LEMME TELL YOU IT’S BETTER’N DIGGIN’ A DITCH
LEMME TELL YOU IT’S BETTER’N DIGGIN’ A DITCH
I might have recently – I admit nothing – suggested that a good way to break into comics is to get a blank sheet of A4, mutilate it, scribble your deranged imaginings all over it and then attack it with a breadknife until the resultant mess resembles some sort of pamphlet, then hurl it at some unsuspecting retailer and demand money.
And I was right!
BUT there’s a difference between getting into comics, which requires nothing more than pen, paper and a willing audience, and getting into the comics industry, which requires industry a.k.a hard work. Enter Larry Young, of Ait/Planet Lar fame.
He does a book called TRUE FACTS - a book of columns which ran in the currently non-functioning but soon to return SAVANT – which will almost certainly be somewhere on your comic shop’s shelves, and if not, why not? It tells you how to self-publish your own proper, good, big glossy comics, with good print runs and all, and readerships to match. It tells you how to do this in the US, admittedly, but with a few tweaks here and there the rules are applicable globally.
There is a downside, which is that this book will scare the shit out of you. It will frighten the very life out of you because it seems to suggest, without insulting or attacking the reader, that the only thing holding you back from your self-publishing dream is you yourself and your Playstation addiction, or your basic lack of any kind of talent, or your gross stupidity and inability to handle funds, or just the fact that you can’t be fucking bothered, and these are hard truths to swallow when you’ve spent your life imagining yourself as Dave Sim without that whole, y’know, woman thing. Not just comics either – by the same coin, you could create your own film, or get up on a stage and sing, or become a flamenco dancer in far-off Spain, living by the sweat of your brow and charming senoritas with your ready wit and flashing eyes of danger. OH GOD! What have you been doing with your life? Larry draws the true faithful in conspiratorially, making you blush to the roots of your being as he blithly exposes your weaknesses.
All of this will of course BUILD CHARACTER so go off and buy/borrow/steal a copy, or download it off the SAVANT archives for the price of an internet connection and some electricity.
Confidence is the only thing missing from TRUE FACTS, but it will come, and you have to produce the comic before even Chapter 2 is meaningful, so we have time. Time for some Playstation, in fact. Ah, sweet indolence.
Vic Fluro in The Brown Wedge • 208 views