DENNIS K: Have any advice for aspiring writers trying to get into the industry?
WARREN: Find yourself a real job that pays money and doesn't eat out your guts.

Failing that, kill yourself.

Failing that, concentrate not on writing pitches to major companies, but on getting published. Doesn't matter where. Hell, publish yourself. See, the biggest hurdle is in getting published once. Get published once, and suddenly people will start taking you seriously. Why? Because it shows someone gambled some money on you, and that's what it's all about. Publishers are people who gamble their money on your gift. They're not charities. They want to make more money that they spent, and that's what they're gambling you can do for them.

Get a published book with your name on. Hell, do it through Cafe Press the way Travis Johnson and the Variance crowd have. And that's your calling card.

Yes, you're going to have to find an artist who's as hungry as you are, or find a way of achieving the images yourself, and that's going to be a bitch. But it's the nature of the beast.

Y'know, when Paul Pope first self-published himself, he invented an imaginary publisher, so that on first glance it looked like someone else was risking their money on him...

 

PLANETARY: ALL OVER THE WORLD TPB

MARK GONZALEZ: Which comics have you enjoyed writing and which ones did you end up hate writing?
WARREN: I think the single comic I hated writing the most was STORM, a four-issue mini for Marvel. Most of what ended up in there isn't even me. It was the absolute nadir of the Harras-managed X-Men Office, compromised and rewritten and re-plotted and just fucked around with literally panel by panel by page. An absolute nightmare of a job.

Comics I enjoyed writing? Too many to list. Most of them.

WON KIM: What I'm wondering is if you agree that anger and self hatred are common occupational hazards in the industry; and if so, whether the industry attracts such people or makes'em that way; and whether or not working in comics is worth these and the other hassles that must certainly come with the turf. If time allows, pls. elaborate.
WARREN: It's interesting. I don't spend a lot of time among "my fellow professionals" -- I mean, I've only done one San Diego con, and that was back in '97. I don't do the British cons in Bristol, though I did appear at the London comics festival last summer as a favour to my friend Paul Gravett. I think I only saw one pro at that, and that was Brendan McCarthy, who came over to complain that my talk was sold out...! (And I hadn't clapped eyes on Brendan in ten years, god knows how he recognised me.)

I've certainly known some very angry people in comics, who could conceivably be seen as self-hating. But then, a lot of people seem to think I'm very angry, and then get very confused when they meet me.

This... how can I put this? In my small experience, this is a business that perhaps has a large sector of people who for various reasons didn't develop a large set of social skills. I've met some weird comics people, and, as I say, I'm not a big convention-goer.

That said, anger and self-hatred are commonplace in any creative field. It's always going to be endemic to a sector of the populace. Read EASY RIDERS RAGING BULLS by Peter Biskind. Robert DeNiro certainly spent his young life, at the very least, paralysed with self-loathing. You want anger outbursts and wrecked marriages, read that book (if you haven't already, of course).

I'd personally kind of question the notion that creators are "overbearingly righteous and unbending" when it comes from a former editor -- I've had that sort of thing said to me when I've seen a book published with my name on but containing very few of my words. All writers, to some extent, have to believe they're right about what they're putting down on paper, otherwise it's not worth the effort of hitting the keys. The job demands a healthy ego. There are certainly damaged egos in the business, but they're pretty easy to track by the jobs they take. And it's pretty obvious that some writers -- mostly American, I have to say -- are drawn into comics by the attraction of writing the characters that comforted them as children and teenagers.

Am I even getting close to the point here? I don't know. What do you think?

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