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Succeeding in Comics without Success

NO FLY ZONE: Succeeding in Comics without Success (artwork from DORK! #7 by Evan Dorkin)
© Mania.com

There are a million pieces about how difficult it is to succeed in comics. This week’s No-Fly Zone is our contribution to an admittedly cynical body of blog posts and editorials about how brutal the business can be. But, there’s inspiration to be found in this week’s piece, so fear not.

Succeeding in any creative field is difficult. From comics to music, everyone wants in. Art is fun. It can be glamorous. Most people aren’t even any good, but it often comes down to who wants it more. The adage about art being 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration is entirely true. People with less talent than you will succeed, despite your best efforts. Let’s look at a couple of very stark realities. You could just mail a pitch into a publisher and get a job writing or drawing comics. Maybe you have the best idea ever. Maybe you, the NFZ reader, are a great undiscovered talent. But, while that’s happened before, it doesn’t happen often. Most editors will tell you to publish your own comic first or get published in the small press—smaller than Image or IDW, they mean. In the literary world—rightly or wrongly—self-publishing implies that no agent would represent you. It means your book probably sucks. That may not be fair, but that’s what a lot of people will think. With comics, self-publishing is a trial by fire to be endured by anyone serious about working in comics. Start on your own and show that you can do it. Claw your way into a business that doesn’t take kindly to strangers. Okay, fine, but self-publishing and production costs on an individual comics aren’t cheap. You could just write, draw, ink, letter, and possibly color it yourself and then print it at Kinko’s on letter paper. Staple that bad boy in the top left corner and it’s off to the races! But, to produce a reasonably professional looking book, you’ll probably end up working with other talent. You will have to pay them somehow—if not up front, then out of the back end on your book. That means that even if you make money, you still owe people. In the end, as anyone playing music will tell you, you pay to work in this business for a long time before you start profiting by it—if you ever do.

Let’s say you do make it. If you have a comic at Image, they charge you $2,500 off the back end. The bottom line is that you need to sell about 20,000 copies to start really turning a profit from an Image deal, especially if you have a creative team to pay. Unless your name ends with Kirkman, that’s probably not going to happen for a while. Check out that link for an article from Publisher’s Weekly idea of what other small publishers offer. IDW or Boom might give you something up front, but they’ll still collect from you down the line. In the end, you will lose money for a long time before you start turning a profit, if you ever do. The expression “don’t quit your day job” never rang truer—not because you suck, but because you have to eat and pay the light bill.

That’s not to say that you can’t have a “career” in comics, but most people can’t make it their day job. And, horror stories abound from those that have. To be honest, comics are a cutthroat, brutal sort of business that has inherited some practices from its shady original ties with the mob. In regular book publishing, most people would scoff at the idea of paying to have their own book printed. It’s fairly normal in comics. Though, in the case of Image and many small publishers, you still retain the rights to your stuff, which has other advantages. But, regardless, there are plenty of horror stories from departed talent at Marvel and DC. Former DC editor Valerie D’Orazio cracked the internet in half with Memoirs of an Occasional Superheroine—a blog-turned-book that exposed rampant sexism and mistreatment of staff and talent at the DC offices. She won’t be working at DC anytime soon, but she probably wouldn’t want to anyway. There’s no point in recounting an endless series of anecdotes of comic-con horror or exploitation of talent at major publishers, but it’s safe to say that comics are an ugly business. You have to have a thick skin alongside a shred of talent (not to mention the money it takes to break in, as explained above). It almost makes one want to just do comics as a hobby, funded by their day job. Hey, it beats playing World of Warcraft or watching television all the time.

The idea of doing comics as a hobby really brings us to an important question: why the hell would anyone even try their hands at comics when there’s such a small chance for success? And, because when you do succeed, it’s often a miserable experience, why bother at all? First, the decision to make an actual, pay-the-bills career in comics is an individual one. To roll out of bed and work on comics instead of filing TPS reports is a dream for a lot of people, and with good reason. Most of us would love to make money doing what we love. There are a lot of issues that come up when you do that, but if you can put up with it, do it. In the end, though, you create comics simply because you love them. You do it because you have to. You make comics—be it as a career or a hobby—because the experience satisfies you at the molecular level. Millions of people work jobs they hate. Sometimes, that’s unavoidable. If you’re doing that, you should make your true calling your hobby and do it in your free time. You might lose time and money, but it means you aren’t dead inside. For most people, that isn’t comics. Hell, you might love reading comics, but the process of creating them is of no interest to you. A lot of fans make that mistake. Your thing might be music or cooking or theater. It might be building furniture. Everyone has a dream. You have to find that thing you’ve always wanted to do and fucking find a way to make it happen. To do otherwise is to live a life unfulfilled. It seems like obvious inspirational pap, but we all know a hundred people plugging away at a life of drudgery, anesthetized by sports, porn, video games, shopping, food, or Christ-knows-what-else. That’s why you do comics—because you have to. Doing otherwise would leave you unfulfilled and something less than the person you want to be. Your goal shouldn’t be to make a living at comics. It should be to just make comics, and leave a body of work behind that contributes something new and exciting to the medium. If you do that, you’ve already won. It doesn’t matter whether Marvel or DC comes calling. If you land a career, that’s great. Go you. But, keep your expectations grounded. Remember why you started in the first place—because you love comics and love the process of creating them. Anything above that is gratis, and not reason enough to spend untold amounts of time and money on a medium with few external rewards. Create comics because you love them, and the world is yours.

You are now exiting The No-Fly Zone.

Kurt Amacker is the writer of The No-Fly Zone, Mania’s weekly alternative comics column. He is also the author of the comic miniseries Dead Souls, published by Seraphemera Books. Dead Souls is available from the Seraphemera Books website, Amazon.com, and at comic shops everywhere. He can be reached at kurt_amacker@seraphemera.org.