Who's Who in the CBU 2008

Name: Regie Rigby

Regie is a strange, almost ethereal creature. Who can plumb the hidden mysteries of his dark and murky past - a past which contains a terrible secret. A secret that taught him that with great power comes great responsibility, that criminals are a cowardly superstitious lot and just who exactly knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men.

By day, he assumes the appearance of a mild mannered teacher, bringing the joy of literature and the English Language to classes of enthralled and enthusiastic students. But by night?

By night he goes home and writes lesson plans. Sorry. That's as interesting as he gets. Really.

The rumours about rooftop struggles with underworld uberfiends, the gossip about the hidden cave filled with hi-tec equipment and the suggestion that his car might be fitted with turbo lasers are all nonsense.

When he's not teaching he reads comics. Sometimes he combines the two activities. When he's not doing that he's either playing computer games or asleep.

How Do We Make It Big?

By Regie Rigby

It’s a frustrating week this week. In my day job, coursework deadline day is coming up, with all the attendant hassles that involves, (regular readers may remember this from the last couple of years, newer readers, just trust me – don’t ask…) so I’m a little stressed. (That’s why I’m a day late too…)

Then there are two things what’ve come to my attention in recent days that I can’t talk to you about yet, which is winding me right up because I’m rather excited about them. But, I’m not saying anything yet, because I said I wouldn’t. So you Lott will just have to wait and see – but trust me, it’ll be well worth it.

So, what am I going to talk about this week? The death of Captain America? Could do, but do you know what? Not gonna. There are all sorts of reason for this, but they boil down to the following three:

1. What’s to say that won’t be said better by other people who actually like the character?
2. I don’t like the character very much. For the same reason I don’t like Superman, since you ask.
3. Yeah right. Like he’s going to stay dead.

The wonderful 2000AD T-Shirt contest?

Nah. Not many people have won that, frankly, and I think you can look forward to a bit of a re-launch of that in the not too distant future – stay tuned for further details!

So what else?

Well, lately I’ve been thinking about new talent. It strikes me that some of my favourite comics writers and artists are, in fact, virtually unknown to most comics readers. Some of the best comics I’ve ever read are produced by people in their “spare time”, for no money, with no professional publisher, no marketing and no distribution. As a consequence, they reach teeny tiny audiences. Appreciative audiences perhaps, but you can’t eat appreciation. Without big sales you can’t make a living in comics, which means an awful lot of talented people are unable to give their creativity their full attention because they need to work full time in “real” jobs.

What a waste. Think of the adventures they could take us on if they had the time!

And yet take a look at your average comics store rack.

Of course there is a lot of good stuff there – possibly more than there has ever been. But there are also a lot of talentless hacks getting their stuff out there. I’m not naming names, but regular readers know pretty well who I don’t rate.

There can be only two reasons for this. Either the comics reading public will buy any old tat, and is incapable of exercising simple quality judgements, or the wrong people are catching the eye of publishers. I suspect that the truth lies, in fact, somewhere in the middle.

Clearly, as comics readers we sometimes lack restraint. We get ourselves hooked on particular characters, and I guess we’ve all found ourselves buying sub-standard stuff at one time or another. But at the same time, I can’t believe that given the choice editors would rather hire a bad artist or writer if they know where to get their hands on a better one.

Given that the better ones are out there – and they are, how do they bring themselves to the attention of the people who can hire them?

Well, these days everybody has a website – I certainly don’t know anyone that is serious about doing art that doesn’t have their work online somewhere – but that’s only going to attract attention if people know to go and look. You can contact publishers directly, but I’m given to understand that unsolicited submissions from unknown creators are often shunted to the edge of the desk in the general direction of the bin. This is perfectly understandable – Joe Q must get an awful lot of stuff sent to him by hopeful eight year olds and the work of potential professionals will surely get swallowed up and lost in the general mass.

What options are left?

Well, you can do the “publishing yourself” thing and get enough of a following together to get you noticed, and you can pimp your portfolio around conventions then pitch like crazy to anyone who’ll listen to you in the bar. This has been known to work too, but it does mean that you have to be able to catch the appropriate editor when he or she has a spare five minutes, isn’t being pitched by somebody else, and isn’t slumped unconscious from sheer exhaustion.

Not all that easy really. On the one occasion I tried it I felt as though I was intruding.

So, what else can you do?

Well, if you’re serious you’ll be doing all of those things already. But these days there are alternative ways of promoting yourself. There’s Comic Space of course, which is rapidly turning into a valuable tool. Then of course there’s the cunning ploy of finding somebody else to promote you.

Perhaps somebody with a regular column in the internet’s most diverse comics webzine. If only we knew somebody who could offer a platform like that.

Oh, hang on - I could do that, couldn’t I?

Tell you what. I’m going to start a regular series promoting as yet unpublished artists. E-mail me some examples of your work, if I like it, I’ll plug you. For copyright reasons please don’t send your own character designs – I have ideas of my own I’d like to promote one day and I don’t want to be accused of nicking yours. For the same reason I can’t accept story ideas either.

So, to start with, lets stick to characters we all know and recognise. I’m inviting images of the three “figurehead” characters – Superman Batman and Spider-Man. I’m particularly interested in original twists on these iconic characters. In addition, to mark the shield slinger’s demise, I’d be interested to see any new takes you might have on Captain America.

I’m also interested in hearing any experiences you have had trying to get your work in front of publishers. How many of you have tried it? How far did you get? As the convention season gets underway, have you got any advice for other hopefuls? I read an editorial by Dez Skinn once, where he pointed out that the one of the reasons so many people are still reading comics “at our age” is that we all have something we’d like to see in print.

I think he might’ve been a little bit right, don’t you? Let’s see if we can’t figure out a strategy for making it happen for one or two of us!