago but tomorrow, if I had to find one person to write a generic ghost comic for me, I can think of at least 20 friends who would be up to the task and welcome the work.
Once upon a time, there were those of us who could line up three or four comics a month to write and even without a contract, count on that as relatively steady for the foreseeable future. Today, few are in that category — and they're all looking to line something else up. Never before has writing an established, well-known comic seemed so much like a temp job.
Now, in and of itself, that may not be a bad thing. I coined a phrase some time ago, which was to never get possessive about characters you don't own. Writing your childhood fave or something of the sort can be a dream come true, and even lucrative for a time. But you're just baby-sitting and some day soon, the parents will reclaim their kid and maybe even hand it off to another baby-sitter who'll declare your stint apocryphal. A lot of folks — writers, especially — wake up one morn and realize that they have spent too many of their most fertile, creative years building on someone else's property and/or constricting themselves by the demands of such jobs. One comic artist friend of mine, lacking work in that field and trying to break into another, believes he is at a huge disadvantage: He picked up too many bad habits drawing super-hero comics. It's not that he should never have done them. He just should have done something else, as well — preferably something that was his, in spirit if not in copyright.
None of this is to suggest that no one can get into comics these days and do good work and make a decent living. Some will. Some will also win the lottery. In the case of the lottery, most people come to it with some sense of the odds against them, and they make what one can only hope is an informed, realistic decision that the possible gains justify the definite outlays. I think that today there are a lot of kids — many of them, quite talented — who are so horny to write Batman or whatever that they do not realistically assess those odds. If they did, they might well find that some of their other dreams are eminently better investments and that if they do comics — especially of the work-for-hire variety — they shouldn't even dream of doing them full-time. That's partly for the soul and partly for simple economic survival.