joekeatinge

October 28, 2011 7:41 pm I was pretty struck by Natalie's letter as I remember having exactly the same feeling when I was 19 and feeling my desire to 'break into comics' was something that was Never Going To Happen. As a guy who has since had some success with comics and currently makes his living off of them, it turned out there was a lot I had to learn, that there's a lot I know now that I wish I knew then. While my time traveling ability is at an all-time low, I hope I can instead help out with Natalie and whoever else is feeling the same way by typing all this out. So, here goes: how I 'broke into comics' (a term we'll destroy in a bit here) and the lessons I learned along the way. You'll 'break in' another way. Everybody's path is wildly different. Spoilers: that's the first lesson I wish I knew. When I was 19 I left the house and moved up to Portland, OR for college. I had been reading comics my whole life - I'm still not even sure how that started. Since reading Spawn #10 at age 10, I wanted nothing more than to write and draw my own comics. Comics were - and still are - my greatest passion in life. There was no other art form or pursuit that ever interested me more. However, by the time I was 20 I had given up on comics as a career completely, spending the next year or so with the aim of becoming an English professor. I had heard stories about guys like Jim Shooter or pretty much everybody from the 1940s breaking in during their teens. Guys like Rob Liefeld and the Image founders were largely young when they broke in. I felt my window had closed. I loathed every minute of college, but it was The Safe Thing To Do. People don't break into comics. It's too hard to do. It's a rarefied air I would never be able to breathe. As I was nearing turning 21, I grew increasingly depressed. Like, A LOT depressed. So much so I was having a hard time getting anything done, much less school. This wasn't what I wanted. I hated school, so the idea of being a professor and constantly being in school all the time seemed like some circle of Hell. That said, I had come to grips with the fact my drawing style was, at best, resembling dead cartoonists. It wasn't marketable. I guess I wasn't thrilled with my writing either, because the idea of being a writer was something I accepted was never going to happen. At the time I had a girlfriend who was pursuing becoming a filmmaker and she urged me to try comics. She was moving down to San Francisco, a place with a huge history of people making comics like R Crumb, Erik Larsen, among many others. I thought the idea was stupid. My father, a guy who spent my entire life pushing me to go to college and get a secure job, didn't. He pushed me to go. So, I did. The deal was to give myself one year to try to get into comics. If it didn't work out, I was back to becoming an English professor. As my dad put it, in the worst case scenario I would spend my 20s in one of the greatest cities on the planet, so it wasn't the worst fate to have. This was the tough part, because I knew what I wanted, but no idea how to do it. I took a handful of community college classes, mostly focused on writing and film (which I figured was a close cousin of comics. I'd later realize I would be better off studying music, which I now believe to be a lot closer). I wrote and I wrote and I wrote many a script no one in all existence will ever see. I wrote original stuff. I wrote what I guess is fan fiction. I read a lot. I studied a lot. I was just trying to figure out how to crack this code to comics. Roughly six months in, friend of mine by the name of Mark Englert (whose name you may recognize from Capes with Robert Kirkman or Halocyon with Marc Guggenheim) was illustrating a Freak Force back up to Savage Dragon #115. He mentioned off hand how their color flatter quit and they needed another one. I asked what the hell a 'color flatter' did and he explained it's the person who gets paid pennies to separate out all the different elements of a comics page in either flat color or grayscale for the colorist to fully render. I said I could do that. He asked if I knew anything about Photoshop. I said, Hell, no, but I'd figure it out. So I got a copy of Photoshop and did just that. Within days I was colorflatting on a computer that could barely handle it, using a mouse and a lasso tool. I was getting paid a dollar per hour to separate colors on a page. I dropped the college classes, worked at a video store from 5 PM to midnight then worked from 1 AM to 10 AM color flatting as much as I could. My health worsened for it. My relationship was demolished by it, but I was working in comics in some way, so I was freakin' stoked. That's lesson two: figure out the work no one else wants to do and do it well. The thing is, the color flat work turned me from Random Fan to Guy Who Actually Could Get A Pro Badge At A Convention. Mark came up to visit both me and Erik Larsen (who lived across the bay in Oakland). I went with him to visit one time, since at this point I was color flatting some of Erik's books. Erik asked me what I wanted to do and I told him. I also mentioned how I had no idea what to do. He said, "I don't know what to tell you, son." From there we became buds. He was the only person in the bay area I knew who made comics as a living. At the same time, I was starting to hang out at a comic shop called Isotope, where I finally made a ton of friends who either shared my passion for reading comics or wanted to make comics on their own. Having these friends made me a lot more jazzed to make comics. It made it seem possible. So, that's lesson number three: find your community, whether it's in person or online. I think most people probably go with the latter. My friendship with Erik led to us hanging out a bit during Wizard World LA, which led to me volunteering to run the Image booth when the guy doing so didn't want to. That led to me knowing Eric Stephenson, which led to me doing the same thing at that year's San Diego Comic Con for an up-and-coming writer named Robert Kirkman, who also didn't want to handle sales at his booth. I did it for Image and Larsen. Apparently it worked out well. I sold a lot of books for Robert. He didn't have to. Larsen and Stephenson saw how much effort I put into it. Larsen came up to me toward the end of the con and asked what I was doing lately. I mentioned my schedule of working at a video store, working on color flats, then coming home to the new apartment I shared with some friends who smoked so much there was a perpetual cloud in our hallway. ALSO: a kitchen seemingly made entirely out of dirty dishes. He asked how much I liked it. I said I didn't. Then he said the other phrase I'll never forget from him: "Then why don't you come work for me?" Erik had become Publisher a few months before. He was in the bay area. So Image was going to be too. He said they needed to largely restaff the office and I seemed pretty enthusiastic and I obviously could get whatever work he had thrown at me done. My mind was blown for the months following, especially since he made it seem like it wasn't a sure thing. I'm still not sure it was, but lo and behold, in November of 2004 I left Hollywood Video for the last time and went to work the next week at Image Comics. My initial job there was Inventory Controller, which basically had me as a glorified mailroom boy. I worked from that to Traffic Manager, which I did for years, which basically meant I maintained our scheduling, printing and distribution. Eventually I was the PR & Marketing Coordinator and for a brief time the Sales & Licensing Coordinator. Throughout all these jobs I got a ton of experience and easily the best education one could ever have in the comics field. It showed me how the business actually worked from almost every single angle. Even those angles I didn't work, like accounting, production or publishing, I was able to work alongside some of the best people in the field who do what they do. To this day I am still mesmerized by how damn amazing the Image Comics Production Staff was and continues to be. They're the unsung heroes of creator owned comics. So, that's lesson four: learn the industry. Know your business. As much as comics is a beautiful art form, it is an industry. Knowing what I know now helped me out a lot. Image will most likely not hire you. So, do your research. Go to websites like iCv2. Go to panels at conventions. Hell, talk to people at conventions. Unless I'm signing or on a panel, I am pretty much always open to answering whatever questions people have. I wouldn't be where I am now without the help of others. That's lesson five: pay it forward. People are going to help you break into comics. You need to do the same. Speaking of paying it forward: at a Wizard World LA in 2005 I met a guy who would become one of my best friends, Mark Andrew Smith. You'll no doubt recognize him as the dude who's now writing GLADSTONE'S SCHOOL FOR WORLD CONQUERORS and the upcoming SULLIVAN'S SLUGGERS with artist James Stokoe. We were coming into comics at the same time, so despite the sometime huge physical distance between us (he's been living in Asia for years), we kept in relatively constant contact. Around the same time I started to get to know other cartoonists, people like Brandon Graham (now of KING CITY fame), that Stokoe guy, Marley Zarcone (she of HOUSE OF MYSTERY), and many others. They were all doing amazing things at smaller publishers or in some cases even just online. I long wished they would get a larger platform, as I was (and still am) convinced they could take over this medium. Concurrent to that I would talk to friends who did more established work say they wish they had a platform to create whatever without the restraints of their own books. About a year or so later Mark gave me a call saying he just inherited a sci-fi anthology. He asked for what I thought we should do. I said 'something bigger.' After many more a conversation, the idea for PopGun was formed. Editing an anthology was nothing I ever saw coming. Mark and I split editorial duties and eventually included an assistant who would go on to fully co-edit two volumes, DJ Kirkbride. The long-story short, we edited four volumes altogether and the series has gone to win multiple Harveys and even an Eisner for its efforts. There was no way for me to ever know it would go so freakin' big back when Mark and I first talked about maybe doing it, but we did. There's lesson six, be open to every opportunity that comes along. You'll never know where it will lead. Saying yes will more likely lead you down more interesting paths than saying no. For instance, editing PopGun led to me editing other books, including ONE MODEL NATION, a book written by one of my all-time favorite musicians, The Dandy Warhols' Courtney Taylor-Taylor and illustrated by AFRODISAIC's Jim Rugg. Editing became something of a second job (albeit one that didn't really pay) for a long time. Again, I never expected it to even happen. Then there was Angouleme. After countless times of pushing me to go, my buddy Justin finally convinced me to go to the The Angoulême International Comics Festival in 2010. He knew I wanted to write, but he also knew that I had never been outside of the United States and Canada. I was able to figure out how to get there and for the first time in my life I crossed the Atlantic ocean and went to Paris, France. This experience is one of those major moments in my life, on par with moving from Portland to San Francisco or being hired at Image Comics. It was there I was exposed to so much both in and out of comics that I had never seen before. It was the life experience I needed to get me writing. Which is lesson seven, possibly the most important: get some life experience. The best writers and artists draw from truth. If all you've ever done is stay in the same town, your field of vision is going to be pretty limited. Fall in love. Get your heart broken. Get in a fist fight. Travel abroad. Do something really stupid. Spend too much money. Start a savings account. Wake up with a bad hangover. Learn to cook. Read books without pictures. Go to concerts you don't want to go. Go to bars alone in foreign lands and see who you meet. Drink Absinthe. Real Absinthe. The stuff you should be arrested for and you've got to separate and mix correctly or you'll die. Returning from this trip was tough. On the plus side, it really kick started my creative juices in ways I never anticipated. All I wanted to do was write my own comics, but I wasn't. I was writing press releases about other people's. Now, don't get me wrong, I loved my job. Very much. It's another life experience I am eternally grateful for, but at the same time if there's something putting people in this existence to do a specific thing it was obvious that wasn't it for me. Time passed. Eventually it became obvious it was what I needed to do, in both in my and my employers eyes. They liked me, but they needed someone with their focus in the right place. Made sense. We parted ways. This, right here, was one of the scariest experiences I ever had. Yeah, I've been in some actually, physically threatening situations (I highly recommend those as well for the life experience thing), but this was something where the entire status quo of my life was shifting to something new and different. I didn't have the secure job. I didn't have the health insurance. I didn't have the regular paycheck. I basically had a drive to create and some money saved up. Living in San Francisco means you pay to live in San Francisco. When you've got a full time job with benefits, you can make ends meet. When you're trying to start a freelance career, it's not the best place to be. I travelled around to a few different cities including Seattle, WA, Vancouver, BC and Portland, OR to figure out where to go from there. Within hours I knew I would move back to Portland. It was there a friend I made working together at Hollywood Video in San Francisco all those years ago, Emi Lenox (yep, same one from Image Comics' EMITOWN), had been working on establishing her career. It was there one of my previous bosses, Jim Valentino, drove me around and more or less proved why Portland was the place to be. The community of creators there was unparalleled. The low cost of living was absurd. So, the second day there I put in an application for an apartment. I got it the following day. I moved in a month later. That's lesson eight: be willing to be scared. Be willing to take a risk. Be willing to do something that's possibly stupid. I will add the caveat that this step is hard, impossible to take if you have responsibility to others, such as a kid, but I didn't. So I did it. Taking the safe route never works. I've been living in Portland for almost eighteen months now and being back here is the best decision I've ever made. The cost of living made existing on freelance rates very doable. The location and community made finding more work a lot easier. Its accessibility to other parts of the country, like Emerald City Comic Con in Seattle, made promoting myself easier. The friends I've made here have kept me extremely motivated. The experiences I had at Image and elsewhere opened up doors to opportunities, but it was only by going through those doors and putting my all into them that I was able to get anywhere. I barely graduated high school. I never graduated college. If I can do this, you can do this, which I guess is lesson nine. So, yeah. Such opportunities included a lot of freelance editing jobs that weren't exactly what I wanted to do, but subsidized working on my writing in the meantime. They also opened a lot of doors. Working with Frank Cho and Doug Murray on projects like 50 GIRLS 50 helped me hone my writing craft by editing someone else's work. Frank was a buddy beforehand, but working together on this led to us deciding to co-write BRUTAL together, which he's drawing as well. This experience helped me financially and creatively to put together my own ongoing creator-owned series, HELL YEAH, with Andre Szymanowicz, who I met by working on POPGUN. This pursuit on writing eventually took the notice of another previous boss, Eric Stephenson, who along with another guy I worked with at Image, Rob Liefeld, invited me to pitch for their upcoming Extreme line. They asked if I could put something together, so I did within days. That's lesson ten, when someone invites you do anything - whether it's pitching or whatever, do it right away. There's a billion other people out there who want your job. If you don't move on it, they will. Luckily, I did. In February 2012, the goal I've been working on this entire time, writing a work-for-hire ongoing series becomes a reality with the release of GLORY. It feels pretty good, but at the same time, it just makes me want to work harder than I ever have before. I may be on the cusp of the beginning of what I've been working towards and wanting all these years, but that's not good enough. I want to do better. The way I got into comics isn't the best way. I made a ton of mistakes along the way. I'll make a ton more in the future, but it is my way. I'm still not satisfied with where I am. The main thing I'm hoping anyone gets out of this is that you never know how you'll do it or how long it'll take before you get where you need to go, but the overall most important lesson to this is that there is NO breaking into comics. That's the final lesson. Comics isn't a fortress. Comics isn't a secret club with a password you need to learn. Comics is a medium one person can take on their own. Want to make comics? Make comics. Make them your own way. I can't guarantee this will bring you success, critically or monetarily, but it will personally and in the end, that's all that matters. Good luck in all your pursuits. If you want this, you can do it. Make it so.

October 28, 2011 5:45 pm I'd like to put a third in for Paolo and Cadence. They're great. Same with Albert Moy. Also, Steve Morger is great, who handles people like Frank Cho, Travis Charest, Brandon Peterson, etc.