Publishing industries: "Frustration Inc." (Blog Introduction)

 Oh how unbalanced the publishing industry is. This topic has been discussed thousands upon thousands of times, but who cares, as long as I have something to start the blog with (don't tell me what to do system!).

I had this conversation with a friend over a year ago by now. This guy was seriously (perhaps too seriously) trying to get a first step as a writer in the comic book industry. As an active reader of mainly graphic novels I got dragged by the idea to a lesser degree than himself. I was expecting it to be a difficult endeavor and even told him to not expect anything out of this. But for what I found after a couple days of researching, even I was too optimistic. We all know Stan Lee (most of us at least), he is a superstar in the medium, not an illustrator, so I thought breaking into the industry as just a writer was not a huge deal. The firsthand conclusion regarding that daydream was: "you are a writer trying to break into the comic industry? Ha! Good luck with that." That conclusion has not changed since then.

The main and logical problem with all of this was that we were (and are) nobodies. I know that is the case for pretty much everything, if you have no experience you might as well try to fight the air. The most frustrating thing is that in some cases they get well known writers to do a pitch for a certain character or story and, with all due respect, it turns out to be horrible (I’m looking at you Spider-Man butchers… no names). Even the publishers acknowledge this fact, but they don’t give an “F”. All of this applies to artists as well. The big players do not accept unsolicited work (the most repeated words in the submissions section of every publisher, followed by: we do not assemble creative teams). You need to find your own partner and, by not having a real portfolio backing you up, you’ll most likely end up gambling if he/she will really care about the project or not. The decision of not reading all the scripts they get is reasonable, due to the amount of work it would demand, but, come on, you guys should put emphasis in writing better stories as much as in drawing better panels.

We are left with one forced option: start building a portfolio ourselves in the regular book writing industry, but even that turned out to be challenging. As weeks went by we came with the idea of creating a blog to build our portfolio’s base. I didn’t go all in at first, but as you can see (or in this case read) that has changed. I might talk more about this topic in the future, for now, let’s see how this goes.