Shedding the dead, and saying what needs be said.

*WARNING: Contains talk of comic books, and burning of small, rickety bridges*


It’s no small feat to carve out an audience for oneself, regardless of what it is you’re doing. Try as one may, much of this post-consumer world we live in has blinders on to anything that doesn’t look/sound/taste/feel like it fits in their particular niche. It’s also incredibly difficult to not get tangled up in stats and numbers, and not hold it against the world when you really feel like you’re doing the best you can. It’s an even bigger task when you’re trying to spread your art across multiple genres, formats, and audiences. I’ve come to learn that it isn’t really that big of a deal, the numbers, the hit counts, the re-posts, or the comments. At the end of the day, I’m still going to do exactly what I do. I’m still going to make the music I want to make, and I’m still going to draw what I want to draw. I record my music in my bedroom. I draw on a sheet of plexi-glass laying on the floor (I don’t have a table.) Compared to many others who have big studios, or amazing art setups, I’m happy, and my worries are relatively small. What I have to say in the following is meant to save maybe even one person from making the same mistake I cyclically repeated for a decade. Nobody else is going to do whatever it is you want to do for you. And 9 times out of 10, trying to involve people in that is going to hold you back. Help is great. A second opinion can end up saving you a lot of time. But, to steal the classic Terminator line, “There is no fate but what we make for ourselves.” You feel fated to do something? Do it. If you wait around hoping other people will come with you, you’ll blink and your whole life is passed by.

The last couple of months have been some of the most interesting and integral of my entire life, and a lot of it has been shedding old skin. Like many, growing up I wanted to be a pencil pushing superstar for the “Big Two” (Marvel and DC Comics respectively.) I have a love of superheroes that will never die. It’s something my Dad and I shared together for the first five years of my life until he died. He was the first to say I was good, and he was the first to put the idea in my head that drawing superheroes was something I could legitimately do with my life. To be honest with myself, a lot of the passion in my pursuit of that goal was to give as much honor as I could to the few memories I actually have left of him. Part of that passion is the reason I’ve chosen to turn my back on the “Big Two.” It’s just too difficult to have respect for someone or something that has no respect for itself. I’ve stopped buying any products that have Marvel or DC logos on them, and my services and abilities as an artist and creator are no longer available to them. Until both of these companies make some very definitive changes in their treatment of creators, their legacies, and the characters on which their respective empires were built, to work for them would be A.) a huge disservice to myself, and B.) a huge disservice to anyone who actually appreciates my art. The legendary Steve Bissete’s recent challenge only helped to reinforce my decision. I just have to never mind that for the last 6 weeks Marvel reps have slowly circled around like fat lazy vultures. I desperately want to play in that metaphorical sandbox, but I’d rather wait until they clean some of the cat shit out of it, and realistically, that may never actually happen. The mainstream comic industry IS dying, but only because the mainstream world is dying. Their reaction is to tighten their grip like a barbed wire noose around their properties, their vendors, and most of all their employees. It doesn’t take a PHD to know that the dying find peace, or get better, by letting go.

See, I’ve had a lot of near hits with the comic industry in the last ten years. I’ve seen countless ideas that I’ve shared, taken, run with, and published to marginal degrees of success. In the earliest days of In Sleep I Travel (when I went by the name Infernal Devices,) Ben Templesmith was the artist/designer in charge of putting a visual to my music (this was well before Hellspawn and 30 Days of Night.) The way he layered imagery and color has been one of my biggest influences, not necessarily graphically, but in the music itself. I struggled to make my music as good as the artwork he was providing. In many ways, I’ve yet to be entirely successful. Around the end of Ben and I’s tenure (link to interview: http://www.popimage.com/industrial/060501templesmithint.html), as his star was rising, and mine was remaining stagnant, I began working on a couple of projects with writer Dan Jolley (JSA: Liberty File, Obergeist.) %98 of the reasons for those projects never coming to fruition lay squarely on my shoulders. He was working with Tony Harris, who still to this day is one of my illustrative idols. I was 17, and good for 17, but no Tony Harris, and at the time, I wanted to be. Most of my failure has been simply crumbling under the weight of my own expectation and ambition. At some point around 2000/2001, I completely bowed out of the scene. I figured I’d hone my craft more and come back with a splash. 2004 found me in the midst of developing a project that was being geared toward Adult Swim, a Twilight in Lord of the Rings (this was pre-twilight vampire boom) type of thing that eventually collapsed under it’s own bloat. I took a trip to San Diego Comic Con that year (THANKS STEPH!), and got great response. Nearly every pro I showed my portfolio to just asked why I wasn’t working on a book. I didn’t know. I didn’t really get the indy game. I thought you worked for Marvel or DC, made a name, then did your own thing. (I’ve since learned that it works opposite.) Again, back to honing. In 2006, Jim Lee was on tour promoting his new Superman book, and happened to be coming within a days drive. I was 10 in 1992, Jim Lee wasn’t actually a person, he was a fucking demi-god. He’s still to this day probably the most ripped-off and marketed comic artist the world over. Lord knows I’m still trying to break some of the piss poor habits I picked up copying his work. With two days prep, and a very pregnant wife, I went and waited in a line that wrapped around the block. Jim ended up walking down the line signing comics as quickly as possible and I just held my portfolio open not saying a word. He did a double take, and stopped. He flipped through the handful of half finished pages, looked up at me and said, “This is the best stuff I’ve seen all tour. Finish the pages and send them to me in La Jolla.” I never did. I froze. As great as that was, it wasn’t what I needed. I guess being told “your good enough” is for people who don’t want to get better, they just want to be “good enough.” I crave knowledge, I love learning. I went home. Shortly there-after, I had my first son, and didn’t do much of any serious drawing for several years (fortunately, my balls began to finally drop on the musical end during this period.)

In 2009 I decided to try the Midwest. In all of that decade, I’d moved from coast to coast (Los Angeles, Myrtle Beach, as well as “home” Montana.) Musically it seemed appropriate, as most of my direct influences began in the Midwest. At first Joplin was really great. Not too big, not too small. There was a place to actually get comics (growing up in Montana, the closest place was 200 miles away,) and lo! There was even a small hometown comic convention, Hurley Con. I’d been to Wizard Chicago ‘99, and San Diego ‘04, so my convention experience was of epic spectacle, and save wonderful conversation with Seth Fisher in ‘04, not very personable. Hurley Con is a small one day affair with a few of the Midwest’s working pros. I got to meet and get feedback from some really talented people, including Joplin’s own Jeremy Haun. We seemed to hit it off right away, and about a week later he invited me to his home to take a peek at some things he had in development. He asked if I might be interested in assisting him on some ink fills as he was under deadline. “Oh sure,” I said. In my head I was thinking, “oh holy fuck I’m actually going to work on a real actual comic page with a real actual comic artist.” It was a page of Top Cow’s Berserker, and he drew while I inked all through the night until around 5 in the morning. We talked about Grant Morrison, and I talked loosely of Telefated. I was so jazzed when I got home I couldn’t sleep. I busted out my supplies and started going to town well into that afternoon. He was fairly happy with the work I’d done and invited me back over to do some more and perhaps this time to pose for a couple of pictures for reference. I was all to happy to oblige. I’d always kind of dreamt of some type of apprenticeship, and surely as I got better he would help to get my work in front of the eyes of those who could actually give me work right? So credit or payment was never brought up, it was mildly inferred that when I had finished some samples he would help me out with some of the legwork of getting it out there.
Over the next year I’d come back and help him out, pose for pictures, or just have friendly conversation, because hell, we’d become friends. Over the duration of the Batman: Arkham Reborn book I must have climbed in and out of the Bat suit a hundred times. I got to be Batman, what the hell could I complain about? It didn’t matter if my payment was a beer and some McNuggets, I had an end goal in site and this was part of paying dues…or so I thought. A good childhood friend, Joe Bereta (yes, viral video star Joe Bereta), said to me, “Hey, if you’re good enough to do the work, you’re good enough to get paid.” I shrugged it off. Jeremy was my friend. I wasn’t the only one that helped him work on pages, there were/is around 4 or 5 others that came in and spent hours with their head down getting shit done. Behind their backs he’d often say some pretty harsh shit about them, and played a kind of mind game that they just weren’t that good, so this was as good as it was going to get. Then I noticed a comment (and I’m paraphrasing here) that began to reveal his true colors. CB Cebulski (talent coordinator and now Senior VP of Marvel) tweeted; “Artist, if your running behind on a deadline, it isn’t the time to have all your friends come over and help you finish pages,” to which Jeremy tweeted back, “Wow, people really do that?” That right there people, is what you call a bold faced fucking lie. The only reason I didn’t jump ship right there is because A.) I want to believe in the best in people, and B.) I actually had a lot of fun doing the work. With Batman all wrapped up, I started to spend a lot more time on my own stuff and pursuing my own leads. Our weekly interaction came down to planning and doing the life drawing class, which was very dear to my heart. I would set up and tear down the class, and help to costume and dress the models. Money was super tight for me, always has been, and probably always will be, and I couldn’t afford the fee for the class. So despite all my work and effort, I wasn’t allowed to go. Jeremy threw me one last distraction, asking me to compose an original music piece for Battle Hymn 2. Despite no pay, I obliged, as I always have. As I said earlier, it’s really hard to get anything you do out there and have people take notice, so I’ve always taken any opportunity. I did a couple of things that week that I didn’t feel really fit, and told him I would have to keep digging. Somehow, this became, “I did it, but was going to use it for something else.” He stopped taking my calls or returning text, and the next thing I was told was “Well, B. Clay Moore said, fuck that guy, so…” and the project was pulled from me, without so much as a note being heard. By this point, I’d actually had a handful of pretty great motifs, but wasn’t able to get in touch with Jeremy. Months went by, and Jeremy sent out a tweet looking for some missing DVDs which I’d been borrowing. I told him I had them, brought them back to his house, and we’d had, what I thought was a make-up conversation. I was in the middle of some MAJOR life changes, which ended up with me being homeless and sleeping in an abandoned train station for a short while. I’d spend my days in the park drawing next to a stream, and my nights in bars doing portraits for a few bucks. I ate oatmeal three times a day. Truth be told, I was really, really happy. I was doing what I wanted to do. I was drawing what I wanted to draw. I visited Jeremy for a half hour one day, showed him what I was working on, got some hot water for my oatmeal and left, on what I thought were good terms. We haven’t had any personal interaction since. At this year’s Hurley Con he saw fit to send a fan over to my table to borrow a Sharpie, while never saying a word, or bothering to check out my table. He’s seen it plenty fit to go into my girlfriend’s work place, and talk about how I “used him,” and how I was an asshole, all the while expecting the entire town of Joplin to kiss his ass because he’s really good at light boxing photographs. My e-mails and inquiries to re-acquire a few comics and a studio chair I let him borrow get no response, or returned. I was extremely upset for a long time about this. It’s made me physically ill at times, because I really gave him my all, and I truly believed he was a friend. I’m not angry anymore so much as I just feel really sorry for him. Now that I’m in the field I can see the trees. He’s an incredibly dissatisfied person, and with good reason. He’s locked into a lifestyle that requires him to spend 12 hours a day drawing crap that he himself doesn’t even want to read. That’s hard folks. Being a professional comic book artist is probably one of the most demanding and thankless jobs in commercial media. He’s been doing it for over ten years now, and can’t really see beyond himself anymore. I feel incredibly blessed and thankful for the time and lessons learned, but the only thing I ever did wrong, was give him %100. The biggest lesson I learned, is just because you spent your life pursuing a goal and got it, and it turned out to not be what you really wanted, doesn’t give you a license to be an asshole. So, I’m thankful. If this experience is what I needed to keep myself from turning into that, than it was all well worth it. All of the money and material objectification in the world aren’t worth a goddamn thing if you have to get up, and slog through something you don’t even care about everyday.

I still have a good handful of mainstream superhero art that I’ve yet to post, but I’d wager it’s the last you’ll see from me for a good long time. Maybe once Marvel kicks some cash to Kirby’s family, or DC learns how to work with the architecture built on the backs of many before demolishing and rebuilding every ten years (if the focus had been on telling good stories that were imaginative and creative as possible in the first place, they wouldn‘t have to,) maybe then, I’ll toss my hat back in the mainstream superhero ring. If it’s still there. I know I will be, along with thousands of others, doing what I want to do, and not worrying about the bottom line, or catering to an overlord with mouse ears.

Tomorrow, I'll share some new artworks, including a genuine first peek at Telefated!