- In the previous century, the decisions about who would write, pencil, letter, ink or color a comic book usually had a lot more to do with "Who's available?" and/or "Who needs work at the moment?" than with "Who would be the best person for this job?"
- And some assignments — not a majority but some — were assigned according to who was kissing up to the assigner or maybe to what he or she could do for that assigner in other areas.
- If you work in comics for an extended period, look over the books published by the company or companies that buy your work and ask yourself, "What comic am I totally unqualified and ill-suited to work on?" Then prepare for the call where they say, "We discussed it here in the office a lot and decided you're the perfect person for this job!" It will be that comic.
- The fact that a comic book was canceled does not mean it was not a good comic.
- The fact that a comic book was canceled does not mean it was given enough time to find an audience.
- The fact that a comic book didn't sell well does not mean that a better marketing division could not have caused it to sell better.
- The fact that a comic book was canceled does not mean that it didn't sell well. Companies have been known to cancel books based on incomplete or even misread sales figures.
- It may even have been a matter of the guy with the power to cancel a comic making a political move against someone else in or around the company.
- If an inker cannot capture all that the pencil artist put into the faces, it's bad inking no matter what the rest of it looks like.
- Most tricks involving fancy lettering styles in word balloons have not worked unless they were in a comic strip done by Walt Kelly.
- Most tricks involving Wally Wood-style lighting have not worked unless they were in a comic book done by Wally Wood.
- When you eliminate "thought balloons" as a tool for the writer to use, you usually wind up with too much exposition in the captions and a lot of your characters talking aloud to themselves in unnatural ways that are really "thought balloons" disguised as "word balloons."
- Having to write real short stories (six pages and under) is a very good training ground for comic book writers and many who've never done it could benefit from doing it.
- Sleeping with someone who works in the same office or on comics that have something to do with yours will almost always lead to problems of some kind.
- Writing and sending off to press a "next issue" blurb when you really aren't sure what's in the next issue can easily lead to you writing a story of which you are seriously not proud.
- A one-issue "fill in" story on a comic produced by temp talent will almost always read like a one-issue "fill-in" story produced by temp talent.
- If the hero in the comic you're writing has a secret identity, you should not do a story in which that secret is threatened or apparently revealed less than twelve years after the previous story in which that hero's secret identity was threatened or apparently revealed. Fifteen is better.
- If you come up with a story idea for a long-running comic book and you think, "I can't believe no one else has ever thought of this," the odds are that everyone has thought of it…and that's the reason they never did it.
- If there's an excess of expository dialogue and captions on the last few pages of a story, the writer either didn't pace out the story properly or the plot was too complicated for the confines of the page count. If the comic was done "Marvel method" (dialogue after pencil art), that might mean that the artist didn't pace the story out properly.
- Never mind that you can put out a real slick black line with your digital or real brush. It's where you put that line that matters.
- Editors would get more work delivered to them on time if they were more honest with the freelancers as to when it's really needed.
- You know that trick where you hand in the work deliberately late thinking "They won't have time to screw around with it?" That trick never works the way you hope it will.
- Some comic book companies used to pay writers more for stories that were supposed to be funny because they recognized that funny is harder to achieve than serious.
- If you draw Superman or Batman or some other character who's been around for decades, you should not draw that character exactly the way someone else did and you should not draw that character completely unlike the way anyone else did. Somewhere in-between is where you want to be.
- A professional who seems like a helluva nice guy when you meet him at a convention and tell him you love his work and want his autograph can be an extremely non-nice guy when you deal with him in a work capacity, especially if he rightly or wrongly perceives you as a threat to him.
More of these will follow over the next few weeks.