The View from the Cheap Seats (21 page)

I have no desire to enforce my tastes on any of you. If I ran a comic store I'd be pushing
Bone
and
Cerebus
and
Love and Rockets,
Sandman Mystery Theatre
and
Animal Man,
Madman
and
Cages,
Yummy Fur
and
Peepshow,
Gregory
and
Groo
—to pick a very few examples from the stuff I happen to like.

I'm not telling you to push those titles, although I wouldn't mind if you did.

I want you to push the stuff you think is good. Push good children's comics to children, and good superhero comics to people who like them, and good grown-up comics to adults.

I'm really just asking you to think of comics as a reading material. Think of comics as an entertainment. Think of comics as stories.

You aren't selling investment items. You're selling dreams.

Never forget that.

Comics are for reading and enjoying, like tulips are for planting and blossoming and appreciating.

And the next time someone tells you about comics as the hot investment item of the nineties, do me a favor, and tell them about the tulips.

A speech I gave at Diamond Comic Distributors' tenth annual retailers seminar in April 1993. Delivered to a room filled with comics retailers at the statistical height of the bubble. It was barely applauded by a room filled with otherwise happy people, and I heard later that a lot of the retailers thought it was in bad taste. Which was a pity, because a year later the world of comics entered a recession it took almost a decade to get out of, and most of those people lost their livelihoods and their stores over the next few years. It gave me no pleasure to be right.

T
o begin with, a confession. I hate writing speeches. When I was asked to give this one, my immediate thought was that maybe I could give a speech I'd already written, and no one would notice. Unfortunately I've only ever written one speech before, which I gave in the spring of 1993, and which compared the “investors boom” then going on with the seventeenth-century Dutch tulip craze and warned an audience of assembled retailers that if this kept on there was going to be trouble. And while events unfortunately proved me right, I really didn't think that I'd get away with repeating that speech today.

When I was originally asked to come here and deliver the keynote address, I declined. I said I'd feel embarrassed and out of place. Right now—for the last fifteen months, in fact, since I finished writing
Sandman
—with the exception of a couple of short stories, I've stopped writing comics.

I told the person who phoned me that I'd feel like the kind of girl who dropped out of high school under dubious circumstances and was now returning, in a pink Cadillac, with big
blond hair and far too much makeup, to give a graduating speech on the value of sticking to it and hard work.

The person on the phone—it was Larry Marder—said, “Well, these are weird times. A lot of comics pros are looking at the world outside comics and wondering if that's where they'll be making their living in a year or so. You could at least tell them what's waiting for them out there.”

And I thought,
Well, he's got a point
.

And, after I put down the phone, I thought,
Well, it's also the prerogative of the elderly and the retired to share their knowledge, to drive from the backseat, and to offer unsolicited advice
. “And,” as a poet put it, “being good for nothing else, be wise.” And there are certainly a number of things I learned in the decade I was actively working in comics.

So that's what we're going to talk about. Other media, and comics.

Many of you have done comics for longer than I have, and have experiences or knowledge that contradict mine. Many of you will have toiled in the vineyards beyond comics and may have had diametrically opposite experiences to mine.

So these thoughts are being offered as one set of opinions.

I began doing comics, continued doing comics, and finished doing comics for the wrong reason. It's a foolish reason, and a strange one.

I didn't do comics to have a career, nor to make money, nor to support my family. I certainly didn't do comics for awards or for notoriety.

I began doing comics because it fulfilled some kind of childhood dream and because it was truly the most exciting and delightful thing I could imagine anyone doing. I continued doing comics because it was fun, and because I discovered I loved the medium, and because I felt like I was getting to do things that were completely new, that, good or bad, no one had done before.
And I stopped doing comics because I wanted it to continue being fun, I wanted to continue to love and care for comics, and I wanted to leave while I was still in love.

When I began writing
Sandman,
it would take me a couple of weeks to write a script, leaving me with two weeks each month to do other things. As time went by I got slower and slower, until a script was taking me about six weeks a month to write. Which didn't leave much time for other things.

So there were a number of projects I wanted to do that I simply didn't get the chance to. Which meant that once
Sandman
was done I could throw myself into them headfirst.

My experiences with the world outside comics so far since finishing
Sandman
—I've written a bestselling novel and a children's book, written and cocreated a not-wholly-satisfactory six-part BBC TV series, and had lunch with an enormous number of people from Hollywood. I wrote the British Radio 3 adaptation of
Signal to Noise,
currently nominated for a Sony Award as best radio drama. I'm currently working on a bunch of stuff, including a couple of movies.

Bear in mind that these are not the opinions of someone who feels that any medium is more legitimate than any other, or that film or print somehow sanctifies or confers respectability on something otherwise grubby or unreal.

One of the delights of comics is that the price of ink and paper remains pretty constant, no matter what you're drawing. Film and television are expensive media. Cheap productions cost unimaginable amounts of money.

Comics, on the other hand, are cheap. If you have an idea for a comic, the odds are good that someone will publish it. And if they won't and you believe in it strongly, why, then publish it yourself. You may not get rich, but you will get read.

I have a friend who had an idea for a comic, and self-published it for a while, and certainly didn't lose any money, and had, at the end, a dozen or so issues of his comic, which he was fairly
proud of. Then he decided to try the same tack with filmmaking, with a cast of enthusiastic amateurs, borrowed money, and a willingness to max out his credit cards. At the point where the production crumbled, he had eleven minutes of film in the can and was forced to sell his house to stave off utter ruin.

Comics are unlikely to do that to you.

Film is expensive. This is why it's such a crazy medium.

I remember an afternoon in London several years ago. I was staying in a friend's flat, overlooking a canal. I was writing two different things that afternoon. One was a scene in which the Endless made a man out of clay, building him up from twigs and mud, and breathing life into him, before sending him to a hidden room in a monstrous underground necropolis. That was for
Sandman
. The other scene had an encounter, underneath a bridge in the fog, on a mud bank, between three travelers and some monks, during the course of which one of the travelers was pushed into the mud.

A few days later I had Michael Zulli's pencils of the comics sequence pinned up on the wall, and they were exactly what I'd imagined, and just what I'd hoped for and called for in the script.

A year later I found myself sitting in a freezing cellar, watching a dozen actors being frozen stiff, breathing thick smoke, while about fifty crew, including makeup people, lighting people, electricians and so on, stood around shivering watching the actors doing take after take of getting knocked down into the mud.

I didn't have my bridge. It wasn't really the scene I'd had in my head, and mostly I just felt guilty that real people were being put to so much trouble for something that had seemed like a good idea in a warm room a year before.

In comics you are unlikely to have to lose a character halfway through the comic because he broke his leg. You won't lose locations the night before you're meant to be shooting. You
won't hand in a twenty-four-page script, and then be told that the artist drew it as a thirty-seven-page script, so thirteen pages have randomly been removed.

Most important, in comics there's one of you, or at most two or three people, with one vision. As a writer I think I'd been spoiled by the “because I say so” factor. The point I realized that wasn't there in the TV show was the point I looked at the costume sketches and realized that they bore no relation to what was called for in the script.

I think one reason one becomes a writer may well be to have a certain amount of control over a vision, and unless you are working with a director whose vision parallels yours, then the odds are probably against you.

And bear in mind that the TV series is from a show that everyone was at least on the same page about. The
Sandman
film, which I am happily not involved with, has gone through eight script drafts, three writers, and a director so far. And I heard the other day that they're about to hire a new writer with instructions to make it a romance.

After
Neverwhere
was done, I told my agent to pull out of another TV series I was creating for the UK, because I didn't want to do it unless I had more control than you get as a writer: in fantasy, the tone of voice, the look and feel, the way something is shot and edited, is vital, and I wanted to be able to be in charge of that.

I've agreed to work on the
Death
movie with the carrot being dangled in front of me that I could direct it. And we'll see if that happens, and if I'm a good director or not when the time comes.

So that's my wisdom on movies.

Books are a bit more straightforward.

A few years ago, when I still hung out on bulletin boards, I was on CompuServe's comics forum, and I read a message by a writer of comics announcing petulantly that he was going to go and write real prose books because he wanted “an audience.”

I told him his audience writing comics was much larger than he would have, barring some exceptional circumstances, for a first novel in prose. He took this as an attack on his as-yet-unproven abilities as a writer of prose, which it wasn't meant to be. It was simply a flat statement that in those days—and even in these dark days—any fairly healthy comic sells in numbers that most prose authors would be very happy to get.

For me, though, comics are much more interesting than prose, at least as a creator. One has greater control of how the information is received in comics than you do in prose—whether it's keeping control of the reader's eye to stop them skipping ahead, or simply making sure that they see the same character in their heads that you do in yours.

And comics have the joy that you never see in prose: the joy of being able to enjoy your own stuff. I can't enjoy a prose story I wrote, but I can enjoy what Dave McKean or Charles Vess or Jon Muth or P. Craig Russell does to one of my stories.

Prose has its advantages. You can give it to relatives without worrying about hearing “Oh . . . I don't . . .
read
comics . . . dear.” You can buy it in airport bookstores. Book companies are more prone to advertise outside the comics world than comics publishers are. But for anyone who's doing this because they want to collaborate, comics are more fun.

Radio—I love radio drama. For a writer it's strangely close to comics: in one medium you're telling a story with pictures, in the other you're writing for everything but pictures. It's close to your vision, it's cheap, it's easy, there isn't any radio drama in America and the only way I could afford to do it regularly in England is by sending my children out to dance for pennies on the streets. It's also not a medium I particularly recommend for artists who don't write.

So those are my words of wisdom on the media outside comics.

Now for my decades of wisdom on the world inside comics.

So here, in no particular order, are the things I've learned.

1.    
Big is not necessarily bad. Small is not necessarily good.

Comics creators are an individualistic, unique and bolshy lot. A punch line of a comic I wrote once was “Try getting a thousand cats to agree on anything at the same time,” and cats are pushovers compared to comics creators. They do not organize, do not trust organizations. It's a wonder as many of you are here, as are here. Certainly every shade of opinion, politics and belief is represented.

It used to be—it may still be—an item of belief in comics that all organizations are inherently dodgy. And that where companies are concerned, smaller is inherently better. Independence, however that's defined, is vital.

And if you're a Dave Sim or a Jeff Smith, your own publisher and a fine artist and writer, with complete control over your own destiny, then you have independence, or as much independence as the market will allow you.

Corporations are huge, slow, stupid lumbering things with brains in their tails. This may be true, but they do appear capable of learning, and changing.

You are no more likely to get screwed over by a huge company than you are by a small one. I'm not saying you won't get screwed over. I'm saying that there is no moral imperative towards smaller companies not screwing you.

This really is something it took me ages to learn. I kept doing projects or books for small, more independent companies because it seemed like the right thing to do, and because I was convinced that, in my case, DC Comics was a monolithic and ultimately evil organization that was just waiting for me to lower my guard before they screwed me like they screwed Siegel and Shuster.

It didn't happen. DC were easily the most amenable to reason, accessible, and financially reliable of all the publishers I've dealt with. Which is not to say there was not and sometimes still isn't a great deal of frustration in dealing with some of the depart
ments at DC. But it is to say that their royalty statements arrive on time, are comprehensible, and if one notices something bizarre, one is encouraged to phone the accounting department, who will either explain to you what they're doing, or apologize for having messed up and fix it.

For this, one can forgive many things.

In retrospect my one regret with Eclipse was that I didn't audit their accounts years before they went under. Their figures made no sense, and they would only send out royalties if threatened. On some level I knew that there had to be fraud of some kind going on, but Eclipse was only caught when Toren Smith moved his comics from Eclipse to Dark Horse, and his royalties shot up, despite the fact the deal was the same and the sales were constant.

I honestly do not believe there is any moral superiority to a large corporation or to one man working out of his kitchen. What matters is answerability, and honesty, and, above all, competence.

2.    
Learn how to say no.

This is still the one I have the hardest time with. I think it's part of the freelance mentality: we are so used to hustling, to going out and desperately peddling our skills, hoping that someone will be impressed enough by them or moved to raw pity enough by our plight to give us work, that we learn to say yes to everything.