An interesting conundrum has arisen.
I’m trying to figure out how best to deal with the issue of inked pages. Ardian’s pencils are really tight and dark, but conventional wisdom is that you want to have your pages inked. I don’t know enough about what an inker brings to the table to be sure I can judge inks well. I know art well enough, and I have enough concept of color to recognize what’s working and what isn’t, but I just haven’t seen enough professional-quality sequential art pre-inks to have much idea of what I ought to be looking for in an inker.
That said, having looked through the immediately available things at digitalwebbing, the guys posting on the forums don’t look good enough/right enough for me to say, “Ah, I want that guy,” so maybe I know enough.
I’m discussing with Ted the possibility of going to the bank and seeing if they’d give me a small business loan to do issues 2-6 of Chance with. The kind of costs we’re talking about would be too much to pay out of pocket, but small enough that if it didn’t take off we could afford to pay it back without breaking ourselves. Ted is agreeable to this plan, because Ted thinks there’s very little chance I won’t sell this thing to Image.
I have an extremely cool husband. :)
Though, truth be told, I’ve been reading (and reading and reading) the Image boards on the topic of submissions, and I’m feeling pretty confident myself. There are a number of positive things in my favor, ranging from:
– Erik Larsen (the head editor at Image, who is incredibly available and helpful on those boards) has observed that the better the art is, the more professional and higher in quality in general (and therefore the more likely to be greenlighted, though he didn’t say that specifically) the whole package is. My artist is good.
– He’s also said a lot of readers wish Image would go back to the kick-ass superhero stuff Image did in the early 90s, which means there’s an audience for what I’m doing.
– They also say they get 5-10 submissions a day (which is on one hand a lot, but on the other, that’s like 3500 subs a year, and I’m used to submitting to slushpiles of 7K and more), and their process is to open ’em up and take a look and you can tell on 99.9% of ’em at a glance whether you’ve got something worth bothering with. Again, my artist is good, which means it’ll get past the five-second glance stage.
– This, which led to the discussion with Ted, was also mentioned: the boards have also said you *want* to have at least 3 issues in the can by the time they start soliciting for the first issue. From a pitch standpoint, I’d really like to be able to say, “The pencils for issue #2 are being worked on, and 3-6 have been scripted and are in line for work.”
Interestingly, there’s no indication at all that previous publishing credits are of any use, though they say to mention them in the cover letter.
Anyway,
Oooo! Very cool. Good luck with it. I for one think you can pull it off!
I really like that second panel on page 18. The look in her eyes. Hehe!
They only get 5-10 submissions per day? It disturbs me that I think of that as being such a small number. Heh. And I think publishing credits are only of any use if they can somehow use them for promotional purposes. It’s a whole different ball o’ wax to do comics as opposed to writing prose.
That was my reaction to the number, too, and I’m not even somebody who *gets* submissions!
And yeah, I assume that publication credits are only of use if they’re within the industry, aside from the there are people who think I can tell a story factor, at least. But given the extremely different format, I figure even having novel publications is very little more than a, “Yeah, so?” in comics.
I ought to email you about all this. I meant to bring it up while you were in Dublin, but I totally spaced it. :)
Interestingly, there’s no indication at all that previous publishing credits are of any use, though they say to mention them in the cover letter.
Yes, but keep in mind something – there’s a trend going on right now. Screenwriters and novelists writing comic books. JMS, Joss Whedon, Kevin Smith, Brad Meltzer, and Denise Mina are examples of this. And there’s a lot more that I can’t think of off the top of my head.
So, yes, I think mentioning this would be a good thing, and I think it is another bonus in your corner.
Yah; Tamora Pierce was just asked by Marvel to write a title, too. So certainly it doesn’t *hurt* to be published elsewhere, and it’ll go in the cover letter. :)
I think in cases like this, the inker is really not doing much more than turning pencil into actual ink, which is a necessity in any case. There’s a range of work needed based on the penciller, such that it’s often listed as being “breakdowns” or “roughs” and “finishes” rather than pencils and inks. That’s often the case when the inker is doing almost all of the detail.
The inker is going to add background solids, tones, more or less polish off what the penciller is doing, so I’d really recommend it even if this work is so well done.