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You ever notice how the living embodiment of Death seems to be a more recurring theme both around Halloween and towards the end of the year? Here's some recent comics featuring Death...

Mother Goose & Grimm


Sinfest


Strange Brew


Mary Death


I suppose it makes sense in a way with the year ending. That Sinfest piece in particular is a recurring motif with the strip, where Death hunts down the old year in kind of a Logan's Run style.

But here's the interesting thing: while the Old Year is almost always depicted as an old bearded white guy, Death is just a skeleton in a robe. No skin color, no gender, no sexual orientation. (Obviously, I'm talking contemporary Western depictions primarily.)

The notion of using a skeleton to represent Death makes sense beyond just our culture. After a body dies, the flesh decays away, leaving only a skeleton. There's nothing left recognizable from the original person. And given that everybody's skeleton looks pretty much the same, it's not at all a far leap to start using that as a symbol of Death itself.

But that's the bit I don't think many people think about either. Everybody's skeleton looks pretty much the same. You strip away the skin color, the visibly obvious gender markers, the outward characteristics of sexual orientation, everyone is the same. We're all built the same way.

I mean, you know this, of course. But there's a disconnect a lot of people seem to have when you add that superficial stuff on top. Not everyone recognizes it as the same as using the same blueprints and materials to build two houses, and then just painting them different colors.

And yet, we see Death being depicted as that framework all the time. I wonder if, the next time you come across a comic like these featuring Death, you make an "offhand" comment to whoever happens to be nearby -- something like, "Hey, you ever realize that because Death is shown as a skeleton, he represents everybody? He doesn't have skin or muscle, so he could be you or me or that Black guy up the road or that Asian woman over there or..? Funny how we're all exactly the same underneath a bit of skin, but people still think you're more inclined to violence if your skin is just a little darker."

I have no idea if that would work, or even get people to think a bit more, but it's worth a shot, isn't it?
Faith Roncoroni
You're probably aware that many of the more commercial comics are done by a series of people, right? A writer will draft the story, a penciller will do the initial illustrations while an inker cleans the linework up, a letterer is actually the one putting in the dialogue, and a colorist applies... well, color. Pretty standard breakdown of work, right? It mostly makes sense, as those individual tasks require slightly different skill sets. That approach is generally credited to Will Eisner, who by the late 1930s began getting too much work to handle by himself and found he had to hire a staff of creators to help meet the demand. The list of Eisner & Iger Studio alumni is a veritable who's who of early comicdom: Jack Kirby, Bob Kane, Lou Fine, George Tuska, Mort Meskin, Bob Powell... In hiring all these new people, he established this assembly line process to help speed up production.

(The art accompanying this post is the original rough layout for the page in which Eisner explains his approach in The Dreamer. All of his page layouts for that book can be seen here.)

What I'm wondering, though, is how/where did Eisner hit upon the idea originally? I've seen/heard it referenced almost every time the Eisner-Iger shop is mentioned, but there's very little in the way of details. In fact, The Dreamer is about the most elaborate version I've found, and he literally spends only one panel on it. From Eisner's own accounts, he didn't seem too business savvy at the time, so it strikes me as odd that he might lift the idea wholesale from Henry Ford. Also, I doubt he would've woken up one day and suddenly hired fifteen people to help out; he would've picked up one guy here, another there over the course of weeks and months, so even if he did have a flash of inspiration, he wouldn't have had the resources to implement a full assembly line at the outset anyway.

So some kind of gradual approach seems to make the most sense. Maybe start with "I'll write the story and do some rough layouts, you finish it and make sure everything looks polished"? Then perhaps "I'll write the story and do some roughs, you write in the dialogue and draw the figures, and you fill out the backgrounds"? Then "I'll write the story, you do some roughs, you write draw the main figures, you drop in the dialogue, and you finish it"? Something kind of like that makes sense, right?

But how much experimenting did he do with that? How long before he settled on a single methodology? What were some of the options he might have tried that didn't work out well?

And one thing I've always been struck by is that Eisner has mentioned on more than a few occasions that different artists worked on the main figures than the backgrounds. I understand that's not an uncommon practice in manga, but I can't recall when I may have last heard of that approach being used in US comics. Maybe from the waning days of the newspaper adventure strip? Was Milton Caniff the last major comic artist to employ this approach? (It should go without saying that the foreground/background division of duties is still standard in animation.) When/where did that comics assembly line process shift into the penciller/inker model we're more familiar with? Is it indeed more efficient than a foreground/background approach?

I find it a little curious that, for as much as has been written by and about Eisner, and for as significant as that division of labor was/has been to comics, that there seem to be scant details about how it actually came about. At least, as far as I can find.
Before Marvel Comics was Marvel Comics, it was a low-end publisher of knock-off material. Martin Goodman's business plan was basically to see what was selling well, and then make as many knock-off versions of the same thing before readers moved on to something else. Although he had been doing that for decades before, that's basically where the Fantastic Four came from. "Hey, this Justice League thing is selling really well! We should get on that right away! Stan, gimme a superhero team!"

That's not at all an uncommon practice still today. Marvel started doing superhero movies really well, and we've got a glut of superhero and comic book movies now. They started spinning them all together in one great big "Marvel Cinematic Universe" and people are trying to copy that model. Variant covers, line-wide event-driven stories, universe reboots... anything that does well, inside of comics and out, gets noticed and copied. Usually ad naseum.

Some players do it better than others, but there are two general approaches to this. One: do it as fast and as cheap as possible. Two: do it as big and as loud as possible.

Now, I bring this up because most creators simply do not have the resources to do big and loud. At least not at the level they'd need to. The Walking Dead started in 2003, and soon picked up steam. The zombie genre started seeing more prominence in comics, movies, TV shows and you can't swing an undead cat without hitting a zombie cosplayer at a convention any more. But the only ones that really register are the larger scale ones, like Ash vs Evil Dead. Even though half the creators in any given Artists' Alley are doing zombie related material, you don't know what those are. Those creators just don't have the volume.

So the trick, at that scale, is to do them fast and cheap. Get on board as soon as possible, and jump off as soon as you start being overtaken by the guys doing it louder and bigger.

The problem, though, with that approach is that you're always chasing the quick buck, and you never know what's coming next. Maybe Westerns will become popular again. Maybe dystopian thrillers. Maybe retellings of ancient Chinese legends. Whatever it might be, you have to know enough about them to get something out in the market quickly before the people who are more expert in that subject/genre do something. It's do-able, as far as go-to-market plan is concerned, but it requires a constant and ongoing survey of the entire market. Which sounds ridiculously exhausting to me.

A better approach might be to focus on what you're really passionate about. If that coincides with something popular, that's fantastic, but if not... well, you're still probably going to get exhausted (this time by trying to promote your work to an audience that's less primed for it) but at least you'll love what you're working on.
Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...

Kleefeld on Comics: On Business: Fore-Thoughts
http://ift.tt/1NHxucE

Jack Kirby Collector: Incidental Iconography
http://ift.tt/xLP9rc

Kleefeld on Comics: On History: The Great Comic Book Artists
http://ift.tt/1U2hAxA

Kleefeld on Comics: Weekly Comics Links
http://ift.tt/1ThknCR

FreakSugar: Webcomics Wednesday: Break Time!
http://ift.tt/1JuQadZ

Kleefeld on Comics: On -isms: A Tess Fowler Story
http://ift.tt/1JxAZ3J

Kleefeld on Comics: On Strips: Dilbert Guest Strips?
http://ift.tt/1Zsqacw
I missed this a couple weeks ago, but Dilbert creator Scott Adams is looking to take about a month off to work on some other projects, so he's put on a call to see if anyone would be interested in doing guest strips during that period. He states early on that it would be a paid gig, so he's not trying to pull a "for exposure" line of bullshit or anything, which is cool.

But then his request gets... uncomfortable. He starts by saying that he's looking to showcase some other perspectives...
I don’t want you to produce the normal Dilbert comic. I want you to introduce a new character or a new perspective so we see something entirely different. I’d love to see any workplace perspective that is not a generic white guy. Show me a new point of view – female, gay, Latino, African-American – whatever you want. Introduce a new character and see if it sticks.
Not exactly elegant wording there, but I suppose the intent is... is 'sincere' the right word? Not exactly, but it seems like he's trying to respond to criticisms of misogyny and white-washing in a positive manner.

But the "see if it sticks" part rings pretty false to me. I mean, he's offering people a week-long gig on the strip. Even if you dropped the entire current cast of Dilbert for the whole week to focus on the more diverse cast you were trying to ham-fistedly insert into Dilbert, a week's not enough time to "see if it sticks." That's one of the reasons why syndicates have aspiring cartoonists submit at least TWO weeks of strips to even be considered for anything. And, hell, one of the last big "hits" of strips, Pearls Before Swine, ran exclusively online for a full year before it was felt that there was enough support to put it into print! Does Adams really think fans of what Dilbert has been for the past quarter century will suddenly rave about a new and totally different type of character that's suddenly dropped in for a week?

Adams continues...
For background, the reason Dilbert lacks diversity is because the market does not yet allow a white male to write humor about well-organized minority groups. The problem is that all comic characters have exaggerated and stereotyped flaws. That’s what makes them funny. I can write about white-guy-nerd flaws because I am one. And I can write about white guy leaders who are jerks because leaders have power. But I could not introduce a gay or African-American character and assign that character a stereotypical flaw. The market is not yet mature enough for that.
So what Adams is saying here is that he's not allowed to present any minority characters because he's white? And that the only way for a minority character to be funny is if they rely on existing stereotypes?

Look, I know the newspaper funnies aren't exactly a sea of diversity representation, either on the page or off. But haven't other white creators done just fine adding minority characters WITHOUT resorting to stereotypes? Franklin in Peanuts; Lt. Flap in Beetle Bailey; Oliver in Bloom County; Marcus, Phoebe and Eugene in FoxTrot; Lawrence in For Better or Worse; Caulfield in Frazz... It's not as long a list as it should be, certainly, but my point is that being a cishetero white person doesn't mean you can't introduce non-cishetero white characters and it doesn't mean that you have to rely on bad stereotypes.

And I think that seems to be the thing that Adams has failed to grasp when people criticize the "generic white guy" approach he has with Dilbert. The absence of diversity in his strip is a problem only in part because he doesn't even think about representing a broader population; the more significant problem is that when he IS forced to think about it, he can't come up with anything besides bad stereotypes. He's not just ignoring these groups; he's not even thinking about these groups as people! In his mind, they're these broad monoliths of ugly stereotypes.

Here's the killer part of Adams' request towards the end...
Realistically, I will probably find some cartoonists through my industry contacts, but I wanted to spread a wider net just in case there is some hidden talent lurking.
So he's not really going to give your submission that much consideration anyway? He's going to rely on the connections within the decidedly cishetero white boys club to look for diversity? Anything I suggested earlier about sincerity or responding positively? Chuck that out the window.
Tess Fowler, as you may know, is the current artist on Rat Queens. She relayed a story via Twitter earlier this week that speaks to a whole host of issues, not the least of which is dealing with hurtful relatives. And no, I'm not trying to ruin anyone's Christmas -- she ends on a decidedly more upbeat note -- I'm showing how a person can reclaim her life as her own despite others' attempts to destroy her. Fowler doesn't go into too much detail here precisely how she was able to break free from so much of it, but that people can and are willing to help others is what I try to advocate in my own meager way here.