I'm 30, unpublished, and determined be a comic artist, or DIE TRYING: A rant

[Jettison]

Well - I came away from Emerald City Comicon very happy! Our ashcan was well recieved, and we sold enough to make back our print cost! Brandon Graham and Moritat were nice enough to let us post up at their table and pimp our book - They are two of the nicest guys, totally down to earth, and two of my FAVORITE artists! They are friends with my writer, and so it was a HUGE honor to just get to hang out with them and while they were away at panels, sell books for them....I was sitting 2 seats away from ERIK LARSEN - my childhood favorite, the guy who got me into comics!!! It was so awesome!! I was doing free sketches for whoever bought one of our little previews, it was super fun! I've really been trucking on finishing the follow up pages that come after the preview pages, and I feel like I am improving with every new page!

Here it is -

http://guttertownmassive.blogspot.com/p/comics.html

I will say I came away from the convention revitalized and VERY excited for some potential opportunities!

[Juggertha]

That's awesome news, man.

[Whune]

If you have the talent you will develop it in the gaming industry in ways you never would be able to if you didn't have those assignments keeping you on track.

just draw;
if you've the talent you'll get to where you want to go.

[Jack Flagrant]

REALITY CHECK....

You are 30 years old, waiting tables, and dreaming of being a SUCCESSFUL comic artist. Your girl friend obviously cares for you because she's not asking you to get a job in I.T. or as an accountant some where or a nursing job. She's telling you to feed your creative side in an artistic job (games) that happens to be a million times more stable than being a comic book artist. Listen to her.

Look at it this way. I have been trying to break in to comics for over 15 years. I'm 37 now. Back when I started trying to break in....or make a living at comic, what if I would have said "well, I'm good working at Kmart until my comics career takes off"? It sounds silly because of how hard it is to make a living drawing comics. Start trying to make a REAL career and do comics on the side. Otherwise, you will be 40 and still waiting tables.

There are thousands really good artists trying to get that hand full of comic jobs offered every year. I read that 10,000 artists submit comic strips for syndication every year and maybe one is chosen every year if they are lucky. So how many artists do you think are trying to be successful in comics? I hope you are EXTREMELY good at comics to have the confidence you have about being successful at it. The other thing is, maybe your girl is trying to tell you your not good enough in a nice way. I've never seen your work so dont take that as a critique from me.


THE FLIP SIDE OF THAT....


You should take a week off of work and see how many pages you can do. Get up in the morning and draw for 8 hours each day. You may not be able to do it and you wont know until you try it. If you can do that easily, see if your girl will let you take several months off and draw every day for 8 hours and get some really good samples together. That is the first test to see if you can and want to draw comics for a "living".

If you are an extremely awesome artist and could potentially be in the top ten best artists in comics, and you have proven that you are a self motivator and can draw comics all day every day, then you can pull out the big guns on your girl. The big guns I'm talking about is your potential pay as a top ten artist. Top 10 artists can make $300 a page and there are 22 pages in a comic. Do the math. The average for a regular artist is around $100- $125 a page...Which is still ok. That's for the big companies. Indy companies dont pay good at all. You get asked to do back end deals (I never do those any more). And you get asked to pencil and ink pages and make anywhere between $15 to $50 a page....Keep in mind that if you're lucky enough to get paid a page rate, it doesn't matter that you're getting paid $15 a page they still want your work to look like they paid $150 a page for it. Which means you could be only making a DOLLAR an HOUR! Been there done that.

My point is- Work on a career while your working on perfecting your comic style. The comic industry is a cold mistress. But if it is your destiny, it can wait a couple of years for you to get a degree and get a stable good paying job. Because during those years, you will continue to become a better artist and that can only help your chances of becoming successful as a comic book artist.

There is nothing more to this that I can really add; well said!

In summary, if you expect to make a comfortable living creating comics, penciling the work for others, inking the work of others, etc... you are in for a surprise. Making $150 per page is not great money ($3300 per issue/month) - broken down to $20 an hour on average. Making $20 an hour in New York, you might as well be homeless or expect to live with 5 other starving artists.

FYI - I used to script, pencil, ink, and color comic strips for Impulse magazine in NYC for $5.00 a panel just for the exposure and thrill of working for a company that wanted to utilize my abilities. Subsequently, I had a revelation and realized that I may never “make it big”.

So what? I still love to illustrate. While DC, Marvel, Image, Dark Horse, etc… can take that dream away from me, and rightfully so, no one can take away my passion to be a comic book artist. I am a comic book artist – I just work for myself.

[CrazyDiamond]

Or just self publish.

[Inkthinker]

Web publish. Seriously. Take a look at Howard Tayler's Schlock Mercenary or Randy Milholland on Something*Positive, check out their first strips and compare it to their latest, and tell me they're not inspirational. Especially given that they're both successful and self-sustaining sources of full-time income for their creators. It takes a few years of steady work, but it DOES work, if you have stories to tell and a willingness to work until it works.