A Life Lived in Comics Day 25: MIND into Matter

Exciting day Tuesday. Still getting over being sick; left early Monday, came in late today. Arrived to think I must have a leak in my office because a trash can was on my desk, but it turned out to just be that the carpets had been vacuumed. But once I get everything back where it’s supposed to be, the other thing on my desk is revealed: advance copies of both the regular version of MIND MGMT #1 and the Gilbert Hernandez variant cover. There they are above, as well as a copy opened up to show how it looks on the inside, though readers who picked up the 3 Story: Secret Files of the Giant Man one-shot will already know. I originally took this photo to send to Matt and his agent, but it made sense to show here as well.

I’m biased, but it’s a hell of a first issue, with a great main character, tons of wacky ideas, great design and bonuses, and a killer final caption that lets readers know this series is different even from anything else out there.

It was a half day, so not surprisingly I got about half a normal day’s worth of stuff done. One thing was taking a crack at my first MIND MGMT letters column. I convinced Matt to do the one for issue #1 so he could write up his mission statement for the series, but from here on its me. Tougher than others I’ve had to do, both because those had established tones (though I slowly adapted them to fit me better) and because Matt is including extra stories on the inside front and inside back covers, meaning that there is only half a page for the letters column. I don’t know about you, but even though I like letters columns, I’d happily trade half of one for extra comics, but it does mean fitting everything into 500 words. Eventually came up with a hello that I like, fit in one of the advance letters Matt solicited, and found room for a shout-out to the upcoming conclusion of Jeff Lemire’s Sweet Tooth.

Also of MIND MGMT note this week is the second of our free promo stories, coming out weekly until the first issue debuts. And that’s it for today. Not a whole lot else went on, and sickness has me falling behind. But, seriously, free MIND MGMT—what else could one want?

Next:  That time I went to the Tezuka museum.

Why’m I doing this again?

A Life Lived in Comics Day 19: Self-Promotion 5/2

It’s funny. I feel like I subscribe to a lot of stapled comics, yet a week like this week where there’s only one waiting for me at the store is pretty common. When the Wednesday crowd made the crossing from Dark Horse to the Milwaukie Things From Another World, I only came back with Jeff Lemire’s latest issue of  Sweet Tooth. Good timing; I just caught up on the previous two issues last night, but I do always wish more excited me on a week to week basis.

Probably there are some good recent indies and minis, which I’ll check out on Saturday when I hit Floating World for Free Comic Book Day. There are several good events around town, but Floating World is my favorite FCBD spot because you can try all of the comics instead of having a limit of three or five or whatever, plus there are often small press and local FCBD books not found anywhere else in town. I don’t think I’m up for a repeat of last year, with eight posts in one day and visits to three stores, so Floating World it is.

Today was exciting for me, though, as Dark Horse released both Andi Watson’s Skeleton Key Color Special in print and digital and the first of Matt Kindt’s MIND MGMT Secret Files 8-pagers as a digital exclusive. Totally Matt’s idea, the Secret Files shorts are a weekly series of free stories meant to whet appetites for the first issue of the MIND MGMT ongoing series debuting on the 23rd. It’s something Matt had been talking about since I was first assigned to edit the book, but it wasn’t a certainty for a while, since like so many companies, Dark Horse was still working out the shape of its digital program.

By the time we had the green light, the timeline had tightened. I had worked out a schedule for the first six issues, and to make the three shorts work, we had to essentially drop a seventh issue into the middle of that schedule. I would never have attempted this with almost any artist out there, but Matt immediately sent a few ideas, I gave some feedback on them, and he sent a few more. One thing Matt Kindt readers know is that he is never short of ideas.

Between us we worked out what order the three shorts we’d picked should be in and he started sending scripts. The first gives a taste of MIND MGMT’s world through the eyes of an enemy spy, the second shows journalist Meru in action and delves into her previous book, and the last reveals where the agency came from. Our work method for these was pretty much as I described back in Day 11, except that for speed Matt went straight from the edited scripts to finished art and then I gave notes on that, and somehow he not only made the insane schedule I had to set for him, but he beat it, turning in the final, corrected version of the third short a day early. I actually ended up approving the digital version of the third story today, the same day that the first one was posted to the digital store.

The whole thing’s exciting for a lot of reasons, but one is that I think it’s a Dark Horse first. We’ve done some digital series before, like the Dragon Age and Prototype II game tie-ins that I assisted on, and we’ve done free advance previews of comics on the digital store, but I think this is the first time that we’ve created free, original content for the store to lead up to a new release. Again, it’s Matt’s idea, and it’s only because of his speed and talent that it was possible, but I hope my enthusiasm for the concept and continuing to bug all the right people until it was okayed helped make the difference.

I’m a big proponent of using free material to sell paid material, and am currently tasked with an initiative to make a few more DH books free online, at least for a while. I realize that it’s far from a settled question, but I believe that the paradigm of the Internet is that how much you sell is based on how much of a destination you are, and free content is the best way to become a destination. It’s no coincidence that digital comics stores like Comixology are constantly working to increase the amount of free material they offer.

Chris Anderson’s book Free: The Future of a Radical Price makes the case that the future of selling things is in the increasingly common Internet model of free services that charge a premium for the very top features, and while the vast majority of users won’t pay, the cost of keeping them on will be small enough that it’s well worth it to attract the smaller number of uses who do. This model is more about services than goods, but the book also includes fascinating case studies of how real profits have been made on the releases of free books, CDs, etc. It’s not all that different from Free Comic Book Day. Get me in the door with some free stuff, and I’ll almost certainly drop some money on minicomics and such.

Speaking of free, I did try out Mark Waid and Peter Krause’s Insufferable #1 today, so that’s kind of a Wednesday comic. It went live yesterday, but thrillbent.com was undergoing some scheduled downtime when I went to look at it, so I had to wait until today. Overall, I was more impressed by this than Marvel’s Nova comic that I tried out at work on an office iPad last week. Not counting the fact that really nothing happens in that comic, this one felt more assured and less like it was working hard to justify its digitalness by loading each screen with effects.

The Marvel comic has no sound or motion, but it uses fades and changing panels on every screen, whereas Insufferable uses them more sparingly, making them more effective. The first transition, in which a villain recording himself on video appears from static, is cute, but a later sequence in which panels appear and disappear one at a time to slow a moment down to microseconds is very effective. It culminates in a choice I’ve not seen before in a digital comic, hitting a point where there are two panels and a click to continue simply removes one of them, making no change to the other and adding nothing new. It’s one of the smarter uses of digital comics pacing that I’ve seen, narrowing focus for pacing and effect when the general mode is for each successive click to expand what we’re seeing.

MIND MGMT Secret Files isn’t like that. As you read it, you’ll notice that it’s suspiciously regular-comic shaped, because while there isn’t yet an exact plan for where these stories will end up, it’s a good bet they’ll see print sooner or later. As exciting as digital is, and I’ve found it in some ways more pleasant than reading stapled comics, the money is currently still in selling print comics. Waid and the Thrillbent team are currently supporting the effort out of their own pockets, though I wish them the best of luck in picking up advertising and eventually selling digital comics for money. I enjoyed Insufferable #1, and at the right price point I’ll be there for what they’ve got in store next.

The first prequel story has already gotten some great buzz, so May 23 is even more exciting!

On the flip side of my continuing (though admittedly light this week) acquisition of comics, I’m always looking to get rid of some, and I packed up my first shipment of random comics in response to a letter, set to go in the mail tomorrow. My offer still stands: want a dozen or so pieces of randomness? Write me.

Tomorrow: The ritual of First Thursday.

Why’m I doing this, again?

A Life Lived in Comics Day 14: The Honest to God Day in the Life

The title refers to the fact that I actually sort of kept minutes and made a proper day-in-the-life post, not that everything in it is honest: times are approximate, and I had to leave out a few proprietary things here and there. Also, everything took a tiny bit longer than normal, as I stopped for a minute or two throughout the day to write everything down.

But that said:

7:30: Wake up. Quick check of comics news sites and work e-mail.

8:15: Bus from Portland to Milwaukie. On the trip, read Shonen Jump Alpha on iPad. I’m a few weeks behind.

8:45: Clock in.

8:46–9: E-mail to an artist about a Tarzan intro. Notes on a script draft for a Creepy one-pager.

9–10:30: Notes to Matt Kindt on a MIND MGMT story and some promo stuff for the DH blog and wrote to Marketing about a press release for a special MIND MGMT project being announced next week, sent in the Brothers of the Spear Archive vol. 2 solicitation copy (written yesterday, waited for it to be assigned an ISBN), notes to Nate Piekos on lettering for an Eerie story, approved Creepy 1-pager scripts, selected preview pages for Archie Archives vol. 6. These sort of happened all at once.

10:30–10:45: Printing and stuff.

10:45-11:45: Eerie lettering approved, and a workorder sent up to get it merged with the lineart and a set of proofs output. Final pass on Doug Moench’s script for Creepy #9 and balloon placements on the inked line art.

Balloon placements are one of my favorite assistant editor tasks, as they’re essentially a puzzle. Ideally, lettering goes unnoticed, aiding in a smooth read, which requires taking into account reading order, the physical space within panels, and creating a trail that leads the eye across the page.

Using copies of the line art (printed when working with Diana, Scott or Sierra, digitally when working with Dave) and the script, you start by numbering all dialogue, captions, and sound effects while giving the script a final proofread. Once everything is numbered, you draw the balloons, captions, etc., onto the art, matching the numbers in them to those in the script.

If everything has gone well in the drawing, and in this case it did, there’s a logical best place for each balloon and everything fits. Common artist mistakes are things like not leaving negative space to fit balloons or placing the character who speaks first on the right. Since we read left-to-right, the first balloon and therefore the first character, should be on the left. As you read comics, you’ll sometimes notice a character on the right speaking first and some awkward placements and long tails necessary to make it read right.

The rules vary from editor to editor. Some like to anchor balloons to panel borders, others hate to do so. Some care if balloons fall into the eyeline of characters, others aren’t concerned by it. Whether balloons can overlap panels or not is a matter of taste as well.

For this story, I did a small amount of reordering things; nothing major, just swapping the order of a balloon and a caption from the same panel in a few places, splitting one caption into two in one instance. Kelley left plenty of space, though the pages are quite full, as Doug is pastiching H.P. Lovecraft’s prose throughout this story, and that can necessitate a certain wordiness.

Over time it becomes pretty second nature. I used to do everything in pencil and redo pages several times. Now it’s straight to ink. For the most part this story went smoothly, though I had to break out the whiteout one time when I accidentally made some balloons into captions and had to restart one page when I lost count of panels. Took a bit longer than the usual 10-page story because of the amount of lettering to do, but if you’ve read Creepy #8, you know Doug’s using those words well.

In Europe it’s standard for artists to do their own placements, and many artists indicate rough placements in their layouts. This helps avoid problems later, but as I enjoy doing the placements, I’m perfectly happy to get to play the puzzle over art as good as Kelley Jones’s.

11:45-11:50: Solicitation cover for Brothers of the Spear comes down, and I make notes, asking for another option on one of the two pieces of art used.

11:50-12: More printing and moving paper around.

12-1: Lunch outside. It’s sunny for a change. There are only about three lunch options in Milwaukie for those of us without cars, but a new one has finally arrived: a food cart called the Steak Shack, which likely pays for itself on Dark Horse staff members’ lunches alone.

1-1:30: Recovering/making a schedule for next week.

1:30-2: Finalizing Conan v12 HC.

2-2:15: A break followed by a brief warehouse visit. There is a box of freebies, mostly damaged comics that aren’t saleable, which is invaluable for filling in stray issues needed for reference. While there, I also grab my comps out my box. I have new issues of Conan the Barbarian and Creepy, the 3 Story one-shot, and the variant cover I helped editor Philip Simon arrange for Reset #1 (the artists of the three Dark Horse Originals series launching in April, May and June created variant covers for each other’s #1s).

2:15-3: Corresponding with a future Creepy writer in between working on solicitation copy for Tarzan: The Russ Manning Years.

3-4: Tracking down some production deadlines for the Brothers of the Spear interiors and working with Art Director on refining the volume 2 cover. Since Brothers of the Spear ran as a backup in Tarzan, there are no original covers for us to use. Volume 1 has a great design by Kat Larsen using two pieces of interior art on the top and bottom halves of the cover, one with art from Russ Manning and one from Jesse Marsh. Volume 2 is entirely Manning art, but we’re keeping the dual images for consistency. It’s proven a little difficult because, while the Manning art is lovely, it’s tough to find panels the right shape that feature both brothers in the foreground and captures them doing something interesting. We found a few good options, but this time we may use the two-image motif to show one brother on the top half and the other on the bottom half. Should get more options soon, then we’ll see.

4-4:30: Catching up on e-mail. Eisner campaign business. Sending out art for a couple projects to licensors.

4:30-5:15: A joint Editorial/Marketing initiative comes up. Impromptu meetings and e-mails. Otherwise I’d have been getting notes on MIND MGMT #3 finished art and lettering to Matt Kindt. Better get that to him over the weekend.

5:16-5:45: Carpool home.

6:50: Laurelhurst theater to see Wanderlust and have a beer (like many theaters in Portland, the Laurelhurst shows cheap second-run movies and serves food and booze).

8:30: Get out of the movie, which was weightless but fun. Internal debate over whether I want to try to catch the end of the DH-sponsored pre-Stumptown Drink and Draw with Peter Bagge at Bridge City Comics. Ultimately decide to go, but a combination of buses means I don’t get there until…

9:30-11: It’s starting the slow process of winding down, officially ending at 10. I miss Peter Bagge, who I’ll hopefully get to say hello to later in the weekend, but do chat with a few folks from work while drinking free Ninkasi beer. I also get my first quick visits with a few of the people I mainly see at shows, like the lovely Liz Conley, now a member of Couscous Collective, but still the gawky 13-year-old I went to high school with in some portion of the back of my brain.

As always, the Friday night party is a nice transition into Stumptown proper, and I meet a few new folks, such as Jackie Estrada of the Eisner Award committee, and get a little time with people I haven’t seen in a while, like Shawna Gore, one of the organizers of the party and of the fest. Mostly it’s comics talk with everybody, though my question, “So, what did you draw?” gets some cool answers, like DH senior editor Randy Stradley’s dinosaurs and a peek into the weird brain of DH assistant editor Jim Gibbons.

11-11:30 Help cleanup a bit while waiting for my ride and debriefing with party organizers.

11:30: Ride home from Kaebel Hashitani and Merrick Monroe of Sequential Art Gallery.

12: Attempt to wind down with some TV. Fall asleep almost immediately.

---

Saturday: Stumptown, naturally.

Why’m I doing this, again?

A Life Lived in Comics Day 11: How We Do it

Boilerplate

Still haven’t really gotten in the habit of noting for the blog what I do and when. Mostly I reconstruct my days from the email I sent and received. It’s a very e-mail-based job.

A few things: sent out some lettering for Eerie #1, approved the revised lettering for Conan the Barbarian #5, received a few blurbs for the back cover of Bucko, gave direction for the cover designs of Brothers of the Spear vol. 2 and Tarzan: The Russ Manning Years vol. 1, sent a script for Creepy #10 on to the licensor with notes, reviewed the iPhone version of 300, and did onscreens for Usagi Yojimbo Book 26: Fox Hunt. Jeff Parker stopped into the office for a meeting with another editor about an upcoming project, and we chatted a bit about his intro for Archie Archives vol. 7, Steve Lieber’s hilarious Bucko foreword, and other comics goings on.

I also wrote the letter column for Conan the Barbarian #5, a task I still haven’t entirely gotten used to, just because for all the years I read comics with letter columns they seemed like one of those things that happen by themselves. I’m ready to accept that I am a naive simpleton, but it often doesn’t occur to me until I am actually called upon to perform a task that it’s not something that happens automatically. The blurbs on the front flap of a book? Just happens. The incidental text on legal pages and backlists? Magic. The letter column is a particularly odd one because they often identify who exactly is responding to the letters, so in theory I knew that people wrote them and that there was a method to them, and yet faced with my first one I didn’t have a clue where to start.

I’m hardly an old hand at it now, but I’ve been writing the Conan letter columns for most of a year now, since Dave and I took over in July 2011. I’ve put together columns for other editors and creators who answer the letters, but Conan’s been my first book responding to letters myself every month. As of this month, assistant editor Shantel assembles the letters for me and does a preliminary pass on cleaning them up for spelling and grammar, so I get to focus on answering questions, making with the hype, and coming up with bad jokes. It’s fun to think about the books I work on from the reader point of view, and I’ve enjoyed having a discourse on subjects like how different art styles fit with certain characters and how the needs of different media shape the way adaptations are written. I’m still not entirely comfortable with my signature appearing at the end, as though I’m claiming the comic for myself, but it’s Dark Horse’s standard practice, and I’ve gotten used to it.

MIND MGMT Becomes Real

Today’s greatest sense of accomplishment came from the email list of which books had gone to the printer, which included Matt Kindt’s MIND MGMT #1. Finding a home at Dark Horse in part because of the success of Matt’s 3 Story, MIND MGMT was originally to be edited by Diana Schutz, but I ended up taking it over to ease her workload, which is currently dominated by the massive undertaking that is the Manara Library and some other prestige projects.

Matt and I find ourselves kindred spirits in this project, as it’s for both of us our first go at making a monthly ongoing series. Matt is of course well established as a graphic novelist, between 2 Sisters, Super Spy, 3 Story, and Revolver, but he’s never had a series of stapled comics before. It’s my first series as well, though that’s more to do with inexperience than success elsewhere.

At the stage where I came in, MIND MGMT existed as a series outline, detailing the overarching storyline of the entire cycle. Shortly after I familiarized myself with it, thumbnails came in for the first six issues, along with a breakdown of all the dialogue. Like many writer/artists, Matt develops the visual and verbal parts of the story side by side, so rather than just a script with descriptions of the action, we have the even better guide of seeing how everything fits. I’ve redacted the script ever so slightly for spoilers.

Before long, Matt had turned in the pencils for all six issues. Since he does everything himself—he’s even doing most of the design work on the book itself, including creating the logo, establishing the look of the copyright page and letter column, and building fake ads for the back of each issue, which contain a secret code when the first six are lined up—he’s able to develop the words and pictures together all the way through, so the pencils arrive with lettering created in InDesign. This page worked great the way he wrote it, so there aren’t many changes, and they’re Matt’s. The way the story evolved requires the Amnesia Flight to take place two years ago rather than in the present, and Matt’s spread out the passengers’ dialogue from panel 4 onto three other panels, but looking over the script again, maybe that was always his intent.

I gave Matt a set of notes on the penciled pages, but apparently I didn’t have many for this page. Still, Matt continues refining, as you’ll notice if you look at panels 4 through 8, where he’s reversed the positions of the couple in the seats, the woman now on the left and the man on the right. He’s also added the aged-paper texture and MIND MGMT Field Guide text that are two of the book’s visual motifs. The caption in panel 1 has changed color because of my concern that the time/date captions looked the same as Meru’s narration captions, but otherwise you are looking purely at Matt’s process. The work that Matt and I have done together has largely concerned the pacing of the first arc as a whole and how he’ll set up for the second arc, but for the most part MIND MGMT is Matt Kindt getting to be Matt Kindt.

Launching an ongoing series in the current market is no sure thing, and whether we go the distance will be determined pretty quickly by sales. Early numbers are encouraging. It’s a $3.99 book, but it’s content from cover to cover, and while it’s difficult for me to be unbiased, I think it’s a very good book, one which has only gotten better as Matt has refined his story. The extras are a lot of fun, and really add to the feeling of value, but in the end it comes down to the writing and the artwork, and Matt’s hit new levels with both. At least once an issue a great detail in the story makes me smile and a finished page makes me stare. Whenever I share a cover around the office, people are blown away. MIND MGMT is Matt’s accomplishment, not mine, but I can’t think of another series I’d be more honored to have be my first as editor.

If you want more MIND MGMT right now, pick up Matt’s excellent 3 Story: Secret Files of the Giant Man one-shot, which features a preview, or head over the Dark Horse Digital store for the free Dark Horse Originals 2012 sampler. Yes, that was hype. Whatever. I love this book.

And with honor, we lead directly into . . .

Shame Department

Somehow I have never really googled myself before. You’d think a self-obsessed guy like me would have by now, but somehow it’s never occurred to me. Sure, I’ve checked up on specific things I was involved with, and I’ve had a morbid fascination with the exploits of Irish gangster Brian Brendan “The Milkman” Wright, but I’ve honestly never made a serious search into “what does the Internet say about nascent comics professional Brendan Wright?” A surprising amount, as it turns out. Which maybe just speaks to my ignorance of how many comics sites there are and how thorough they are in cataloguing every scrap of trivia.

This came about because I searched for reviews of Archie Archives vol. 5, which came out last week. I’m always on on the lookout for reviews, because they yield blurbs that can be used in future Previews copy or back covers (see, it doesn’t happen automatically). The very first result that came up when I searched “archie archives 5 review” was a very favorable advance review on fanboycomics.net that happened to quote my introduction, which I confess piqued my curiosity. Where else did I come up out there?

Because of the aforementioned Brian Brendan Wright and a player for the Dallas Mavericks I searched for “brendan wright comics.” Most of the first results were either entries from the Wright Opinion or else links to it. Many were reviews or profiles of comics I’ve worked on, so weirdly detailed in their listings that they include the assistant editor. God bless comics people, but they are an obsessively detail-oriented bunch. I am on the list of editors for Creepy’s wikipedia page after only two issues, in a publishing history that goes back to 1964. I can only imagine what a footprint actually accomplished people must have left.

One nice thing was to see interviews with creators I’ve worked with who mention the editorial staff on their books. I’m still at a point where my contributions to most of the books I’ve worked on were pretty impersonal; replace me with someone else and the results would have been pretty much the same. Most fittingly, Patrick Reynolds (super nice guy the two times I’ve met him and a very, very good artist) jokes to ComicsAlliance about how many people he had to include on e-mails for Serenity: Float Out, an issue in which I was the fourth member of the editorial staff. But in keeping with the last subject, there’s also a good interview with Matt about MIND MGMT. Get excited!

Also, it’s possible I’ve married a woman named Julie Law?

In a bit: I should be over Before Watchmen by now. I’m sure they published it more to get people talking this much than to really add more evergreens to their backlist. And yet . . .

Why’m I doing this, again?

A Life Lived in Comics Day 10: The iPad, and All That It Implies

As I feared, having the ability to instantly buy and read a ridiculous number of comics from the lazy convenience of my chair has not exactly curtailed the impulse buying habit. But Saturday was my first experience rebuying something digitally that I already own in print, and it was kind of . . . awesome.

A longtime fan of Joe Casey’s weirder superhero comics like Automatic Kafka, The Intimates and Gødland, last year I picked up his new series Butcher Baker the Righteous Maker, with its swaggering tone, backmatter that I find hard not to read as a parody of Matt Fraction’s Casanova text pieces, and Mike Huddleston’s American-flag-rock-candy colors. I was a little surprised to find myself not engaging with it—perhaps I just wasn’t feeling much swagger myself at the time, I dunno—but I dropped off after the third issue.

A year later, I’m lying in bed, reading Tarzan of the Apes on the Kindle app, as I figure with all the Tarzan material I’ve put into Dark Horse’s costing process, it’s time to actually read the original (downloading public domain books rather than buying them or getting them from the library is an enormous perk of owning a tablet). Taking a break from the research, I open up the Comixology app to find that they’re running a 4/20 sale on Casey, Jim Mahfood, and Ziggy Marley’s Marijuanaman, and that several of Casey’s other Image books are on sale as well, including Butcher Baker. I’ve never entirely trusted my original reaction to the series, so I decide that now is the moment to try again. Rather than get out of bed and retrieve the comics from the “for eBay” longbox, I download the free issue #1 without moving an inch.

(That’s right; technology is now at the point where it is easier and faster to download a brand new copy of a comic than walk across the room and pick up the one I already have. Even before buying an iPad I had pretty much stopped reading my print Dark Horse comps once our comics went day-and-date digital. Not even counting the fact that my employee account lets me read most DH books before they’re released and in some cases even printed—way better than waiting for comps, which sometimes come weeks after release—if I’m already in my chair with my laptop, why go all the way to the other room, where I may have to actually look around under other comics for them or even—gasp—have to get them out of boxes?)

I wasn’t entirely sure I was sold after issue #1, but damn if #2 wasn’t only 99¢! I bought #2–#4 and read them in a go, finding that the story works much better that way. Convinced, I purchased the remaining issues as well, having spent a total of $5.94 on seven comics.