COMIC BOOK MAKER 2.0 II: THE WIND UP AND THE...

[MattBrady]

by Ryan McLelland

Welcome to Comic Book Maker – following the creating of the Arcana Studios’ comic book Philly from initial conception, to pitch, to production, to release.

When artist Jim Hanna and I got together to bring Philly to life, we both felt that we had a good thing with the script and the concepts. What we both knew that we needed next was something to pitch to the various comic book companies. We felt five pages (inked, colored, and lettered), a cover, a synopsis, and (of course) a cover letter was what we would aim for as our pitch. We had the guy who wrote the script and we had the guy to pencil it, we just didn’t have the rest of the pieces necessary to bring it all to fruition.

Not letting that stop us, we poured over the script of the first issue and looked for what sequential pages would be the most fun to pimp our wares to companies. One might think, “Why not just draw up the first five pages of your comic book? It’s that simple!” In our case, it really wasn’t that simple because the first pages of Philly #1 deals with the Philadelphia Police and the plot that would lead our superheroes for the rest of the entire arc. While this tells a company of the plot of Philly, it really didn’t showcase our heroes, and that was what we needed to do. From the get-go you must consider who you are pitching your book to and what is going to appeal to them. A comic company will, in all probability, make their decision pretty quickly based on your artwork and the ability to tell that story within the panels. Sure your story synopsis and script are very important, but if you aren’t able to translate that onto the page you’ll probably get that infamous rejection letter pretty quickly.

We decided on some pages that had our hero Firestarter drinking in a bar and our hero cop Detective Malik Owen coming in to ask where he could find The Trio’s leader Brick. The two have words with each other and even though both of them are ‘the good guys’, we see a bit of animosity between ‘the law’ and ‘the spandex-guy’. A fight nearly breaks out before Firestarter gets a call to help Brick out in a street brawl. On the city streets of Philly we finally meet Brick, who is doing battle with a guy who looks like a WWE reject.

While these pages would not even include our third member of the Trio (Quik) we thought the pacing and humor would be perfect for our pitch, so Hanna quickly got to work penciling these pages. Since it is not what you know but who you know, I decided to reach out to people that I knew to help bring the pitch together. A guy named Raph Hedon had designed the cover to my Wise Intelligence Anthology #1 and I knew he was a hell of an inker/colorist. Raph looked at the pencils that Jim had already done and agreed to come aboard. On the flip side, I knew no letterers and, at this time, I was away from my home in New Jersey for a couple months doing Army training in Georgia with most of my contacts being left on my home computer thousands of miles away.

While there are always sites like Digital Webbing to find a letterer, I decided to go another way. Before leaving for Ft. Gordon I had attended the Pittsburgh Comic-Con where I not only had several hysterical run-ins with Margot Kidder (truly classic stories…just ask me some time) but I also got to meet fellow Newsarama contributor Dirk Manning, who does the amazing horror anthology Nightmare World. I thought of that meeting and wrote Dirk to ask him who did his lettering on his book and he pointed me in the direction of Jim Reddington. Jim Redd seemed quite busy with Nightmare World and several other projects but, at this time, we had Jim Hanna’s finished pencils and some of Raph’s inking/coloring on our pitch pages. Reddington agreed to come aboard and letter our five pages and we suddenly had a collaborative crew together to at least pitch the book.

I had nothing now but time on my hands because everyone had to complete their piece of the puzzle. I focused on writing the first-arc synopsis and the cover letter that would go with our pitch. While including the synopsis of the book here would ruin the entire first-arc of the book I’ll tell you the rules that I went by. Keep everything short and concise. Write it then edit it. Let a friend read it then edit it again. Bring it down to the fewest words possible. Sell don’t tell. Does any of that make sense? It might not have even make sense to me either, except that being longwinded in who the characters were and how they came to be wasn’t essential in selling the concept. I kept the story, not the characters, the main focus of the synopsis. If a company liked the story, then I’m sure they’d be interested in the characters that went along with the pages enclosed.

The same can be said for the cover letter. It doesn’t need to be long or drawn out, full of plot and the telling of how your comic can be the next biggest thing to happen in comic books since Brian Bendis began to write Ultimate Spider-Man. A brief overview of the series and a thank you for reading is fitted with a middle paragraph that talks about the creative team and why the book might fit well to that particular comic book company.



That being said the cover letter was not a form letter. Every letter that went out was changed and tweaked to talk specifically to the publisher about their books and how Philly might fit into their specific line of comics. I wasn’t going to pitch to Marvel or DC, but I also knew I wasn’t pitching to companies like Antarctic or Sirius. Companies like Image, Devil’s Due, and Arcana were truly perfect bigger companies to pitch to before looking at pitching to smaller companies who might also cater to a superhero book like this. Keep in mind that while writing a cover letter one needs to keep the tone professional, write in a business format, know who you are pitching to, and perhaps even the person you might be submitting it to. Believe it or not, a little research might provide you the name of the person who actually looks at the submissions, making your cover letter seem a bit more professional than the very conventional ‘To Whom It May Concern’. Here is a sample of a cover letter for the book I pitched over to Image Comics:

I’d like to take the opportunity to propose a new comic book series titled ‘Philly’. I’m submitting this book to Image Comics in hopes of the series being produced by one of the greaestt publishers in the industry today.

When you think of being a hero in a big city you think of those metropolises being New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles. For the newbie superhero team known as The Trio they are hoping to cut their teeth in the start-up city of Philadelphia. While the city is not overrun by those costumed bad guys looking to take over the universe, The Trio find themselves fighting with gangs, corrupt cops, vampires and even themselves in their first story-arc.

The creative team helping to bring this series to life includes myself, Ryan McLelland, as writer (Newsarama, Platinum Studios’ ‘Jeremiah: The Last Empire’, ‘Wise Intelligence’), Jim Hanna (DNA) laying down his amazing pencils, Raph Hedon (10th Muse) providing inks and colors, and Jim Reddington (Nightmare World) providing the finishing touches with the lettering. The hopes would be to publish ‘Philly’ as a regular full color series with this book’s audience being those Image Comics buyers who enjoy books like ‘Invincible’ or ‘Noble Causes’ – comics that look at superheroes outside the box.

Talking about the story really doesn’t sell the story – hopefully the pages enclosed may wet your appetite. I also enclose a brief synopsis of ‘Philly’s’ first story-arc. I truly thank you for you time. I am fully aware of how busy Image Comics is looking through the many submissions you receive and I’m just happy that you’re taking the time out of your day to consider this project.

Best
Ryan McLelland

I was in, I was out. With the pages and the synopsis included with the cover letter I tried to keep everything to its bare minimum. Did it do the job? With our pitch put together our first rejection came pretty quickly from Image Comics (Erik Larsen didn’t dig it - but does he ever reject nicely!). Our very second pitch was to Arcana Studios, where Editor-In-Chief Sean O’Reilly liked what he saw. “Let’s do it,” he said and the contracts were sent out.



Say what? Just like that? He liked it and then a contract was sent out to be signed? Yeah, it happened just that quickly. Suddenly we were off and running with our superhero opus coming to a comic store near you. It took a little over a month to put our little pitch together, but we put our all into that pitch to make sure that what was being sent out really exemplified our comic book. It may have seemed that a deal came quickly, but we all breathed a sigh of relief and knew that all that time and effort we put into our pitch was worth it. Now we had to get our enjoyment quickly out of mind since we needed to get to work on putting together entire issues. You’d think that would just be as easy as pie but it’s not as easy when your inker/colorist and letterer soon leave the project that just got picked up. But we’ll save all that for next time…

In Two Weeks: Our final creative team comes together as we premiere Philly on the web and ready their first crossover!

Ryan McLelland is a writer/columnist for Newsarama known for his columns ‘It Came From The Quarter Bin’ and ‘Your Indy Weekly’. Having stretched his legs with his Wise Intelligence series, Ryan’s ‘Philly’ will be released this April 2007 from Arcana Studios. Send love/hate mail to: rdmclelland@hotmail.com.

ARCHIVES:

COMIC BOOK MAKER 2.0:
#1 – Starting Over


COMIC BOOK MAKER:
#1- My Simple Idea
#2- Writing and Art
#3- The Submission Thing
#4- The Spirit Animals
#5- Preview Art
#6- Printing On Demand
#7- Pitching Thoughts

[Speedball93]

I really dug the first installment and was interested in picking this up. The art is a little too cartoony for my taste, but the story seems good. Only having to pitch this a couple times before getting a contract makes it sound easy to get a project greenlit, but I know it must be tough at times. Congrats on the quick success.

[RyanMcLelland]

Originally Posted by Speedball93

Only having to pitch this a couple times before getting a contract makes it sound easy to get a project greenlit, but I know it must be tough at times. Congrats on the quick success.

Failure is the best way to strive for success. While I loved the fact that Philly came together quickly I don't want everyone who follows the column to just think that this project was thrown all together and suddenly it was picked up as a series.

As a writer I've struggled for over ten years trying to bring many projects to comic books or the silver screen. My favorite book in the world is a book I started with rejection letters. One after another came in, especially as a very young writer, and my book began to grow. So I read books about writing, read books about pitching, learned more about agents and agencies. I would finally have some agencies look at my scripts and then in the end choose to not represent me.

Publishing something is usually not an overnight thing. Having written for several years now for magazines like Newsarama and Latino Review have given me some great learning and writing experiences. My point is that I learned to take the rejections and turn them into something positive. Philly was not my first pitch to comic companies nor was the Wise Intelligence book (the comic created during the last Comic Book Maker series which also was not picked up). Ideas have come from my head to the page for many years.

Philly was a project that took along time to come to fruition, which is why writing Comic Book Maker is so fun to me - that I get to pass those experiences on. And I know this column makes it very much BADA-BING - we got picked up! And, this time around, it did happen that quick. No one was more excited than I. For myself it was something that was a long time coming and I knew from writing the scripts long before we got picked up that I had something good in my hands.

Now, whether you all disagree or agree with me on that is another story. Laugh. Myself, Jim Hanna, and the rest of our team (now being NichX and Andrew White) have continued to bring out best to bring a quality project out. I'm glad you've liked what you read thus far and hope you enjoy what is coming in the next few weeks and months.

I usually never write any sort of diatribes here on the TalkBack section, especially when it comes to my own columns, I like them to speak for themselves. So I just wanted to put it out there that success hasn't come easy but if you strive for it and continue to strive past all those rejections, eventually you will find that something that clicks. I'm just writing to try and show you how it all clicked together.

[Speedball93]

I wasn't trying to suggest otherwise. I was just glad to see that with a good pitch and a lot of hard work, success can be right around the corner. I know from past experiences that rejection can lead to new ideas and better work. Keep the columns coming Ryan!

[metr0man]

I'm almost at this stage myself for a creator-owned series I'm putting together. We have a good art team so far. But one question I have for Ryan is, how exactly did the pitch process to Arcana work? The reason I ask is that their webpage says "fully completed comics only"... was that something they added later, or did they look at your pages anyways, being that it wasn't a whole lot of work to glance over 5 completed pages instead of 22 completed ones.

[Dirk Manning]

Dang... it seems like so long ahgo now that I pointed you in Jim's direction!

Oh, how time flies when you're having fun, yes?

[atomicbill]

I know Jim personally and have seen the complete book, it looks great. I also know from experience that Jim's art can sell a book. Locally his DNA title sells in the 200+ copy range at Atomic Comics' chain of stores, that's tremendous for an indie book let alone a local title. Best of luck to Ryan and Jim, you can count on a couple hundred copies ordered from me.

Bill Mitchel
VP Purchasing
Atomic Comics, Arizona

[eddynunez]

I've read through most of the CBMv1 series and it's just great - informative and entertaining. Thanks for posting your past and current experiences. Looking forward to the next installments. I can honestly say it's helping me to come up with different approaches for handling my current ventures. However, I still have a loooong way to go before making any substantial progress. While I've been moving along creatively (developing characters and stories, searching for a creative team), I haven't been able to come up with a solid business plan to follow. Any suggestions on where I can look to (online, books, etc.)? Hollerrrr.