Dean Haspiel: "Make Mine Me"
Dean Haspiel on the frustrations and futility of pitching "big franchise" projects:
http://welcometotripcity.com/2012/03/make-mine-me/
I suppose some of this falls under "Well, duh", but I give him credit for laying it all out so candidly.
http://welcometotripcity.com/2012/03/make-mine-me/
I suppose some of this falls under "Well, duh", but I give him credit for laying it all out so candidly.
Comments
I guess I'm lucky that I've never been particularly interested in those gigs. I admit: I'm not gonna play Sherman and turn them down in advance. And back when Marvel was trying/pretending to do open auditions with Epic, I sent them an out-there out-of-continuity X-Men pitch (XYQ, about queer mutant subculture), for the same reason that people buy lotto tickets when the jackpot gets really big. Some cash and the publicity would be great. It'd be a fun challenge. But it's not on my bucket list.
Would I much rather prefer to have my own original stories told in comics form? You bet your sweet potato ass I would, it's what I've been dreaming about since, oh I don't know, I was about 10.
Dino and I once pitched a complete revamp of a Marvel character, and while it didn't go anywhere, it remains one of my favorite pitches ever.
The reality is that it would have worked better from day one as an original concept.
-BCM
For me, the appeal is always 1/4th the character, 1/4th the profile boost, 1/2th the chance to feel like I'm getting away with something they wouldn't normally publish.
I pitched a Transformers comic once that was basically an episode of Maverick with giant robots, because yeah, I like Smokescreen, certainly, I'd like the money, but mostly because who the hell else would write a Westerny heist story with giant robots? (And who would buy it, were I not hitching that high concept onto an established property like TF?)
(It got rejected because someone in my proposal already had plans in place for them.)
I dunno. Creatively, I do enough of "my" stuff to be satisfied, so the appeal of WFH for me personally is always the blatent careerism and the me:___::Bendis:Luke Cage challenge.
I love indie comics, I love the creator spirit...but I want to treat making comics like a career. And part of a career is about working. The one thing I've learned from strip cartoonists in papers and magazines is that inspiration is for losers (gross overstatement), and reliability and day-to-day, no matter what-working consistency are vital.
On the flip side? I think that in the end no matter who or what you end up working on, in the end the fact that you/we are working at MAKING COMICS is a pretty bitching job to have.
As it stands, I'm pretty pleased with the editing and fill-in writing I'm getting to do for others on their creator-owned work. Been given some stupid-cool opportunities this year to be involved with some Image books and an Archaia title and even if the money from it ends up being slim, the fun factor has been through the roof.
But, WFH as a day job in my experience often does not pay for more than the time it takes to do the WFH in question, and then catch your breath for maybe a month till the next gig starts up. And i have a lower overhead than most.
Having done a pile of stuff that paid but i don't own, to be honest i'm happier being paid to be an artist NOT in comics most of the time as a freelancer, and doing comics for the love first, money and maybe for whatever long tail there will be after second. Not that i don't want to make a $ at it but realistically i won't be making much with the giant mitts of Disney or Time Warner in the same pot any way so little point in sharing with them.
And given how badly they paid and the total lack of royalties it barely did that. & I would never have pitched those jobs, done anything for them on spec.
Muties i courted, sort of. Joe Quesada made big noise at the time about making marvel creator friendly and i wanted to test his mettle, wrote him and challenged him to let me have my way with something and prove he meant it - he took me up on the dare and put me on the miniseries, and then bailed on supporting the mature content and vision behind the books once work started. They blamed it on the editor and fired him and made the series meant for adults an all ages line, and proceeded to censor the stories is arbitrary ways that made the book i was doing raunchier than it was.
If you happen to enjoy the stories they assign unconditionally and have the luck to hook up with editors you work well with then you are likely to be fine in the short run - I could not tell you what the numbers are, how many people don't fall in that box. But it's a small box and we know they get far more interest than they have need. And almost everyone who's been working for more than a couple years has at least one horror story about it NOT going that well. And i think one of the factors behind the spreading buts of cartoonist is all the treats we buy ourselves to cheer ourselves up about work thats....ok, not quite what you had in mind but....hmmm, toys, chocolatey, soda...yes, that's better. Speaking for myself, but i can't be the only one.
At this end of it, there are times i'd love to be making a living from something i don't care at all about and just do my comics for the love. :P.
business requires compromise, getting along with my clients.
The few cases where i've done a book for someone these days [the last 8 years] like possibly a project I'm looking at for the summer, or even Therefore Repent! [Jim owns that, he hired me on] i'm approached because in part i won't compromise and that's what the client wants for their property. Even with Ghostbusters - we pretty much did exactly what we wanted with that one, when the studio made silly requests like NOT to use the classic 1959 Cadillac Miller-Meteor due to a lack of permission from GM, we gnored them because that's silly - it was limited by time/budget and was for sure a WFH gig, but while i would not call it my best work i'm very happy to call it my work. This if it's going to be any kind of compromise, is the kind it should be. Compromise you consent to and have a choice in. Otherwise it's not really compromise is it?
The simplistic response is of course to think, I'll just not do stories i don't like, so on. But you don't get anything like that as an option IN the sand box. You're partner in this relationship, least when it comes to WFH with the big two, is a bully who knows how hot you are for what they got and not ashamed to use that to their advantage AND then dump you with no warning when some other hot young doodler comes along. And if you have a long affair, when you get to old, to slow, or unfashionable, they don't really mind letting you fall to the wayside with no safety net. Folks like Joe Q say hey what about Heroes?
I've learned from my own time and watching others, without the Marvel name attached, limitations like the Diamond benchmarks are almost as much a problem for known Marvel or DC creators as they are for the rest - the selling point on Marvel and DC books for outfits like Diamond is the brand and characters, then maybe the creators but not really that much for the majority of cases. It's a very small list of exceptions.
Odds are we're not on that list really.
Better I think to do work you love, do your best work, and own it for better or worse
And if marvel never happens for you then least you have your own work to be happy with. Make making that work the "day job" - it looks harder but all told, if you have any chance of making Marvel a day job, you have a shot at making your own work one too. They would NEVER hire us if that was not true. No money in it.
I like that.
Work for hire is a ton of back and forth and compromise and not hearing back (especially these days, with fewer editors even looking at stuff from new writers...)