MattBrady
03-15-2003, 09:01 AM
<img src="http://www.newsarama.com/Other_Publishers/ACTOR.jpg" width="168" height="138" border="0" align="right">by Michael Sangiacomo
(all images by Armando Gil. As to why, keep reading...)
What happens when the phones stop ringing?
Like the film and music industry, today’s hot comic artist or writer is sometimes cast aside by the fickle public for the newest hot, young thing. Most often, the creators land on their feet in a new or related career. But sometimes they don’t. That’s where ACTOR comes in.
ACTOR (A Commitment To Our Roots) is a not-for-profit organization that helps comic book creators in times of need.
“The first order is to stop the bleeding,” explained ACTOR President and new top dog at Top Cow Comics, Jim McLauchlin. “In some cases that means giving enough money to turn the electricity back on, or buy food. We can’t provide a fortune, but we can help these folks get over the hump.”
Once that is done, the longer-term goals of ACTOR is to arrange a way for comic book freelancers (and that’s many of the creators) to buy inexpensive health care. Lastly, ACTOR wants to help with financial planning and advice.
<a href="http://www.newsarama.com/Other_Publishers/IRONMANGil.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://www.newsarama.com/Other_Publishers/IRONMANGil_t.jpg" width="200" height="326" border="0" alt="Iron Man by Armando Gil" align="left"></a> ACTOR started in 2000, the brainchild of McLauchlin (then with Wizard magazine) and CrossGeneration Comics founder, Mark Alessi. McLauchlin, a former sports writer, said that down-on-their-luck ballplayers had the Baseball Assistance Team to help out, but comic creators had nothing.
From those beginnings, leaders from big and small comic companies joined in to help make ACTOR a reality. The group was incorporated in February, 2001, and is slowly gathering funds mainly through donations and auctions of specially-created work. So far, they have financially helped 14 people to the tune of $46,000. They don’t divulge the names of the recipients without their consent.
“These are proud people and we respect that,” said McLauchlin. “We actually had a case of an artist and his wife in their 50s who could not make ends meet. They were living on a banana a day, literally. We used funds to help them get back on their feet.”
While some of the recipients of ACTOR’s largess have been veterans of the Golden Age of comics, McLauchlin is finding that most of the people who need help were working in the 1970s.
“The comic business has gotten a lot more human over the years,” said McLauchlin. “The pay is very good, more than the guys in the Golden Age would have imagined. But the industry was built on the backs of guys like Bill Finger.”
Finger was a workhorse at DC Comics in the Golden Age, ghost-drawing many of the Batman stories which were credited to Bob Kane. Many of the older artists have passed on. The creators who worked in the late 1960s and 1970s - who worked before comic companies improved their lot - are those that need help today.
<a href="http://www.newsarama.com/Other_Publishers/conanBATTLEGil.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://www.newsarama.com/Other_Publishers/conanBATTLEGil_t.jpg" width="200" height="308" border="0" alt="Conan by Armando Gil" align="right"></a> “Crossgen has tremendous benefits for its employees,” said McLauchlin. “Marvel and DC, as they compete over talent, will give health insurance and good pay. Things have gotten much better. We can’t forget the older guys who didn’t have it so good.”
Sadly, as in the case of famed Golden Age artist Gray Morrow, ACTOR was only able to help with funeral expenses.
“We had been working with Gray when he died,” said McLauchlin. “He had fallen on some hard times. He lost his job drawing the Tarzan newspaper strip the same week his wife, Pocho, lost her job at an insurance company.”
Two familiar names that needed a helping hand and didn’t mind talking about it were writer Bill Messner-Loebs and artist Armando Gil. Loebs and his wife got a financial boost, but more importantly, ACTOR opened some doors at comic companies to possibly get some work.
For Gil, they helped him get an 11-page job inking a Hulk story, “not the greatest thing in the world, but it gets his name out there.”
Gil, who drew King Conan, Micronauts, Lady Rawhide and many other titles beginning in the 1980s, was most recently involved in storyboarding the Courage The Cowardly Dog cartoon on Nickelodeon. He spent the last few years toiling in obscurity at the ill-fated Stan Lee Media company, which has since gone bankrupt amid allegations of criminal activity by some officers. Stan Lee, the founding father of Marvel Comics, was not involved in the nasty stuff.
“We were developing a mess of shows there,” Gil said. “I had my own character, a kid’s show where kids were creating their own world via virtual reality. The moral was that nothing was safe in cyber-space.”
<a href="http://www.newsarama.com/Other_Publishers/BATMANGil.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://www.newsarama.com/Other_Publishers/BATMANGil_t.jpg" width="200" height="301" border="0" alt="Batman by Armando Gil" align="left"></a>When Stan Lee Media went belly up, it wiped Gil and many others out. But Gil said his real trouble came when he left the Courage Dog job in New York to return to Cleveland to be closer to his daughters, ages 6 and 9.
“I didn’t get around to renewing my driver’s license, I got in trouble, got a DUI (driving under the influence of alcohol) and eventually had my car taken away,” he said.
Gil had the misfortune of breaking down in Rocky River, a hoity-toity Cleveland suburb. His girlfriend came to the rescue. She used her car to push Gil’s car toward a service station. Oh no, not in Rocky River you don’t. Police impounded the car and refused to release it until Gil paid off all his fines.
That’s when ACTOR stepped in and paid off the fines so Gil could get his car back. Gil was sleeping on a friend’s couch and doing odd jobs in the Cleveland area, ironically, some were house painting jobs. He could not work without a car and hadn’t saved enough to pay off the fines.
Gil, who started drawing at age 19 hanging around the Neal Adams studio, got his first professional work at DC in 1979 with Hawkman and House of Mystery. He did a little of everything for Marvel over the next decade: Howard the Duck magazine; some issues of Micronauts; Savage Sword of Conan covers and The ‘Nam.
“Every time I would start to do well, a woman would dump me and set me back,” Gil said.
His latest venture is drawing Force Majeure for writer Michael Tierney at Little Rocket Publications. He said he will draw 60 pages of the outer space series by the summer. Gil is still looking for regular comic work, he can be reached through ACTOR.
“ACTOR came along when I needed a hand,” Gil said. “You know the old saying, give a guy a fish and you feed him for a day, teach him to fish and he’ll feed himself. Well, I know how to fish - I just need someplace to drop my line.”
Michael Sangiacomo is a statewide news reporter for the Plain Dealer newspaper in Cleveland, Ohio. His syndicated "Journey Into Comics" weekly column on the state of the comic book business, can be found in newspapers and at the Newsarama website. His monthly comic book column appears the first Saturday of each month in the Plain Dealer Arts page and is syndicated through Newhouse Newspapers. He also writes a twice-monthly audiobooks review column covering crime thrillers and mysteries that can be seen at <a href="http://www.audiobookstoday.com" target="_blank">www.audiobookstoday.com</a>
(all images by Armando Gil. As to why, keep reading...)
What happens when the phones stop ringing?
Like the film and music industry, today’s hot comic artist or writer is sometimes cast aside by the fickle public for the newest hot, young thing. Most often, the creators land on their feet in a new or related career. But sometimes they don’t. That’s where ACTOR comes in.
ACTOR (A Commitment To Our Roots) is a not-for-profit organization that helps comic book creators in times of need.
“The first order is to stop the bleeding,” explained ACTOR President and new top dog at Top Cow Comics, Jim McLauchlin. “In some cases that means giving enough money to turn the electricity back on, or buy food. We can’t provide a fortune, but we can help these folks get over the hump.”
Once that is done, the longer-term goals of ACTOR is to arrange a way for comic book freelancers (and that’s many of the creators) to buy inexpensive health care. Lastly, ACTOR wants to help with financial planning and advice.
<a href="http://www.newsarama.com/Other_Publishers/IRONMANGil.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://www.newsarama.com/Other_Publishers/IRONMANGil_t.jpg" width="200" height="326" border="0" alt="Iron Man by Armando Gil" align="left"></a> ACTOR started in 2000, the brainchild of McLauchlin (then with Wizard magazine) and CrossGeneration Comics founder, Mark Alessi. McLauchlin, a former sports writer, said that down-on-their-luck ballplayers had the Baseball Assistance Team to help out, but comic creators had nothing.
From those beginnings, leaders from big and small comic companies joined in to help make ACTOR a reality. The group was incorporated in February, 2001, and is slowly gathering funds mainly through donations and auctions of specially-created work. So far, they have financially helped 14 people to the tune of $46,000. They don’t divulge the names of the recipients without their consent.
“These are proud people and we respect that,” said McLauchlin. “We actually had a case of an artist and his wife in their 50s who could not make ends meet. They were living on a banana a day, literally. We used funds to help them get back on their feet.”
While some of the recipients of ACTOR’s largess have been veterans of the Golden Age of comics, McLauchlin is finding that most of the people who need help were working in the 1970s.
“The comic business has gotten a lot more human over the years,” said McLauchlin. “The pay is very good, more than the guys in the Golden Age would have imagined. But the industry was built on the backs of guys like Bill Finger.”
Finger was a workhorse at DC Comics in the Golden Age, ghost-drawing many of the Batman stories which were credited to Bob Kane. Many of the older artists have passed on. The creators who worked in the late 1960s and 1970s - who worked before comic companies improved their lot - are those that need help today.
<a href="http://www.newsarama.com/Other_Publishers/conanBATTLEGil.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://www.newsarama.com/Other_Publishers/conanBATTLEGil_t.jpg" width="200" height="308" border="0" alt="Conan by Armando Gil" align="right"></a> “Crossgen has tremendous benefits for its employees,” said McLauchlin. “Marvel and DC, as they compete over talent, will give health insurance and good pay. Things have gotten much better. We can’t forget the older guys who didn’t have it so good.”
Sadly, as in the case of famed Golden Age artist Gray Morrow, ACTOR was only able to help with funeral expenses.
“We had been working with Gray when he died,” said McLauchlin. “He had fallen on some hard times. He lost his job drawing the Tarzan newspaper strip the same week his wife, Pocho, lost her job at an insurance company.”
Two familiar names that needed a helping hand and didn’t mind talking about it were writer Bill Messner-Loebs and artist Armando Gil. Loebs and his wife got a financial boost, but more importantly, ACTOR opened some doors at comic companies to possibly get some work.
For Gil, they helped him get an 11-page job inking a Hulk story, “not the greatest thing in the world, but it gets his name out there.”
Gil, who drew King Conan, Micronauts, Lady Rawhide and many other titles beginning in the 1980s, was most recently involved in storyboarding the Courage The Cowardly Dog cartoon on Nickelodeon. He spent the last few years toiling in obscurity at the ill-fated Stan Lee Media company, which has since gone bankrupt amid allegations of criminal activity by some officers. Stan Lee, the founding father of Marvel Comics, was not involved in the nasty stuff.
“We were developing a mess of shows there,” Gil said. “I had my own character, a kid’s show where kids were creating their own world via virtual reality. The moral was that nothing was safe in cyber-space.”
<a href="http://www.newsarama.com/Other_Publishers/BATMANGil.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://www.newsarama.com/Other_Publishers/BATMANGil_t.jpg" width="200" height="301" border="0" alt="Batman by Armando Gil" align="left"></a>When Stan Lee Media went belly up, it wiped Gil and many others out. But Gil said his real trouble came when he left the Courage Dog job in New York to return to Cleveland to be closer to his daughters, ages 6 and 9.
“I didn’t get around to renewing my driver’s license, I got in trouble, got a DUI (driving under the influence of alcohol) and eventually had my car taken away,” he said.
Gil had the misfortune of breaking down in Rocky River, a hoity-toity Cleveland suburb. His girlfriend came to the rescue. She used her car to push Gil’s car toward a service station. Oh no, not in Rocky River you don’t. Police impounded the car and refused to release it until Gil paid off all his fines.
That’s when ACTOR stepped in and paid off the fines so Gil could get his car back. Gil was sleeping on a friend’s couch and doing odd jobs in the Cleveland area, ironically, some were house painting jobs. He could not work without a car and hadn’t saved enough to pay off the fines.
Gil, who started drawing at age 19 hanging around the Neal Adams studio, got his first professional work at DC in 1979 with Hawkman and House of Mystery. He did a little of everything for Marvel over the next decade: Howard the Duck magazine; some issues of Micronauts; Savage Sword of Conan covers and The ‘Nam.
“Every time I would start to do well, a woman would dump me and set me back,” Gil said.
His latest venture is drawing Force Majeure for writer Michael Tierney at Little Rocket Publications. He said he will draw 60 pages of the outer space series by the summer. Gil is still looking for regular comic work, he can be reached through ACTOR.
“ACTOR came along when I needed a hand,” Gil said. “You know the old saying, give a guy a fish and you feed him for a day, teach him to fish and he’ll feed himself. Well, I know how to fish - I just need someplace to drop my line.”
Michael Sangiacomo is a statewide news reporter for the Plain Dealer newspaper in Cleveland, Ohio. His syndicated "Journey Into Comics" weekly column on the state of the comic book business, can be found in newspapers and at the Newsarama website. His monthly comic book column appears the first Saturday of each month in the Plain Dealer Arts page and is syndicated through Newhouse Newspapers. He also writes a twice-monthly audiobooks review column covering crime thrillers and mysteries that can be seen at <a href="http://www.audiobookstoday.com" target="_blank">www.audiobookstoday.com</a>