Richard Gagnon writes…
I have a nephew that wants to be a comic book writer/artist. He's a little rough around the edges, but he's at an age where his work is going to improve tremendously in the next few years. He has the potential to be a professional comic book artist. From everything I've read, being a comic book pro is more a labor of love than something that will be financially rewarding. I'd be interested in your insights on pursuing a career in comics. I'd imagine that the pay you get for writing comics is the least lucrative writing that you do (although it must be a sheer pleasure to see what Sergio draws from your scripts).
Well, first of all, most of what I do with Sergio is co-written, not always in the same ratio, so I never think of him drawing my scripts. I think of it all as what we produce together. That said, I often find great joy in writing comics because (a), I grew up loving comic books and (b), because of how few collaborators you have. On a TV show, live or animated, there are contributions by dozens and dozens…sometimes hundreds of others. You don't even meet a large percentage of them and on a cartoon show, many of them may be located in another country and speaking a different language so what you do gets handled by a lot of strangers.
And their sheer number guarantees that some of them will not be very competent or on the same wavelength. On a comic book, three or four people are involved so there's a real good chance that you'll all be in contact, you'll all be in sync and they'll all be good at what they do. I loved it when I was working with Will Meugniot or Dan Spiegle or Scott Shaw! or…well, most of my co-conspirators. And yeah, the money was less than some other jobs but you have to factor in the stress and the time spent in meetings and arguments and such. Compare making $1000 on a job that's fun and easy and quick with one that pays ten times that but has 20+ times the tsuris.
Personally, I've had good and bad experiences in each work area and there have been many non-monetary perks in each. I worked briefly as a story editor on a network adventure series and I probably made less per hour on that job than I made writing Scooby Doo comic books. And I had a lot less fun.
But to get to what you asked about: I tell everyone these days, "Do not under any circumstances become a comic book writer or artist!" Tomorrow night, I'm speaking to a bunch of wanna-be cartoon writers up at U.C.L.A. and I"ll tell the same thing about writing cartoons. What you should do instead is to become a comic book or cartoon writer or artist who does many things, one or two of which are in one or both of those areas.
There are a couple of reasons for this. One is that we're in the era of merging media. Writing or drawing cartoons and writing or drawing comics and writing or drawing videogames are all overlapping and morphing together. There are jobs where it's hard to tell which you're doing and it will only get harder.
Another thing is that we are no longer in a time where you could do what a lot of my friends did in the seventies when they were breaking into comics or cartoons. They'd say, "Once I get established at DC Comics, I'll work for them the rest of my life" or "I'll get a job at Hanna-Barbera and work there until I retire." That doesn't happen anymore. Companies like DC Comics move across country and go through many changes of management. (I don't know anyone at DC now who is reasonably certain they'll be there in three years. Some of them will be but no one is sure it'll be them.) Companies like Hanna-Barbera go out of business and others get sold and become largely-new companies.
In July of this year, I marked fifty years of being a freelance professional writer. I've never been out of work for more than about six hours and that's because I've never been exclusive to any company nor have I ever gotten 100% of my income (or even close to it) from any one source. I'm not saying that to brag and I'm not claiming I was brilliant to run my life this way because it really wasn't planned. I may have done, as we sometimes do in this world, the right thing by accident. But if your kid is thinking, "All I want to do in life is write and draw Marvel comics" — or do any one thing for any one employer — I think he's in for a lot of grief.
Since I haven't seen anything he's done, I am making zero judgment on his skills. But this applies even if he's the absolute best at what he does and the farther he is from being that, the more it applies.
I would also suggest that he has to love the work. I assume he does now…but will he love it when he hits the inevitable rough periods? When he works on some project where everyone involved winds up hating each other and pointing fingers at one another to escape the blame for what resulted? There will be such projects and what keeps you going is that you love the profession even when one or more assignments are like skinny-dipping in the fire pits of Hell. There's a quote I've heard attributed to many actors but usually Henry Fonda. It goes, "To be an actor, you have to still love acting even after the play that closed during rehearsals directed by the worst human being who ever lived."
I could go on and on about this topic and surely will in subsequent posts, and I've said some of it before here. I'm quite serious about it. I think the reason to become a writer or artist (or actor or anything of a creative nature) is because you don't think you'd be happy doing something else. If your son feels that way, he's off to a good start.
