There’s been a fair amount of hubub about the various comic pros being paid vast sums to do things on substack. Now there’s good arguments to be had for the morality of taking substacks money, but there are good arguments to be had for the morality of taking any large amount of money from any giant tech company. (And where does that leave my spotify subscription if I decide to take the moral high ground?)
Anyway, the issues are complex, and to be honest, I’m ill placed to make a call. As far as I can tell the people taking the money have weighed it up, and decided to go with it. Nothing I’m gonna do will change their mind (I mean unless I act like an obnoxious a-hole to them on twitter and convince to change their mind, but let’s face it we all know that won’t work)
So let’s put that issue aside and move on to what’s on offer. Near as I can tell substack have contacted writers (because it’s a newsletter so writers are hte obvious choice) and given them a big wodge of cash – figures I’ve heard have been in the 100k+ range to do what ever they like as long as it’s aimed at their comic reading audience.
Some have decided to parlay that into paying artists to make creator owned comics (good call) but, for me, at any rate, it doesn’t represent very good value for money (and they don’t need my $7, the comic will happen without me) but they’ll almost certainly collect them in print. So that’s fine, I’ll skip that.
It’s been funny to watch each of the people contacted created a newsletter that’s very much them – Jonathan Hickman’s newsletter offering is the most Johnathan Hickman you’ll ever see in your life.
Scott Snyder’s has been the only one I think offering an interesting value proposition – rather than comics, Scott’s offering a comic ‘school’ – now, its massively subscribed, so you’re NOT gonna get one to one or anything like that, but it may well turn into a community like the old comic book days and that’s interesting to me. But so is the learning to write aspect of it.
Thomas (my youngest son – aged 13) has been writing and drawing books of his own since before he can write (he’d literally get me to staple some pages together for a book, draw pictures in each page and dictate the story to me to write in for him – we have about 30-40 of these books and they’re delightfully daffy)
So for him, writing and drawing a story is simply a matter of coming up with a title and an idea and just banging through it until it’s down. I deeply admire him for it.
For me, when it comes to writing I’ve successfully avoided making any sort of committed stab at it. The last thing I tried to write, that was any sort of meat to it was a Bond style Thriller (was actually a Bond strip, but good rejected because they weren’t looking for Bond stories when I pitched it).
I think it’s a great Bond and a ok not-Bond.
But I did a whole process on it, writing notes, converting them to a story and then writing a script – I think I got a decent draft zero done (40 pages) when events overtook and then I put the writing away and moved on to just drawing.
Sometimes I’ll tell Tom a short pitch for a short story and… well, he’s starting to get fed up with me “..yes … but are you gonna do it?” “Uhm”
Anyway, I promise, I’m gonna try this year.