Trying to Find a Comic Book Artist

Part 4: A Super-Collaboration

The average, typical truckdriver (shown here) highly recommends my Substacks to keep you company on the lonely open road. Or while shaving your armpits—see?

You can find the first article in this mini-series here on Iron Age Unfolding. Then read the other misadventures so you’ll be up-to-date!

Maybe one of the reasons I kept thinking I could find an artist for my sci-fi project was that I had what looked like early, surprising success in finding one for the first graphic novel in my superhero series.

Having been on Gab since it was in beta, I had found quite a few groups that nominally shared my interests.One of them was a comics group. Unfortunately, what was posted in that group was mostly Star Wars, Star Trek, Dr. Who, toys, and Hollywood Insider-style articles on movie business deals. Not much in the way of comics, despite the group name.

I had no experience in the comics business and didn’t know how to find artists, so I cast a wide net. If you’re not on Gab, I’ll just tell you: it’s a great place to find links to news articles you can’t find as easily anywhere else, but it’s not so great a place if you’re hoping to network with other creatives. Nevertheless, just in case, I posted in the Gab comics group, asking if any non-woke or anti-woke illustrators would like to collaborate on a big undertaking. It had to be a collaboration because I was already sinking crucial financial resources into the sci-fi graphic novel, and honestly couldn’t afford even just that. If I could find an artist to collaborate with me, then we could share whatever royalties we got, and maybe with crowdfunding, I could raise enough to pay him a big lump sum after the GN was on the market, pulling in sales.

What’s astonishing in retrospect is that I got a response almost immediately from an illustrator.

We chatted, and emailed. I gave him the elevator pitch of what I had in mind. He was willing to collaborate, and was game for the flavor of project I conceived. On top of all that, he struck me as a real stand-up guy. What a Godsend, sez I.

We agreed he should sketch some sample panels and we would discuss style and character looks and so forth. I sent him an excerpt of my high-tech spy character infiltrating a building, collecting evidence, getting discovered, and then fighting his way out. He’s is one of the few non-powered hero characters in the series, but that scene/subplot is pretty much self-contained. It has a beginning, middle, and end, and introduces the character and his support structure while the action plays out. So, good pick for a sample, I figured. The artist gets a feel for the story I’m telling, and I can get a feel for how he would illustrate it. If he only drew a couple sample panels, that should be enough for me to tell if his style would be a good fit.

He asked several questions for clarification that told me he was taking this seriously and wanted to respect my ideas. He also made a good suggestion, if I remember right. He sent me some character concept sketches and they were promising. Not only was this a decent guy, who was enthusiastic about the project, but he was talented enough to make the art pop.

And then, he bowed out. Life threw him some kind of curve ball. He never elaborated what it was, exactly, but there was a finality to it, like he was certain he would never work on my project.

I wasn’t mad at him. I’m still not. He didn’t owe me anything. But it still sucked.

Take this incident, the original publisher going radio silent, a few dozen other similar incidents to get hopes up only for the floor to drop out from under me in years past, combine them with some paranoia and a writer’s imagination, and I entertained some silly speculation:

Maybe I was on a triple-secret FBI no-fly list for comic collaborations, and the publisher had been bumped off for the crime of working with me. Then they had threatened this artist, or showed him the kind of havoc they could wreak in his life if he went forward with our collaboration.

Less dramatic but more likely, he didn’t like something about the excerpt. And these days, literally anything can piss somebody off. Or (least likely in 2024, but still possible) the reason really was the one he gave, such as it was.

Whatever the reason, the deal fell through before a single panel was drawn. Silver lining: I hadn’t lost any money.

Also, another artist responded to that same inquiry I had made in the Gab comics group.

To be continued…

Thanks for visiting my stack! Did you know I have another publication where I share chapters (for free) of a bestselling sci-fi novel? You don’t even have to subscribe (though it would be cool if you did) to read them. And you never know when I’m gonna post eye candy images as sheer, craven clickbait.