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Open Q&A: Rick on Scheduling

by Eric on June 17, 2012 at 11:30 pm
Posted In: Q&A

Here’s another installment of our question-and-answer series. Remember: You can ask your own questions in the comments section and Rick will provide follow-up answers!

With serial comics, you’re often working on a fairly tight deadline, and I imagine that there are considerations you have to make about which visual aspects of storytelling — panels, moments, expressions, methods, etc. — to prioritize, just for the sake of time and sanity. Do you get a script and say, “These are the areas I need to really focus on,” or does that come naturally as you compose the page?

If you’re an artist working in the field of comics your archenemy isn’t a bad inker, or an insensitive editor, or even a scathing review of your work. No, your Big Bad is always there, hanging over your shoulder like a vulture, just waiting for you to slip up. Your enemy is Time and there’s never enough of it. Ever.

Comics are periodical publications. They are issued on a regular basis, usually monthly, to the consumer. The content of those magazines has to be produced in a timely manner so the publisher can go to press in time to make the on sale date. If they don’t keep to this schedule they create bad feelings with their customers and incur financial penalties from the printer. Things have to keep moving. The people who create the content for these magazines have to work to a schedule so that the comics can move along the production chain to completion. That means everyone works to a deadline.

One of the things a comics professional has to have to be successful is the ability to work to a deadline. This is something an editor takes a chance on when they hand out assignments to new artists. An artist may have beautiful work in their portfolio, but the unseen quality is the willingness to work on schedule. You just don’t know until you try, and this has proven to be the Achilles’ Heel of many a potentially great comic artist.

Working as a comic artist, you can live pretty much wherever you want and work whatever hours suit you. If you’re more productive working at night, you can. If you have to take time out of your day to attend to a personal matter, no problem. It’s all up to you. There’s no supervisor in the next office or across the room making sure you’re not wasting company time. While this is a very desirable situation, it is fraught with possible danger.

You’re at work on an assignment and you decide to take a break. You just bought the new DVD release of season 5 of your favorite TV show. Maybe you’ll sit down and watch an episode. Or two. Maybe three. Before you know it, you’ve watched half the season and burned up 3 or 4 hours. Whoops! You have work to do, but it’s late and you’re really tired. You’ll make up the time lost today, tomorrow. You’ll work a little longer. Things can get out of hand pretty quick.

You have to put the work first. This doesn’t mean that all you do is work, but you have to balance everything else in your life to that deadline. You know when the deadline is. You know how much work needs to be done. You need to find some way to make sure you stay on schedule. Luckily, it’s a schedule you devise for yourself. You have the option of finding the way that works best for you.

There are probably dozens of ways for an individual artist to meet the deadline comfortably. Some will go through the script and draw thumbnail layouts of the entire issue. This enables them to work out page deigns and storytelling in an economic way. The thumbnails may be the size of a sheet of copy paper, half that size, or even smaller. Depending on the tightness of the drawing, they may just blow the thumbnails up and use them as an underlay to trace onto the board. Or they may just use the layouts as guidelines to the finished page, realizing they may change what they’ve done to make the actual art work better. This method speeds up the process and saves a lot of redrawing later on.

Some artists (including yours truly), work to a segmented schedule. I know how much time I have and how many pages need to be done. I break that into days. How many pages do I need to finish each day to accommodate the deadline. Obviously, all pages are not created equal. Some will require more time than others. You can address this by jumping around in the book. If there’s a page you know is going to eat into your daily schedule, set aside the time necessary to give the page its due, and jump around to find pages in the assignment that should take less time and bunch them together in the schedule. You know how fast you work. You know the drawing problems that take the most time. With a little thought and personal scheduling, you can work to a deadline and not feel too much pressure.

There will always be the unexpected. I can guarantee it. Plan on it. The script comes in two weeks late. The deadline doesn’t change. It just means you have two weeks less than you thought you’d have to do the job. A good editor will build a cushion into the schedule to account for things like this, but you can’t always depend on it. You have to find a way to reassess the amount of work and the shorter time until it’s due. You say, I’ll take as much time as I need to do this job, it’s not my fault it’s late. But what does that do to the inker, the letterer, the colorist, the production people who have to get the book ready to go to press? This is a team. And not only do you want to do the best job you can, you also want to make sure you don’t cause problems for the rest of the team. It’s just common courtesy and solid professionalism. Another guarantee I can make: you will hardly ever have more time than you need to do the job.

Sometimes things get way out of hand. You’ll be faced with an impossible deadline. There’s no way you can finish the amount of work needed in the time allotted. But you have to. They’re depending on you. Either that, or they’ll have to find someone else who can do the job.

Early in my career, part of my reputation was built on being someone who could pull a job out of the fire and turn work around in a timely manner. I was DC’s “Go To” guy when something was running late. I had experience as both a penciller and an inker, so I was offered a number of those assignments. In situations like that, you find ways to do the best job you can in the time allotted. Sometimes the work that you turn in is less than your best. You have to live with that and hope that, down the line, the editor will remember how you saved the project and will offer you a plum assignment with enough time to do your best work. Don’t count on it, though.

When you find yourself in a situation like this you have to immediately clear the decks of everything else and prioritize the work. Where can you save time? Can you bring in someone to help? Maybe they can lay pages out or do backgrounds. Just remember, you’ll need to pay them and you’re not getting paid extra for this rush job. This is when scheduling is of the utmost importance. This is when being confident of your strengths and weaknesses really comes into play. You know where you need to put most of your time. The one place you never cut corners is on the characters. That’s what the readers pay their money to see. You can cut back on backgrounds, maybe simplify props, use suggestion to indicate a crowd scene. You might find a way to streamline your storytelling. But you definitely need to spend the most time on the characters.

Something else to consider: don’t take on more work than you can handle. I speak from experience on this one. I’ve made this mistake more times than I care to admit. If you take two jobs and schedule them so you can turn them around in time, inevitably, something will happen that tosses that planning out the window. You receive an offer and you don’t want to turn it down. It’s work. You have bills to pay and as a freelance artist, you have no way of knowing when the next offer will come along. Or maybe you have an assignment and you receive a call. It’s an offer to work on your dream project, or to work with a writer you’ve always wanted to work with. Do you turn that down? No. You try to find a way to make it work. And it usually ends up being a nightmare. Tread carefully.

The freedom to be your own boss comes with a price tag. There are no sick days. There are no paid holidays or vacations. You have to be willing to work when the work is there, not when you feel like it. Your friends are all going to see the latest big budget super hero movie at the Cineplex and you have to get 6 pages done by Monday. What do you choose and how does it impact your future? There are a number of words for it: Responsibilty, Professionalism, Personal Integrity. It’s only part of what it takes to work in the business of Comics. It’s an important part. You might be excused for turning in a sub-standard job because you were facing an unreasonable deadline, but if you turn the work in late, or not at all, you may not have to worry about deadlines ever again.

Rick

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Open Q&A: Greg on ideas

by Eric on June 10, 2012 at 11:49 pm
Posted In: Q&A

Following up on my conversation with Rick on the very abstract subject of “ideas,” here’s a Q&A with Greg on the same topic. Feel free to leave your own questions in the comments section below!

I’m not sure if it’s more of a joke or an annoyance for writers that one of the most often asked questions is, “Where do your ideas come from?” But for me, this has always been the least interesting of the five W’s and H to ask about. If you’ll indulge, here’s a set of questions about ideas that I thought you could maybe answer generally, with perhaps specific examples surrounding the process of creating Lady Sabre. “Ideas” is a sort of abstract concept too, so feel free to stretch the definition in whatever direction you want.

What form do your ideas take when they come? A setting? A situation? A line of dialogue? Do some concepts arrive more fully formed than others? Do you always hold onto the essence of that original idea throughout the creative process?

It’s remarkably inconsistent, honestly. Most of the time, the ideas that are the most powerful or “resonant” with me – meaning the ones I’m most anxious to pursue beyond anything else I may be working on – tend to arrive as an image, a moment or a scene. I see something in the mind’s eye and latch onto it, something about the people, perhaps, or the place, or the action. But that’s not to say it’s the most frequent means of arrival.

I think most writers get their ideas anywhere they can. It’s part of the job, to keep the mind open and fed with new ideas and concepts. I’ve been watching and reading a lot about physics lately, for example, and I know that’s fueling stories, but I’ve no idea what those stories will be as yet. By the same token, the whole economic broohaha has led to a new project, this one more concrete, that I’m just starting work on. Other times, like I said, I see something clearly – it doesn’t have to be contextual at all – just something that I imagine and think, okay, that’s neat, I’d want to know why that happened, I’d want to know what happens next.

I also work from theme a lot, I think, so in that, yes, there’s a consistency, a through-line to anything I’m trying to do. What happens more often than not, then, is that whatever thematic story I’m working with, or working out (more precisely) links up with an image, a moment, that I’m picturing in my mind. And then I’m off to the races.

When do your ideas come, in relation to the other projects on which you’re working (e.g. Does inspiration strike when you’re knee-deep in something else? Does the process of revising and submitting one project trigger the formation of new ones?), and at what point do you shift gears to focus on new projects? I often wonder about writers who…I don’t want to say multi-task, but at any point in time since I’ve known you, you’re working on a comic or three, a novel, now Lady Sabre, and probably two or three other things to which I’m not privy. How do you make room on the creative plate for everything? How do you prioritize which ideas to work on at any given moment?

Oh, the pain of it is that most new ideas come in the middle of “the other thing I’m doing.” Which can be aggravating, because in the main, I trust my instincts, and I want to hold onto those new ideas, you know? I end up quickly jotting something down or noting it in Evernote or whatever. But when I’m on a particular project, the bandwidth gets narrow, as the saying goes, and I need to keep my focus. So invariably I have to shove distractions aside – even if that distraction is a story shouting, “me me me!!!” Deadlines don’t care how creative you are; they just want to be met.

I don’t actually multi-task very well, frankly, certainly not as well as I used to. What I can do well, I think, is hold different ideas in my head at the same time, and that makes shifting gears relatively easy. I’m working on Lady Sabre scripts right now, but I’ve got piece of my mind on BRAVO, and another chunk focused on Punisher. That’s actually not difficult for me, and it might – perhaps – be a benefit, because it allows for cross-pollination, in a way. I enjoy being able to jump from one moving train to another, if that makes any sense; it’s energizing, and one of the biggest problems I have when writing (and especially when the writing is hard) is in maintaining momentum and passion. It ebbs and flows, so anything I can do to keep myself charging ahead is good.

I don’t like… how to put this. I don’t like not rewriting. I want to revise. I want to pound out a draft as quickly as possible, because to me, that’s raw material. That’s the lumber and the nails and the screws, and maybe it’s foundation, maybe it’s the building frame. But it sure as heck isn’t a habitation, you know? It’s not until I can actually roll up my sleeves and work with what I’ve got that I feel I’m doing the real work.

That becomes a Catch-22 when I’m on multiple projects, though, because – again, deadlines – I can find myself in a place where there isn’t enough time to do appropriate revision. It happens more often than I care to admit in regards to mainstream comics. One of the nicest things about Lady Sabre, honestly, is that I can go back and revise, and even revise in progress (though I’m sure Rick wishes I wouldn’t do that quite so much…).

How do you…I don’t want to say catalog, because that sounds scientific…how do you go about writing your ideas down, so they’re somewhere other than your brain? I’ve known writers who used journals, .txt documents with random lines, chains of post-it notes on office walls. What does your jotting-down process look like? And at what point do you sort of make the idea separate from yourself by writing it down? How long do you let it simmer / cure / ferment in your brain beforehand?

To tell the truth, I’ve always been very, very bad about putting the ideas “outside” of myself. It’s only been in the last couple years that I’ve begun to actually record nascent projects and ideas on paper or, more often, on computer. So, yeah, I end up with single-line text documents littering my desktop, or multiple Evernote notebooks. The big step – the moment I know I’m committing to something – is when I’m opening Scrivener, honestly. I barely use a fraction of the programs capabilities, but I love it for its ability to be a virtual three-ring binder. Lady Sabre, for instance, lives in a huge Scrivener doc that I’m always adding more and more to, ideas as they come to me or details about the world or the technology or the characters.

As for how long I let it simmer… there’s nothing consistent there, either. Some ideas wait for years, patiently counting down until they’re called to duty. Others go from concept to launch remarkably quickly. And others find themselves called up only to be sent back down again, because the idea stalled or petered-out or was in some other fashion not ready to be realized. Half of that can be the idea of the story itself, how it’s developed, but sometimes it’s simply a matter of what else I’m doing, and what opportunities have presented themselves.

Who do you share your ideas with, and at what point in development? I’m interested in how you and Jen do or don’t involve each other in your creative processes, and I’m also interested in whether you share ideas with your children as you work. At what point do you involve an artist when you’re doing comics? At what point are you sharing with an editor? Are you ever protective of ideas, and is this a general condition, or triggered by certain kinds of people?

When we were younger, Jen and I would throw ideas back and forth all the time. Especially when I was working on a novel, the end of the day routine would be me taking that day’s work and reading it aloud to her, looking for her thoughts and feedback, and, frankly, also using that as a proofing process, to catch stupid mistakes and typos and the like.

These days, two kids, work and social obligations, there’s just not the same amount of time for that exchange. We still do turn to each other when we’re against the wall on something, and a lot of that is as much hearing what the other one is saying as it is our need to just air the idea aloud; I find, personally, that speaking the story, saying the words out loud, ie, “This is what I’m thinking…” helps to crystalize and refine what I’m working on enormously. This is one of the reasons why I am so passionate about having a good editor, if only to have someone who knows how to listen. A good editor knows when to speak and when to stay silent, and will know when to nudge and when to sit back. There aren’t a lot of them out there, honestly. You can end up working in a vacuum quite easily.

With the kids, it’s different, because Elliot – at 12 – is only now at a place where I feel comfortable really sharing with him the majority of what I write. Dashiell is less interested in the work, but has always, always been far more focused on narrative. Both of them have, for that matter.

Working with an artist, it’s so contingent on so many variables. If it’s an artist I have a relationship with, friendship or professional or whatever, I’ll try to work with them as early as possible, if only to make it clear what it is we’re setting out to do, what the story is. On Lady Sabre, Rick and I have known each other for years, so a lot of the scripting is simply executing ideas we’ve tossed around for over a decade in some cases. Working with someone like Michael Lark, say, I tend to write the script first, then want to discuss it with him once he’s got it in hand. I never, ever, want to find myself locking the artist into anything; my medium is prose, my expertise is in the words, and thus I’m very open about the visuals in general, and even more so where visual storytelling is concerned.

As for being protective of an idea… I’m probably not as protective as I should be. I’ve shared ideas with people I shouldn’t have, only to see them write the story their way – sometimes badly – and leave me sucking wind. It’s unfortunate, and it can be depressing, but at the same time, you can’t be precious about creativity. Or, to put it another way, the manufacture of ideas needs to be constant. If one idea goes, there should be another on the way to take its place somewhere in the pipeline.

Why do ideas lend themselves to different media, and at what point do you say, “This is a comic,” or “This is a novel,” or “This is a video game” or “This is something different”? How often do these ideas cross-pollinate, e.g. something that you came up with for Queen & Country turns out to work better in The Punisher?

I’ve got an incredible luxury, in that I can write a novel, I can write a short story, I can write a comic, and each of these things I can do reasonably well. I’ve dabbled with stage plays, screenplays, so those forms are open to me. It becomes easy to marry an idea to a means when you’ve got so many options.

Most of the time, I end up making the decision on both efficiency and efficacy. I want a story to have an effect, to have a result for the audience – I want an emotional response, or a thought, and that doesn’t mean either has to be particularly deep, but the story should provide some sensation, if only pleasure, if only amusement. So an idea that is intensely visual, for instance, is going to be better suited for comics or another visual medium. Ideas that may appear, at first, to be visual but are instead far more internal, character-pieces, may work best in prose.

But there’s no hard and fast rule. For better or worse, a lot of what I do, I end up doing on instinct.

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Open Q&A: Rick on ideas

by Eric on June 5, 2012 at 9:47 am
Posted In: Dispatches, Q&A

While we’re on our brief hiatus, we thought it might be a good opportunity to get back into a discussion of the creative process. So check back in with us every Monday and Thursday for a little Q&A session with Rick and Greg, respectively.

I’ll be opening each session with a prompt or a handful of questions, but please ask your own questions in the comments section, and Rick and Greg will do their best to answer!

As an artist, how many of your ideas come as fully formed pictures, and how many come as, “I’d like this-and-this to happen — how do I pull that off visually?” How do these ideas shift / change / deform / evolve in the transition from your brain to your hand?

When I’m drawing a strip everything I draw is in service to the story, so it all starts with the script. My job is to visually interpret the writer’s story and elaborate on the emotional context where I can. Much of my input depends on the writer. I’ve worked with a lot of different writers and none approach scripting exactly the same way.

Some writers give very detailed art directions. They’ll not only tell you the characters involved in the scene, but they’ll give a detailed description of the setting. They will list the furniture in a room, it’s location in the room, sometimes even the style of the furniture. They’ll tell you where the characters stand (or sit), what they’re wearing, and even focus on what the particular character is doing, whether it’s important to the story or not. Other writers will give a little sketchier panel descriptions focusing on the most important visual elements and leaving the rest to the artist to elaborate on. Then if you’re working Marvel style, or from a synopsis, the artist decides on the pacing of the story, how many panels on the page, in a sense becoming a co-writer. All of these methods and variations of them, require a different approach.

I’ve always tried to draw to the writer. It’s not my job to change what they wrote, to restructure the story or to alter the focus. That doesn’t mean I won’t change things, but I’ll only make changes if I feel there’s a better way to visualize the writer’s intent. Understanding what that intent might be is something I take very seriously. It’s maybe the hardest part of the job and often requires reading between the lines of the script. Writer’s choose the words they use for a reason, so it’s important to pay attention to those words. The choice of words will give clues to the emotional intent of the scene regardless of the structure of the written pages.

That’s where I start. I approach each script with no preconceived notions. As I’m doing the first read through I try not to visualize anything. I’m just trying to get a general sense of the story, making mental notes on locations, characters, and any research that might be necessary. Sometimes, though, as I’m reading a scene, a visual will pop into my head. When that happens I know it’s the best way to draw that sequence. I don’t understand why it happens, but every time I try to re-imagine something that has come to me that way, I soon realize I’m not going to improve on that image. It’s the same with designing characters. The first image that occurs to me is the one I’m most satisfied with. Many times I’ll be asked to alter a design to someone else’s specification, and I always comply, but I’m never as happy with the result.

I don’t think I’ve ever worked on a script that completely stymied me. There have been some that I’ve had trouble with, usually written by someone who doesn’t understand the medium. My approach to drawing comics is old school. I want to tell a story in pictures and see how much of that story I can communicate visually. It is definitely not the accepted approach to drawing today’s comics. I don’t draw pin-ups on every page. The work isn’t in your face. I try for subtlety when I can. I try to inject visual humor when possible. I find doing things this way opens a visual palette that is much broader than the norm. It gives me more tools to play with. For me, it’s more challenging, and a lot more fun.

This year marks my 30th anniversary as a comics professional, and when I think about all the types of stories I haven’t had the opportunity to draw, my emotions become mixed. I’m disappointed because I’ve never gotten to interpret a war story, or a horror story,or a romance story, or a science fiction story, or do an adaptation of a movie or a tv show, and I really want (need!) to do another Western. And then there’s the notion of writing something myself. But the disappointment soon becomes excitement because I realize I haven’t done a war story, or a horror story, or a or a romance, or a science fiction….

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