I liked ink, I liked finishing someone else's work in ink, the more different the style the more I usually enjoyed it, and I probably inked a lot more of others' drawings than of my own. I even got paid a few times, I even did a comic book once, unfortunately it was being sold before they had artists fully lined up and I had a day job I could get out of only partially (and with a lot of stress and lack of sleep) and maybe I wasn't even capable on a first job to get in 25-28 pages, b&w (no color to fill things in for you) in on a monthly basis. I tried two with tone sheets (that stuff got really expensive on this scale), did a couple more without but trying my own by hand shading to fill the b&w panels out, and inevitably I crashed. I took about six weeks to do an issue. You don't know these things until you do them. Hell of a first gig, b&w, 25-28 pages. A letterer on the issue I crashed on had erased some of the pencil art. I got ten pages in and then some and the art seemed to get more demanding in detail. I said I'd finish the next one and started on it and UPS-ed the unfinished comic in. I got a phone call at my day job of an editor in a panic, though it seemed mostly because the letterer had numbered the pages wrong, but he was sure I had a missing page. I still got paid, the cheques cleared, the bonus cheques, the reprint cheques, but sadly end of that 'career'. I mailed back the issue I had started on and had to keep denying I had a missing page. I hope he figured it out finally. Did I feel like crap though, I had let everyone down, I had let the pencil artist down in a way that still bothers me because he was/is a fantastic artist I learned a lot from (dared hope he learned something from me back, not for ego, just because that's what I valued), let down whatever readers there were, let down the company, let down the day job business I was a third owner of. Not fun.
I still kept my hand in, did some illustrations for text fiction mags that paid in copies, appeared in a German magazine with some outright cartoons, inked a lot of different artists for fun or once in awhile for publication (one I think I only finally saw the three issue the comics ran in a dozen years after the fact). In 1994 I was doing sample pages for DC comics and doing pretty well. I had just written to the art director some stuff about how I'd grown up reading Supergirl comics (she'd sort of just come back to comics at this time) and Shazam, but really didn't feel i was right for the Lobo (or Swamp Things) pencil pages (photocopies) and probably said I really hated this over-muscled psycho-grinning space-biker character and how it made you feel stupid to be associated with comics. Crossing that missive in the mail was a letter on the DC stationary (a tower of super characters on one side holding up the DC logo on the main side) telling me he liked the new sample pages and how fast they came back, and that so-and-so would've probably contacted me by now about an assignment...
...well I never got that letter, if anyone did I wonder what they made of it, or maybe it was simply not sent. Maybe it was the sort of cartoony Lobo they had wanted to assign me, and I had just said how I detested it. I built up this idea and saw hints of it in one of the letters I'd gotten back. I decided if it was I would not do it. I had used different pen names for art and writing, I could do it and blame someone else while taking the money and credit within the company... but I had no interest in doing this kind of work, it was a lot of what I hated about what I knew of comic books at this time (I had stopped entirely as a reader circa 1987): extreme, violent, 'dark', male bodies looking like only The Hulk used to, women posing in ways that made their spines look broken with helium filled boobs. I never got another letter from anyone. I must've said the wrong thing. I even telephoned NYC twice and was kind of blown off by someone that seemed like a very busy temp, though once they took my number down (although it was on every sample page anyway). Just not meant to be... back to doing stuff for fun or little publications, or making my own. I did see more writing published, (even under my real name) qualified to join the Fantasy & Science Fiction Writer's Association (which I did for a single year), and even was nominated for an award (one of my pen names, an anagram of mine, and I didn't know about this until a few years after the fact). I was having some other problems in life come to a head, including health, and just let people and things fall away bit by bit. Met someone who wanted to marry, he was diagnosed with stage four cancer and the next year and a half from that were full of ferry boats, buses, and sleeping in chairs in hospital rooms in two U.S. states.
Back to the artist's story, what I didn't know all that time is how the art director had died fairly suddenly. I had no idea! To me it was all a closed chapter, something and someone I used to 'do' or 'be'. For years I still imagined that art director in an office getting comic books together and out to the printers on time (I didn't look at comic books very often, and one local comic shop even had a big cut-out of Lobo in the window to really repel anyone like me), wondering if he ever thought of me one more time or ran across the old pages. I wondered if Dick Giordano who I'd met with twice further back might've asked about me? Other than people I knew's own comics, which were mostly all for little companies, I didn't crack one open again until a long time later; someone had given my boyfriend the first issue of an X-Men comic set in the past, made by the artist who had done it when I had started reading in circa 1979-80... something I could at least relate to looking like what comics had looked like. But anyway, the art director had died about when I had gotten that last letter, maybe it was his last letter to anyone... and finding this out so long afterwards was a real shock. It must've been mayhem at the DC offices afterwards, who would give much priority to an inker who had last worked four years earlier for a publisher on the other side of the continent? I could've done it though... I wasn't the total loser as I suspected; I could've done 17 or 19 or whatever pages that was the main feature in a monthly DC comic, certainly the fewer pages that their new talent Showcase book required, open for color, and they knew I was versatile and had done professional level work on some very different artists' styles.
"I coulda been a contendah!" Going back I see some familiar names did make it, and am happy for them. It doesn't seem too important to me anymore, I am someone who no longer is an artist, I'm a was though, and I think I was pretty good. It was an identity once, I needed it, then I just didn't. Plus the comic books had really changed, basically to what looked like underground comics without the humor or unofficial low-brow status. I knew some underground cartoonists but I was never cut out to do that kind of thing much myself, it was deconstructive somehow, naughty... and they were deconstructing the mainstream comic books now to extremes where it was damaging. I cared about readers, about kids that some seemed embarrassed to have as readers of their super-people literature... basically a lot of the positive fun had gone (and as I wrote elsewhere, the superheroines in particular all seemed to be getting killed or maimed). I didn't want any part of that even when I was trying out at DC. The circulations shrank, the specialist shops and conventions became something between the main focus and the only focus. Pretensions were inflated beyond reason and comic books were no longer comic books but graphic novels or sequential narratives... who has a Crime & Punishment with super costumed people in them? I sure didn't and don't, as either a writer or an artist.
These are a few remnants of another age, like the 20 cent to 50 cent cheaply printed comics I grew up with. Not to be continued.
