To everyone who seems to think they can’t get their dark/gritty/male-led/whatever comic published because “SJWs won’t let me”:
There seems to be a disconnect about how things work.
Literally nothing is stopping you from making and publishing comics, and if you say, “My comic won’t get published because of SJWs!” you don’t understand how the industry works. You know how you get a comic published nowadays? You make a comic and put it online. Boom. You’re published. That’s literally how it’s done. Sending your original ideas into the Big Two is a waste of your time and effort. Odds are, they’re not going to even read your submission. If you include their standing characters in your story, they are actually legally disallowed from reading your submission.
Image, Dark Horse, and Vertigo don’t do open calls. In order to get in with one of them, you have to have work finished that you can show them. You have to go to cons with a portfolio or find out who to send your portfolio to. They won’t buy your work on a pitch alone. You need to prove that you can produce content consistently while on a deadline. Updating your work three times a week for a year and having a back-up plan of how to stay on schedule if your computer blows up? That’s what’s going to get any of those companies to pay you any attention at all.
Now, Oni’s about to open up submissions to everyone, but the thing is, they’re going to want to continue building their current brand. If you want to take a swing at Oni, make sure what you’re writing feels like something they’d publish. Read as much of their shit as you can possibly get your hands on and pay attention to publication dates. Did they publish a lot of something from 2004-2012, but not really much of it since then? Don’t pitch something that fits that description. Do they seem to be building a backlist of something that feels like it should be on a shelf with your work? Submit that thing. That thing has a better chance.
The easiest, quickest way to break into comics—that is still spine-snappingly difficult, quite honestly—is to just publish that shit on your own. Publish it. Plug it. Rinse and repeat. The only way to find out if your comics will make it is to put them out for people to see. It’s hard, exhausting work, and you will make shit for pay for a good long while, but if you want to create comics, you have to create comics.
Honestly, the people I see posting this concern are not people whose work I want to read based on their current attitude, but by god, the only way comics will continue to exist is you fucking make them, and no, I’m likely not your audience, but maybe you’ve got an audience out there. Or maybe, when I see the finished work, I’ll say, “Actually, this is really well done, and I like a lot.” I can’t say because you haven’t shown it to me.
Write it. Art it. Letter it. Post it. That’s how you publish comics. Get to it.
Life is much simpler than we make it out to be with our “what it’s” and “I’m not good enoughs”. Just freaking do it guys.
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