From Hank Kingsley (not his real name, I'm guessing) comes the following…
I read the piece on the tragedy of Bill Mantlo with great sadness and a fear that that kind of thing could happen to me or a loved one. I felt especially bad for his brother who has had to deal with this impossible problem. The same people who tell us all life is sacred and who felt that Terri Schiavo's heart had to be kept beating no matter what are unwilling to do anything to make it possible for a Bill Mantlo to afford to live. I do not know why they think that a Cigna with its responsibility to its stockholders to show a profit will not try to kick the Bill Mantlos of the world off their plans so they don't have to pay for them. I believe in free enterprise and capitalism but I believe more in life.
You said that the author's account of how a comic book is created was wrong but you didn't specify how he was wrong. Could you go into more detail about that? And could you also answer this question for me? When I hear that writers missed deadlines and caused comics to not come out or to go reprint, I just do not understand that. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of people out there who would love to write comic books. Why doesn't the company just hire more of them?
Regarding the health care matter, I honestly believe that in the next 10-20 years (and maybe sooner), we're going to see something akin to Single Payer in this country. It may take a different form. It may be disguised so it looks more like a Republican-driven plan that they can claim is not "a government takeover of health care" but is. There will probably still be room in it for the Cigna and Anthem people and all the drug companies to post record profits. But this upward spiral of health costs, even with whatever controls "Obamacare" imposes, cannot continue. Too many people are dying or losing their homes because of it.
Now to the matter of how a comic book is created. Here's the description from the article…
At that time, comics were produced on an assembly line: a writer wrote a 17-page script which went to a penciller, who would follow the script to draw the panels in light blue non-repro pencil. Then the pages went to an inker, who went over the initial art, cleaning it up and adding light and shadow with black ink. Then it went to a colorist, who would paint the panels and send the page to a letterer, who would hand-write every word of dialogue and exposition. As a rule, the process worked fairly well unless the writer missed the deadline, at which point the whole show would grind to a halt.
Not only is that not an accurate description of the process at Marvel in the seventies, it's not accurate for any company I know of at any time. Here, step by step, is the breakdown…
- There were a few writers then at Marvel who wrote full scripts (Mantlo, I believe, was sometimes one) but most would write up a plot, either on their own or working in consultation with the pencil artist. These scripts were sometimes 17 pages, sometimes other lengths.
- The plot would go to the penciller who would draw it out. A few of them used non-repro blue pencil but most did not. Most used regular pencils.
- If the writer had written a full script, the pages would go next to the letterer. If the writer had written a plot, the pages would go back to the writer who would then compose the dialogue and captions. Then the job would go to the letterer who would inscribe all that copy on the page.
- Then it would go to the inker who might add "light and shadow" or might just trace the penciller's indications of light and shadow.
- Throughout the process, the material might be routed through an editor (sometimes, the writer was the editor) and the company's production department. The last stop before printing was almost always the colorist, not the letterer.
The author's line about "unless the writer missed the deadline" is misleading, too. Yes, writers miss deadlines. So do pencillers, inkers, letterers, colorists, etc. Books have been late because they got lost in the mail or lost in the production department. (An issue of Blackhawk I did for DC shipped late because even though the artist and I got it in weeks before the deadline, someone in the office mislaid the art.) Along the "assembly line," anyone can cause a problem.
Solving deadline problems is not always a matter of hiring more people who want to do comics. First off, not everyone who wants to do comics can. In the seventies — the period when Bill Mantlo became the King of Fill-In Issues as described in the article — the problem seemed to be a shortage of artists and also an unwillingness on the part of Marvel to spend the money to double or triple the size of their editorial staff. They kept adding new comics to the line but didn't enlarge the office crew accordingly, nor did they say, "Gee, we don't have enough artists so we'd better not add more titles."
I was involved with a number of last-minute deadline crunches on comics during that period, helping writer friends who through no fault of their own found themselves waiting, past the date when the book should have been off to the printer, for the penciller to finish so they could dialogue the pages. Someday here, I oughta tell some of those stories.