Sounds crazy right? Breaking out? Isn’t the whole endgame as an indie comic creator about breaking in? Depends. Breaking in does not have to be the end all of being a comics creative. It takes a village to make a proper comic, a great comic and one that engages readers and spawns new fans. Artists and writers have a symbiotic relationship (some do both) I knew early on if I was going to up my artist game I needed a writer who could handle me and my madness. I needed more of a partner than just a writer. Enter Frank Martin. Frank came on to Immortal Coil on the second half of issue 2 and I empathize with him having to deal with my notes, characters, scattered visual hallucinations and ever changing or expanding narrative.
That issue spawned a continued collaboration and self publishing our books under our own collaborative imprint, Third Contact. We started exploring other ideas, stories, and rabbit holes - which led to creating A Thousand Cuts and psychological horror series All the Dead Things and an original graphic novel, Love & Death on the Dark Side of the Moon. So here is where it gets interesting….
A Thousand Cuts #1 was our best crowdfunding book yet, All the Dead Things got picked up by a publisher and Love & Death missed its funding goal by a few hundred dollars. It was the latter that really became the impetus of what we are doing next. We decided to go back into Immortal Coil and finish it. We could put out A Thousand Cuts #2 and possibly do really well on Kickstarter again, we could be finishing our first work in the DM, or we could have re launched Love & Death knowing where we went wrong and tried again. But that’s not how it played out…
We decided the best course of action was to take our respective skills and pour it fully focused into the remaining issues of Immortal Coil. Is it our best story? Maybe…maybe not…is it a great story? That it is, and the only way to make it great is to not be a fractured duo with feet in other worlds, we have them planted fully in finishing Immortal Coil.
What became apparent is that for the art and the writing to really be the best we can make it we had to put aside aspirations of “breaking in” and subject ourselves to the art of storytelling in all its wonderful comic goodness. Regardless of what making it in this business means to you, right now, for Frank and I, it is about having a series from beginning to end in which we give it our all. For ourselves, for our readers and for service to story.
Maybe that is “breaking out” and if so that is ok because doing what feels right and staying true to a purpose pays off in the end. Now go make the world a better place and keep making comics!
Real talk: writers have it harder than artists. Yeah, I said it. At least when it comes to “breaking in” to the industry. Workload? Artists absolutely have it worse. But comics is a visual medium. It can’t exist without pictures, so artists hold a lot of the power when it comes to working in the industry.
This was a hard thing to wrap my head around having come from writing prose. Before comics, I began my career crafting short stories and novels, which was always a labor of love. It was just me, pouring myself into my storytelling, without any immediate return or cost. It was the creation of art for the sake of art, so I expected comics to be much of the same.
To my surprise, it wasn’t. By and large, artists didn’t want to partner on their own projects. They wanted to be hired to do other people’s stuff. So I found myself facing a significant financial hurdle if I wanted to “break in,” and this story isn’t unique. Tons of aspiring comic writers quickly realize just how expensive their aspirations could be.
Combining the financial burden with the slim possibility of success is a tough pill to swallow. Traditionally, writers were beholden to artists for creation and publishers for validation. You couldn’t make a book without paying an artist, and you can’t get your book into readers’ hands without a publisher saying it’s good enough. That system is a recipe for mental health disaster.
Fortunately, crowdfunding has entered the comic scene as the great disrupter, allowing writers such as myself to bypass the traditional publishing infrastructure and bring my work directly to readers. The financial wall of creation is still there, but now I and so many others in my position have a direct means to fund those projects. It has also allowed me the ability to redefine what “breaking in” actually means. So much in life revolves around expectations. Having grown up reading comics as kids, up and coming creators like myself have an image in our minds of what it means to “break in” to this industry, which isn’t as straightforward or universal as it seems. This industry, like any that revolves around the arts, is a bit of a Wild West. There’s no one approach to success or even one concept of what success means. Every writer has to discover for themselves what success looks like with realistic expectations. The good news is there are more tools and resources than ever before to make that happen.
Until next time,
Frank & Gerald
Third Contact Comics
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