Blog

In December I posted my last Here’s the Thing… article here and told of my plans to start a new, positive article which would essentially be a heavily moderated brainstorming session where we develop an idea a week designed to get your books into new readers hands despite how dumb it may start out. The first column, which has since been named “The Hive”, was supposed to go up today.

And now here you are, back on the DCC blog, expecting to start changing how we do things in comics and ready for some great discussion and, unfortunately, you won’t be getting it this week.

It’s not because I’m not prepared – I have first drafts for five articles all ready for edits – but the thing is, The Hive is moving over to Buzzscope (which will be going back to it’s original name, Pop Culture Shock) and will be bimonthly starting next Thursday.

I’m excited about the move; Guy LeCharles Gonzalez is putting together a pretty impressive line-up of columnists that handle a wide range of topics you don’t normally see on comic sites. They have Friends of Lulu’s Ronee Garcia’s column, “What a Girl Wants”, giving female insight into comics that goes beyond the standard “10 Ways to Get Your Girlfriend into Comics”. Rich Watson’s “What’s a Nubian?” that offers commentary on black comic book characters. Neil Kleid’s hilarious “Take That!” that lampoons some of the more popular comic articles and features on the internet. They also offer columns from Tania Del Rio, Jim Scalicrup, Michael Avon Oeming, David Rodriguez and plenty of other big thinkers and enthusiastic industry players.

So, when we started talking about moving The Hive to Buzzscope, it dawned on me that this column SHOULD be there – it just sort of fits.

I’ll be making announcements from this site when the article goes up.

So, you’ll all have to wait until next week for The Hive to start. However, I didn’t want to completely turn my back on the DCC blog so I want to go out on a limb and throw out a new idea for this site. Please keep in mind this will in no way be weekly but sort of a “as time permits” type of idea. It sort of dawned on me when I was checking out the comic blog scene and I must have seen about five or six people who I like and admire declaring they’re going to try their hand at comics this year as their resolution.

As a lot of you know I’m a comic book editor. I think I’m a pretty good one – Western Tales of Terror was a hit when it was out and Elk’s Run, well, just wait until we get our Eisner this summer if you people still don’t believe what everyone is saying about that book. I’m at the point now where various writers and teams send me work and ask for my opinion on things. I don’t have time to take on a project just yet but with my personal website going on hiatus in four weeks and with Elk’s Run coming to an end, I find that it’s a good time to start putting myself out there as an editor again, so here’s what I’m thinking.

We have writers in the group; I know a lot of writer’s read this site. What I’m thinking I would want to do is accept 40 word pitches for three to eight page stories from writers who want to fine-tune their comic writing skills. From those pitches I’ll choose an idea I jive with and that seems workable and I’ll request the full script (this can also work for samplings of full projects, maybe the first 8 or 10 pages of a graphic novel or mini-series, but in order to do it right the entire story would need to be worked on and I imagine some people would have issues with their entire story being posted). Then I’ll post the pitch, the script and my edits in a way that aims to teach a larger audience about writing for comics. I’m not going to sabotage people and tear them up if the script isn’t that good – it’s going to be 100% productive and the people who put themselves out there will get full credit, links and I guarantee you’ll have a script that, story wise (you’re on your own art wise), will get you into a variety of anthologies. Plus, you’ll learn something, and what’s wrong with that?

This idea is eventually going to be folded into a magazine a friend is putting together but I wouldn’t mind bulking up on some backlog for when (and, let’s face it, “if”) that starts. The magazine version of this article, when it goes down, will likely take the edited scripts, pair you with an artist, and publish the completed version in a future issue. I’m not doing all of that, yet.

Anyway, I’m just getting an idea of who’s interested. Email me if you are – spread the word if you know someone who would be. Post some general questions if you got them in the comments section.