Retrospective Part One: Wrath
Keep Working, You’ll Get There.
Warning: This first story is not “fun”. It deals with some of the worst subjects you can discuss. If you are in pain and can’t cope, please seek help. Don’t wait. I care, and the people around you care.
Behold, I have refined you, but not as silver; I have tested you in the furnace of affliction. Isaiah 48:10
Introduction
I want you to believe in yourself. I don’t care if you started today or forty years ago. We all hit slumps during which we think, “This is never going to work” or “It’s just a dream. I should grow up and get a real job.” We might even think, “I’ve lost it. Whatever it was, it’s gone.”
You may feel your current circumstance is just too big a hill to climb. I’ve got to tell you that most people suffer terrible things. Many still reach their goals. They do it by putting one foot in front of the other until they arrive (often to their surprise). The fight is not measured in how many times you are knocked down, but how many times you get back up.
Mother-in-Law: Sometimes you have to be smart enough to know when to quit.
Me: Your right. I’m not as smart as you.
With that in mind, for the next few posts, I’m going to go way back in time, before money, before respect, before industry recognition – and show you (with brutal candor) the timeline of misfires, hiccups — and “yes”, successes — that took place over nearly thirty years. I’m going to tell you how it started, how it went, and finally, where it all ended up.
Dark Night of the Soul
It’s the early 2000s and I’m late to the game. I’m over thirty with a diploma from a school so bad it was declared a fraudulent institution and shut down by the government. I make up the difference with private tutors we can’t afford and some DVD courses. YouTube is not the resource it is today, so there’s no help there. In short, I’m old, unskilled, without contacts, and I can’t afford business cards.
The death of our son has left my wife in a deep depression. The most generous description of my mental state at the time is “unstable”.
We live in a one-bedroom apartment in a crime-ridden neighborhood. She works overnight in a call center. I cycle between crushing guilt, suicidal depression, and rage – taking heavy prescription medications and trying to find work during the day.
We rarely speak. I don’t understand how she can even pretend to go on with life. She doesn’t understand why I can’t.
I lose jobs as fast as I can get hired. Hoping that self-employment might offer some income, I find small gigs at an online talent broker. The owner brokers deals between writers and illustrators. He finds the artist and takes the check from the writer. After he takes his cut, he gives the artist his pay.
Except he doesn’t…
St. John the Honest
One of the clients was a brilliant writer named John Johnston. He had not only been paying me; he had even sent bonus money which the broker was just keeping. When he discovered what was happening, he got it fixed in epic style – putting the broker in his place and getting my money (which I didn’t even know I was missing). Needless to say, I was grateful. Working for him in the future was a no-brainer.
Johnston is a true creative polymath. He can write, design, fabricate, and conceptualize on a level few can. He wanted to design perfectly laid out, expertly illustrated and lettered comic book “pitches” in short form. They looked just like a comic in every way, but with fewer pages. This way he could pitch his projects to publishers without paying the huge up-front cost of creating a full issue. It was brilliant.
He honored me with the cover and interior of his amazing story, “Wrath”. Johnston was writing “weird west” before it was a real genre, and he was good at it. Wrath was a post-apocalypse story in which the wild West re-emerged as a violent, radioactive hellscape of mysterious enemies and gritty heroes. I would be illustrating one of the antagonists for the cover and doing several pages for the interior.
WRATH
The cover art is an obvious homage to Patrick Nagel’s Rio album cover for Duran Duran. The high contrast art seemed like a perfect fit with the story’s mix of hyper-modern and archaic, even arcane, themes.
The cover came off well. But if the cover showcases my strengths at the time, the interior shines a spotlight on my weaknesses.
The work is not simply high contrast; it borders on childish. The overdependence on reference shows a lack of confidence in my own abilities. Worse, the areas where I trusted myself to draw more organically are comically blocky and do not match the referenced pieces. That’s not an attack; these sorts of mistakes are not uncommon for someone at this stage in their learning process. Given my inexperience, it’s not really all that bad.
Wrath was drawn with a stylus in Adobe Illustrator on a PC using a 24” Wacom Cintiq graphics tablet. A few friends of mine posed for the photo references. It took about a month to complete and paid quite well – several hundred dollars. That may not seem like much but the fact that an untried, unpleasant illustrator with no serious portfolio was paid at all gives it a shine in my memory – a gloss that will never wear off. God bless John Johnston.
“I don’t settle for win, win. That just means the deal was good for you and good for me. I like win, win, win. That’s good for you, good for me and makes the world a better place.”
-John Johnston
I was awarded several gigs from “Johnny” Johnston and I loved every one. He went out of his way to treat me with kindness, which I rarely reciprocated. My mind was a swamp of bitterness and unresolved grief. He never castigated me for it. Instead, he tried his best to offer me hope and better emotional tools to work with. In old age, I look back on that time and wonder why he worked with me at all.
The Beginning
I’d like to tell you that things got better from there. I’d like to say I was “discovered” and became an overnight success. I’d like to tell you that, despite my behavior, Johnston and I are close friends to this day. But none of that is true, because that isn’t life.
My wife and I would struggle financially, emotionally, and in our relationship for another decade. But Shelley didn’t quit the marriage, and I didn’t quit the art world.
The lesson here is that I wasn’t ready on any level, by any metric, to begin work as a professional illustrator. I started because I had to. I just jumped in. Was it perfect? Clearly not, but you have to start somewhere, or you will look back twenty years later and see all the “could haves” – and that hurts more than failure. One learns from failure. There is no reward for inaction.
However, it would get better one day. There would be a miraculous fairy tale ending and I would go on to do great things. But that is a story for another time.
Next, Part Two: The Godfather of Pulp