Working in Comics

In light of recent events, I feel the need to make note of this. Sequential art is my main field of study, the combination of storytelling through text and imagery. I make my living through both literary and visual mediums. I have worked as a concept artist, writer and artist on a bunch of projects now. I've delegated a large amount of my free time to my personal work which I hope to have go live soon. Of course, I'm in no way trying to toot my own horn here, I live in the shadows of the professionals I idolize. I'm finishing up with college within a year, and from there on all of my time will be put towards work.

A big thing we learn in school, and one of the most important things you can probably be taught in an art school, is professionalism and the business mindset. After all, we are working in this entertainment industry, we have to be able to put on a serious face once in a while. It costs money to create artwork, on both ends of the spectrum. As artists, we need to purchase our supplies, our tablets, our upgrades for Photoshop or Painter. We need these things to do the work that is expected of us, and usually these funds come out of our pockets before any work is even done. We make large investments before seeing any profit at all.

There's a weird stigma around the internet that seems to think artists shouldn't be paid. Or, at least, not paid directly. The commercial art industry works a bit differently from the fine art one. Our work is meant to push products, be it a story we want people to read, a game we want people to play, a film we want people to see, et cetera. The "starving artist" is a folk tale; the truth of the matter is that there are successful artists and unsuccessful ones. Many artists choose to leave their work as just a hobby, prematurely knowing they can't make their entire living off of their work, or maybe they can but just don't want to, and don't have the business mindset required to do so. For whatever reason, the success stories of artists are seldom sung, and we only hear a few, if any. But this is a real career. If a person gets paid $10 an hour to greet people entering Walmart, why should the creator of the entertainment we seek be paid less?

Of course, with the disparity of working times from artist to artist, not to mention the quality differences, an hourly wage is usually unheard of (sans in-house careers). One of my professors broke down the time necessary to create one page of comics, from the pre-production phase to the finished inks on Bristol. The total time was 16 hours. That sure is a lot of time, and plenty of people find ways to cut that down to mere hours, but the time to create a page of comics is never to be shortsighted. To create top-quality work, it surely should be taking much of a day. Mainstream manga artists work intensively as well, but have the advantage of assistants to do clean-up work, environments, rendering, black placement, et cetera. In Shonen Jump, the artist doesn't do the lettering at all, either-- it's done within the publication's department(as opposed to American comics, where lettering is another part of the pipeline before going to print). But even with the large group effort that goes on in the Japanese comic industry, twenty pages a week is an incredible workload. Finishing three pages a day consistently to a professional quality would leave little time to sleep, or do anything else besides draw. I'm personally lucky if I can finish a single page in a day, let alone an illustration.

Personally, I'd love to work on every project I could, if I could find the time to do it all. My main concern with work I do for others is that I want it to be the best quality work I can put out-- I'm not a fan of rush jobs. If I was to pay an artist to do work for me, I wouldn't want it to be something slapped together under pressure just to get it done. An hourly wage for the work I do probably wouldn't be fair for either end; sometimes I'm really fast, and the work is cathartic. Other times, I struggle with the work at hand, and it takes much longer than anticipated. This is especially true with comic pages, where you're not just illustrating one large image, but generally five to seven per page. Sometimes more, sometimes less, but overall it's a lot more work than singular illustrations, if you put that same effort into it.

I hope this isn't off-putting to many of you. I've gotten many notes here and even emails regarding interest in me working one comics for people, and often for free, the promise of publication being the payment, if anything. When I wasn't dependent on my work for my living needs, these wouldn't be out of the question. But as it is, I cannot illustrate your comic for free. At the moment I also have a bit of work on my plate, alongside school. Being a working artist is a hard job, it's all about networking and keeping to strict deadlines on your own record. Choosing this field is probably one of the riskiest decisions I've made with my life, and it's definitely the largest. To all my friends making the grind every day, I respect you all and wish you all the best of luck. I am grinding each day alongside you guys!