The View from the Cheap Seats

by Neil Gaiman

  I told him his audience writing comics was much larger than he would have, barring some exceptional circumstances, for a first novel in prose. He took this as an attack on his as-yet-unproven abilities as a writer of prose, which it wasn’t meant to be. It was simply a flat statement that in those days—and even in these dark days—any fairly healthy comic sells in numbers that most prose authors would be very happy to get.

  For me, though, comics are much more interesting than prose, at least as a creator. One has greater control of how the information is received in comics than you do in prose—whether it’s keeping control of the reader’s eye to stop them skipping ahead, or simply making sure that they see the same character in their heads that you do in yours.

  And comics have the joy that you never see in prose: the joy of being able to enjoy your own stuff. I can’t enjoy a prose story I wrote, but I can enjoy what Dave McKean or Charles Vess or Jon Muth or P. Craig Russell does to one of my stories.

  Prose has its advantages. You can give it to relatives without worrying about hearing “Oh . . . I don’t . . . read comics . . . dear.” You can buy it in airport bookstores. Book companies are more prone to advertise outside the comics world than comics publishers are. But for anyone who’s doing this because they want to collaborate, comics are more fun.

  Radio—I love radio drama. For a writer it’s strangely close to comics: in one medium you’re telling a story with pictures, in the other you’re writing for everything but pictures. It’s close to your vision, it’s cheap, it’s easy, there isn’t any radio drama in America and the only way I could afford to do it regularly in England is by sending my children out to dance for pennies on the streets. It’s also not a medium I particularly recommend for artists who don’t write.

  So those are my words of wisdom on the media outside comics.

  Now for my decades of wisdom on the world inside comics.

  So here, in no particular order, are the things I’ve learned.

  1. Big is not necessarily bad. Small is not necessarily good.

  Comics creators are an individualistic, unique and bolshy lot. A punch line of a comic I wrote once was “Try getting a thousand cats to agree on anything at the same time,” and cats are pushovers compared to comics creators. They do not organize, do not trust organizations. It’s a wonder as many of you are here, as are here. Certainly every shade of opinion, politics and belief is represented.

  It used to be—it may still be—an item of belief in comics that all organizations are inherently dodgy. And that where companies are concerned, smaller is inherently better. Independence, however that’s defined, is vital.

  And if you’re a Dave Sim or a Jeff Smith, your own publisher and a fine artist and writer, with complete control over your own destiny, then you have independence, or as much independence as the market will allow you.

  Corporations are huge, slow, stupid lumbering things with brains in their tails. This may be true, but they do appear capable of learning, and changing.

  You are no more likely to get screwed over by a huge company than you are by a small one. I’m not saying you won’t get screwed over. I’m saying that there is no moral imperative towards smaller companies not screwing you.

  This really is something it took me ages to learn. I kept doing projects or books for small, more independent companies because it seemed like the right thing to do, and because I was convinced that, in my case, DC Comics was a monolithic and ultimately evil organization that was just waiting for me to lower my guard before they screwed me like they screwed Siegel and Shuster.

  It didn’t happen. DC were easily the most amenable to reason, accessible, and financially reliable of all the publishers I’ve dealt with. Which is not to say there was not and sometimes still isn’t a great deal of frustration in dealing with some of the departments at DC. But it is to say that their royalty statements arrive on time, are comprehensible, and if one notices something bizarre, one is encouraged to phone the accounting department, who will either explain to you what they’re doing, or apologize for having messed up and fix it.

  For this, one can forgive many things.

  In retrospect my one regret with Eclipse was that I didn’t audit their accounts years before they went under. Their figures made no sense, and they would only send out royalties if threatened. On some level I knew that there had to be fraud of some kind going on, but Eclipse was only caught when Toren Smith moved his comics from Eclipse to Dark Horse, and his royalties shot up, despite the fact the deal was the same and the sales were constant.

  I honestly do not believe there is any moral superiority to a large corporation or to one man working out of his kitchen. What matters is answerability, and honesty, and, above all, competence.

  2. Learn how to say no.

  This is still the one I have the hardest time with. I think it’s part of the freelance mentality: we are so used to hustling, to going out and desperately peddling our skills, hoping that someone will be impressed enough by them or moved to raw pity enough by our plight to give us work, that we learn to say yes to everything.

  I remember, as a starving freelance writer, in the early eighties, I would blithely proclaim competence in anything, if there was a check attached. Which meant I often found myself utterly out of my depth, interviewing the head of NASA or, for one very odd week, editing Fitness magazine—I don’t remember, but I imagine that the phone call for that would have gone something along the lines of:

  “Neil, can you edit a magazine?”

  “Can I edit a magazine?”

  “Silly question. Well, do you know anything about Fitness?”

  “Do I know about Fitness?” (Sort of implication there that anything I didn’t know about gyms and leotards and suchlike probably wasn’t worth knowing. Note the way I didn’t say, “Well, I went into the gym a couple of times when I was at school. And I saw Pumping Iron II: The Women.” This was because I was a hungry freelance writer, and I said yes a lot.)

  As a comics professional, it’s too easy to say yes.

  Most of the things I’ve done that in retrospect were astonishingly stupid ideas (as, often, my friends were ready to point out immediately) I did because someone asked me to do something, and, hell, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

  Next thing you know there are unreadable, even offensive comics with your name on them that you never wrote in the world. Or whatever.

  I learned early on that most of the people at the top of their professions—and I’m not talking about comics here, I’m talking about everything—were the nicest people, easy to deal with, and with little side to them. And I also learned that the people who were most insistent on having VIP status, on making a loud noise about everything—the kind of people who would actually say things like “Do you know who I am?”—were the second-division talents, the ones who hadn’t made it, the ones who never would.

  It took me longer to learn that you can say no. And it’s an easy thing to say. It helps define your boundaries.

  3. Get it in writing. Or put it in writing.

  This is important. And those few times I haven’t put something in writing, I’ve regretted it. Right now I’m locked in a fairly heated and as yet unresolved situation with one publisher about payments for characters, for toys, spin-off comics, and other uses of a bunch of characters I made up for this publisher. And part of our dispute is over verbal agreements made on the phone four years ago. If we’d put it in writing then—I’m not even talking about contracts, I’m talking about my writing down what was said and faxing him a copy with a “just to confirm this was what we said”—life would be easier now.

  4. Everything is negotiable.

  If someone sends you a contract, whether you are dealing with it yourself or getting someone else—an attorney or agent or someone—to vet your contracts, remember that absolutely everything is negotiable. In the early days I used to think that contracts were a take-it-or-leave-it proposition. And they aren’t.

 
And, by the same token, contracts are renegotiable, something that I first discovered after the first year of Sandman. I wanted a creator credit and a creator share of the character, which, according to DC’s original “take it or leave it” contract, was entirely theirs. And I wrote a long, sensible, perfectly friendly letter to Paul Levitz explaining why this was a good idea, demonstrating that the Sandman character that I’d created was no more the Simon and Kirby Sandman than it was the Lee and Ditko Sandman. And, after some to-ing and fro-ing, a new contract was issued, giving me a share of the character.

  One reason I did it this way was that I’d observed over the previous few years that when people gave DC Comics ultimata, whether DC were right or wrong, they would become inflexible. Corporate history perhaps: Siegel and Shuster wanted the rights to Superman back, and were shafted, and left with only the rights to Superboy. They went back for another legal go-around, and lost even that. Meanwhile Bob Kane was “taken care of.”

  Do not be afraid to negotiate. And if you have people whose job it is to negotiate on your behalf, don’t be afraid to use them. Nor to accept input. You are not looking a gift horse in the mouth, nor is the contract going to go away because you got someone to look it over.

  This is speaking as someone who has been, from time to time, screwed over by overlooked clauses in otherwise pretty good contracts, and who has, from time to time, been astonished by what, in a contract, the other party let slide.

  5. Trust your obsessions.

  I remember Alan Moore in the late 1980s telling me about a documentary he’d seen on TV about Jack the Ripper. And then, over the course of the next few months, telling me about Jack the Ripper books he’d read. By the point where he was asking me to go and find rare and forgotten biographies of possible Ripper suspects at the British Museum, I thought it quite possible that a Jack the Ripper comic would be in the offing. From Hell didn’t start with Alan going, “I wonder what I’ll write about today.” It started as an obsession.

  Trust your obsessions. This is one I learned more or less accidentally.

  People sometimes ask whether the research or the idea for the story comes first for me. And I tell them, normally the first thing that turns up is the obsession: for example, all of a sudden I notice that I’m reading nothing but English seventeenth-century metaphysical verse. And I know it’ll show up somewhere—whether I’ll name a character after one of those poets, or use that time period, or use the poetry, I have no idea. But I know one day it’ll be there waiting for me.

  You don’t always use your obsessions. Sometimes you stick them onto the compost heap in the back of your head, where they rot down, and attach to other things, and get half-forgotten, and will, one day, turn into something completely usable.

  Go where your obsessions take you. Write the things you must. Draw the things you must.

  Your obsessions may not always take you to commercial places, or apparently commercial places. But trust them.

  A footnote to this, for writers:

  When I was working with new artists on Sandman the first question I would ask was “What kind of stuff do you want to draw?” The second was often “What don’t you like to draw?” I found both of these pieces of information astonishingly useful, and often very surprising.

  Play to an artist’s strengths; it makes you look good. Play to your own strengths if you’re an artist—but don’t relax into shtick or into the dozen things that you do.

  6. Don’t stop learning.

  It’s too easy to achieve a level of competence in your field, whatever it is, and to stop there.

  Competence is one thing, but writers and artists are like sharks: when we stop moving we die. (I got that piece of information from reading Jaws at a young age. I have no idea whether it’s true that sharks die when they stop, or go into reverse, but I now believe it utterly, just as I know that double-bass music signals a shark attack.)

  I tend to think of technique as the kind of gardening tools one keeps in the potting shed (an English expression that has no equivalent that I know of) at the bottom of the garden, grabbing a garden fork, or a hoe, or one of those metal things you find hanging from a hook that the previous owner left behind and no one ever quite knows what to do with.

  At Will Eisner’s eightieth-birthday bash several months ago, in Florida, I was most impressed by some lithographs Will had done recently, because these were the first lithographs he’d done since art college, over sixty years earlier, and he thought it was a technique he should master.

  You never know what tool you’ll need. Every now and then I’ll set myself writing exercises—types of formal verse, or styles from other times and other places. Sometimes I surprise myself, and wind up with something wonderful. Sometimes I wind up with something that leaves me hoping I don’t die before I get a chance to clean out that directory, because if it were published posthumously, it’d kill me. But either way I have, literally, learned something.

  As an artist, study other artists to see what they do, then look at life and see how it does something.

  As a writer, read other writers, good writers, even writers who don’t write the kind of stuff you like, and see how they do what they do. And then forget about fiction, and forget about comics, and read everything else. Learn.

  7. Be you. Don’t try to be someone else more commercial. Don’t try to be that other guy.

  This is about art. It may be about commerce too, but for all our description of ourselves as an industry, we’re also an art form. We may have come into the field because of talent, but we’re also here because we’re artists. We are creators. When we begin, separately or together, there’s a blank piece of paper. When we are done, we are giving people dreams and magic and journeys into minds and lives that they have never lived. And we must not forget that.

  I don’t want to sound like an inspirational speaker here. “Be you. Be the best you that you can be.” But this is really important. It’s something that we mostly lose track of when we start, because when we start in comics we’re kids, and we have no idea who we are or what our voices are, as artists or as writers.

  Young artists want to be Rob Liefeld, or Bernie Wrightson, or Frank Miller, just as young writers want to be Alan Moore, or Chris Claremont, or, well, Frank Miller. You’ve seen their portfolios. You’ve read the scripts.

  We all swipe when we start. We trace, we copy, we emulate. But the most important thing is to get to the place where you’re telling your own stories, painting your own pictures, doing the stuff that no one else could have done but you.

  Dave McKean, when he was much younger, as a recent art school graduate, took his portfolio to New York, and showed it to the head of an advertising agency. The guy looked at one of Dave’s paintings—“That’s a really good Bob Peak,” he said. “But why would I want to hire you? If I have something I want done like that, I phone Bob Peak.”

  You may be able to draw kind of like Rob Liefeld, but the day may come, may have already come, when no one wants a bargain-basement Rob Liefeld clone anymore. Learn to draw like you.

  And, as a writer, or as a storyteller, try to tell the stories that only you can tell. Try to tell the stories that you cannot help telling, the stories you would be telling yourself if you had no audience to listen. The ones that reveal a little too much about you to the world.

  It’s the point I think of in writing as walking naked down the street: it has nothing to do with style, or with genre, it has to do with honesty. Honesty to yourself and to whatever you’re doing.

  Don’t worry about trying to develop a style. Style is what you can’t help doing. If you write enough, or draw enough, you’ll have a style, whether you want it or not.

  Don’t worry about whether you’re “commercial.” Tell your own stories, draw your own pictures. Let other people follow you.

  As a corollary to that, let me say something else.

  In this strange, small market we’re in, no one knows anything. All bets are off. The kind of comics
which were surefire commercial certainties five years ago are as likely to tank as they are to succeed, while the kind of oddball cult comics which, five years ago, would never have registered on anyone’s radar are now solid commercial successes, or as solid as anything is these strange days.

  If you believe in it, do it. If there’s a comic or a project you’ve always wanted to do, go out there and give it a try. If you fail, you’ll have given it a shot. If you succeed, then you succeeded with what you wanted to do.

  8. And last of all, know when to leave the stage.

  I thank you.

  * * *

  This speech was given in April 1997 at ProCon, a comics professionals convention, in Oakland, California.

  * * *

  “But What Has That to Do with Bacchus?” Eddie Campbell and Deadface

  I want to talk about Eddie Campbell.

  Our word tragedy comes from the Greek tragos-oide: “the song of the goat.” Anybody who has ever heard a goat attempt to sing will know why.

  A man called Thespis is credited as being “the Father of Tragedy.” He was an itinerant player, who traveled from Greek town to Greek town, in a cart, about 535 BC. The cart was both a form of transportation and a stage, and in each town he would recite his poetry, and his actors—a novelty in themselves—their faces “daubed with the lees of wine” (the earliest stage makeup), would entertain the crowd.

  As the story goes, until then all songs and performances had been about Bacchus, the god of wine. Thespis first tried to experiment by sticking into the songs little recitations he had written about Bacchus—a remarkable innovation which the people bore nobly, up to a point. Then he decided to experiment further, and began to speak and recite about other things.

  This failed miserably.

  “What has that to do with Bacchus?” they would ask him, and chastened, he would return to the subject of the god of the vine.

  As far as they were concerned, real songs, and poems and stories, were about Bacchus.