COMICS BROKE ME...

...Two.

A slew, a spew, of unassailable facts, informed opinion, and the potential of wild, self-serving conjecture. As for the order in which these are present and presented, that’s for you to work out.

Now, for the benefit of those of you who somehow stumbled on this screed and those preceding it, with no awareness of who or what I am, in the name of taking nothing for granted, a bit—okay, more than a bit, to be honest—of backstory.

(For the majority of you, I have the queasy feeling this is going to be like every fucking movie grimly reminding us of why Batman feels entitled to behave like such a morally performative asshole every fucking time, handing out beatings in the name of justice, but mostly really endlessly reiterating a fifteen year old boy’s portentous wish/dream of what a rich guy who had a bad day when he was eight would do with his inherited wealth. If this describes you, feel free to skip ahead.)

For the rest of you, I am a (very, very) long time veteran of what might laughingly be called the comic book business. I’ve spent more than a half century making a living in this craft, having decided sixteen years before I was actually paid to make comic books that it was all I ever wanted to do.

Ever.

This, despite no particular visible talent, I might rush to add.

In that talent free regard, I started out with nothing to offer, and ultimately came to understand that if I was to continue to do this for my living, it behooved me to actually work hard on developing skillsets to, at the very least, diminish my embarrassment and shame at how shitty my work was. For the record, my first credited job with my first client was the result of a very successful comic book artist bullying an editor into giving me a shot, for which I will remain forever grateful to the artist, and deeply apologetic to the editor.

Both are dead, so these expressed sentiments are functionally toothless, as performative as it gets.

The first decade of my career was, and remains, a source of that embarrassment and shame, as I learned how to do my job on the job, stumbling this way and that, until finally, over a ten year period, I had developed first an intellectual understanding of what was demanded of me by mainstream comics, and, ultimately the hand/eye coordination to manifest that understanding on a professional basis, albeit tentatively, at first, and crudely, also at first.

None of this effort, to be abundantly clear, had anything to do with talent. Skill and practice, augmented with a vast and deep trench of imposter syndrome, is what kept me afloat and propelled me forward.

Entre nous, in my well informed opinion, talent is a vastly overvalued endowment. The most talented talent of my generation died in poverty, incapable of understanding in any way how to monetize his talent and its accompanying skillset.

All this is to say that it took a good ten years, a decade, of making inconsistent, only occasionally verging on the competent, just as occasionally dreadful work, until I got “good.”

To backtrack just the slightest bit, and explain why, despite my general ineptitude, I continued to get work back then in that first decade of my long career, it’s worth noting that my only real instinctual endowed gift was that ephemeral comic book skill of “storytelling.” I seemed to know what I was doing with this particular aspect of the craft even when my draftsmanship stank to even the upper reaches of heaven.

At my worst, I could put together and organize a page that deliberately presented the writer’s idea, which, in a creative enterprise in which writers were (all too often unfortunately) the alpha, carried and continues to carry merit, weight and value.

This skill profited writers working in what was then called “The Marvel Method,” in which a plot would serve to generate a visual narrative. The artist, under the mistaken impression that he was being granted some sort of indefinable freedom, while actually doing a chunk of the writer’s work gratis, would transliterate this document into comic book pages. The writer would then swoop in and add dialogue, with no further compensation to the artist for the work done.

This made me a marginally valuable property, particularly for writers who regarded comics artists as laborers providing “Art chores,” a Stan Leeism that reeks with condescension and barely concealed contempt.

It took me awhile to shed myself of that “freedom” bullshit. I taught myself to write, and put the self destructive stupidity of allowing writers to profit on my only innate skillset aside. And I will never work in that misbegotten “method” again.

A full script, always…even if I dismantle it to reconstruct the script into what is actually a visual narrative, a necessity all too often as a result of all too many writers’ complete inability to tell a story visually through textual cues and descriptions.

All of this is to say, in regard to that word, “good,” by my early thirties I had become a comic book man, a cartoonist, who could write and draw. It is the synergy of those two skillsets that is the core of my actual value to this shambling business.

Of course, my definition of “Good” diverges dramatically from that of an audience of adults which shows no embarrassment about mistaking “favorite” for “best,” or for passionately arguing over which is Batman’s greatest foe, for that matter.

Passionately.

Let’s not forget that the old trope, “The Golden Age of Comics is twelve” isn’t funny because it’s true. It’s true, and sadly pathetic, and as funny as that clueless dipshit who thinks responding to a strongly expressed opinion with “Now tell me what you really think!” has ever been even vaguely clever.

And for many among you, civilian and enthusiast alike, that “Good” is of course subjective. Separate and distinct from each other, my skillsets, graphic and textual, are perfectly adequate. It is, as noted above, when the graphic and the textual intertwine that I am worthy of more than passing interest.

And that synergy, curiously enough, is warrant for much of my catalogue to be ignored. Writers write. Artists draw. What the fuck is with this guy, who completely grasps the idea that comic books are, to be brutally clear, graphic design in the service of narrative? Of course, this dismissal is perfectly reasonable, in a culture that, when one actually thinks about it, presumes that comic books—excuse me, GRAPHIC NOVELS—draw themselves.

As noted above, “art chores.”

The quasi literary crowd too often responds positively to badly drawn comics, whose value is solely identified in its text, mistaking visual/graphic ineptitude for authenticity. The illustration/visual media crowd, on the other hand, goes into rapture over work that reminds it of itself, ignoring what the true job those pictures are intended to do, separate and distinct from illustration.

The synergy of text and visual, that is truly what comics are at heart. often simply goes unnoticed.

And speaking of heart, it bears noting that at no time in my career, from its earliest inception to my current dotage, have I ever gotten any work, not a damned thing, from being politic, by presenting as “nice.” This particular path to glory has, to put it simply, never been available to me.

I am not now, nor have I ever been, “nice.” I can’t even fake it. I know this is true because even I don’t fall for it when I try to bullshit this sort of performance. It’s the work that has sustained me, not a chummy relationship with people in the position to provide that work.

Just for a second, for those of you who know me personally, visualize me being “Chummy.”

Woof. Awful, right? Not happening.

And the other option too frequently at play in the realm of the fatuous, the tormented soul of an artist as performance, is just flagrant hooey, aimed at an audience credulously intimidated by such arrant sophist nonsense.

Now, imagine me pulling any of that modern day bogus Byronic bullshit.

Comedy gold.

So, now, over fifty years in, I still operate as if the job on my desk is my last job, and do everything within my power to do the best work I can in service to that job, whether I own the material outright, share in that ownership, or, and this needs to be said, even if it’s work for hire. That, it seems to me, is one of the primary hallmarks of professionalism.

And for those of you have met me in person, and have found me challenging; for those of you endowed with psychic powers and believe you know how and what I think, and in that regard have it all figured out as to what it’s like working with me, let me clue you in on a little piece of reality.

For all my supposed difficulty, for all my allegedly legendary prickliness, I have, until the experience laid out below, never had any editor react with anything but a positive response to working with me. This, because, I actually do what I say I will do, and work as a collaborator with a client, avoiding the pitfalls of always succumbing to the assumption of an adversarial relationship.

That is another hallmark of professionalism.

Much of this came to mind last year when the pommy shitstain who fancies himself a comic book journalist ginned up a bit of heat bereft of light with #comicsbrokeme…a lot of which turned out to be a lot of entitled whining from people who seemed to feel that doing what I do required just the desire to do so, or was just easy as pie, or, for that matter, were simply incapable of producing more than a page a week, and not necessarily a particularly good page to be insultingly clear, under the best of circumstances.

And, of course,when these whines were parsed, the subtext was that great art was being lost, sacrificied to Mammon by a business of Philistines.

Comics, mainstream comics, which demand a certain identifiable level of craft, is a frivolous medium which is difficult to do, let alone do well. Dilettantes, empowered by self designated geniuses who think they’re special, dismissing the very concept of deadlines as the unfortunate province of those abovementioned Philistines, can take a fucking hike.

It’s not an art, it’s a craft. And the finishes are due on Friday.

I should point out that I haven’t had to actively solicit gigs for most of my professional life. This despite the fact that I aged out of providing work to DC and MARVEL over a decade ago. I get along...and, since I’m no more than a journeyman in the delivery of super comics, I have no bitterness about the ageism innate in this situation.

I hadn’t thought any more about the rampant amateurism of the “…broke me” bunch until just this past week, when I had an experience with a client for whom I had never worked, and, on the basis of that experience will likely never work for. As per below, a bridge was burned, the result of not being, as usual, nice.

In the first place, this small outfit solicited me about a year or so ago. I was cool to the solicitation, not entirely convinced that what I had to offer was a good fit for this company. They insisted, I said fine—we left it at the “let’s talk when this offer becomes real” stage.

It became real late last year, with an email outlining the company’s mission statement, which, to be honest, read like a cut and pasted press release. I found it condescending, and a bit silly, and, as noted above, I did not conceal this reaction. I really didn’t need to be educated in regard to their mission statement, which, to my eyes, was a gross simplification of the material’s inspiration, and a presentist inversion of that inspiration’s intentions.

I will gladly admit I wasn’t nice. I will also go out on a limb to say that these people would have been lucky to have me, considering the material that they had already published under their imprint.

To say that my work is a serious cut above what they’d published would be easy, not to mention, but mention I will, a low bar. Had this work come to be, I would have been bookended by marginally competent work, accent on the marginal. And mediocre, at best, too.

We went back and forth, we came to terms, and I delivered a number of premises that fit their needs, and was told that I’d hear back from them in a week.

That was a month ago. When, a week ago, I dropped them a note about being ghosted, I was basically blown off—the explanation of licensors having the flu and fires to start with—as if I don’t live in a fire zone, with a bug out bag in my trunk, waiting, for a warily tense while, for the containment of a wild fire five miles from me.

The most comical part of the “…We should part company…” email has to be, though, a note that, said, in response to my pointing out that I had been under the assumption I’d hear one way or the other in a week, and I paraphrase, “I had no idea you had a schedule.”

Really.

As opposed to what I would now gather is a company policy of “let’s just publish when you’re ready.“

Sure. This might account for the general mediocrity of content. And just to complicate matters a tad more, I would have been delighted to deliver on any of the premises submitted. I say this with wistful regret.

Of course, I have a deep suspicion that this all could have gone another way entirely had I been nicer. I did myself no good by my attitude. That’s just the way things are. Unfortunately for those of us who still believe the work is what matters, not the smile and a shoeshine Willy Loman bullshit, my error was to presume my resume might carry more weight than it did, and, to display my ego publicly for just an instant, should.

All this is to say that my read of the “…brokeme…” whiners as the only entitled amateurs in my ramshackle industry has to be reconsidered…as that rank amateurism seems to have found its niche on the other side of the desk, as well. This codependency of universal ineptitude is a new wrinkle in the dying game that is mainstream comic books.

Trust me on this.

As ever, I remain,

Howard Victor Chaykin…a Prince.