parakkum

Erik Larsen

The Erik Larsen interview covers his history, and how he ended up where he is now. It also gives Danny Fingeroth a chance to bang on his ever-present drum of "Where have all the kids comics gone?" I think Axel Alonso has an excellent answer to this in issue #3. I have to say that Erik Larsen's recent "you all suck, you noncreative bastards" letter is really interesting in light of him saying in this interview that he's really only interested in doing superhero comics, and doesn't care about anything else. That strikes me as pretty unoriginal. I do have to say that Larsen comes off rather grumpy in this interview (and that letter), but he's been decent in my brushing personal encounters.

Steven Grant

Steven Grant's article is titled The Ten Rules of Surviving Comics, and it's pretty much as advertised. The article itself goes into detail, but here are the ten rules, in brief (you really need the explanations for all of them to make sense):

• Understand Freelancing
• Know What You Want
• Know Your Market
• Know Your Status
• Know Your Editor
• Network, Network, Network
• Get The Work Done
• Be Flexible
• Have A Back-Up
• Be Determined

Stan Berkowitz

Stan Berkowitz spoke at Wondercon this year and sounded pretty cynical. In contrast, he's fairly upbeat in this article, where he talks about how his own career developed. In a recurring pattern, he was in a very bad place around age thirty before things started to click. Then, he worked in live-action television for a while, before transitioning over into animation. It's his opinion that once you do animation, you can't really come back out of it (though Paul Dini is an exception). Overall, a solid interview, with a ton of detail about how Stan's career developed.

Todd Alcott

I didn't really know who Todd Alcott was before I hit this inteview, but if you wander over to IMDB, you'll see that he wrote Antz. Alcott is in the fascinating position of doing both avant-garde theatre and huge, mainstream movies. Alcott started out wanting to be a writer, but ended up doing a one-man production to have his writing seen -- even though he's not a big fan of interacting with people, or performing. Since then, he's bounced back and forth between the two worlds, apparently asking himself why he writes plays about serial killers and is then hired to write scripts for animated movies, but with no preference between the two. Really fascinating, and a great take on how to have respect for two different artistic worlds that sometimes operate with a lot of mutual hatred.

Lee Nordling

Even though you probably don't know him, I know Lee Nordling as the Executive Editor of Platinum Studios Comic Book Department, a role he had at the time of this interview as well. As always, the interview itself is quite interesting, but with the bonus of a series of sidebars about making it in the comic strip business. Comic strips -- that is, the kind you read in daily newspapers -- are a very limited market, and a really, really hard one to have major success in. But for now out-of-date continuity-laden oddities like Modesty Blaise, I've really never had any interest in doing a daily newspaper strip -- but if I did, I'd be pretty depressed.

Anne D. Bernstein

Anne Bernstein has had an extensive and varied writing career, working in magazines, for comedy troupes and most recently as MTV animation, where she was a major creator on Daria and MTV Downtown. She also spent a chunk of time at Nick working on their many shows, reinforcing my impression that Nickelodeon is a pretty decent place to be a writer. Beyond these different points, the interview is laced with yet more stuff intriguing bits and pieces about how a writing career can develop. I especially liked a bit about deadlines and procrastination, and how normal they are.

Good issue, interesting reading. It'd be a good student project to do a compare-and-contrast on the careers of the various writers interviewed. When did they first write for money? How does that compare to what they're doing now? Did they even want to be a writer in the first place?