Breaking Into the Comic Book Industry

By Jason Boog 

Comic book artist and writer Dave Elliott shared some advice for aspiring comic book creators in a long interview at deviantART.

Elliott created Weirding Willows, a fantasy comic book that blended scores of heroes and creatures from classic books. Here’s an excerpt from his interview:

Marvel and DC look towards IDW, Boomstudios, Dark Horse and Image Comics for their talent. They do that because there is no hiding when a creator can’t keep their deadlines or has an emotional meltdown … If you want to draw something in particular, you’re going to have to do some samples of that character. You can always get more eyeballs on your pages by doing mash-ups where characters meet who couldn’t in their own books.  Have Batman meet the new Sherlock. Draw how you would imagine the Justice League would look in J. R. Tolkien’s world. Have Blade and Buffy team up against the Twilight characters.

In a Morning Media Menu interview last year, we spoke with Ron Martino, the producer and director deviantART Network. Martino gave tips for creators looking to explore the social network. Here’s an excerpt from that interview:

The literature community is vast. There are novelists, graphic novelists, comic book artists and writers. Artists and creators come to deviantART in many different ways.  We have writers that come on and they find the artists that they would like to work with to create a comic book or graphic novel. We have artists that come on and hook up with writers, colorists or line artists. They start to build out a story together. We have people that can do both on the site. They are artists and storytellers, so they release chapters of a book every week or every month and that’s how they build an audience and tell stories.