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Creation By Brian Koscienski and Chris Pisano
It was now time to find some artists. Okay, how the heck do we do that? We're a couple of knucklehead writers; we knew nothing about artists. We suddenly felt like we were searching for a piece of hay in a needle stack. But, we had some ideas.
Flyers. Yep, the same kind of flyers that we all used in college to look for a new roommate, stereo, and/or couch because our last roommate broke the stereo and set the couch on fire. Our flyer was pretty simple, stating that we were a fledgling publishing company looking for artists who must be over 21. Since we hold all our meetings at the local Hooters, we didn't want to have anyone feel uncomfortable as the police hauled Chris and me away for supplying alcohol to a minor. And no manga. To find out why, simply review our past articles, because I'm sure no one wants me to go on another blithering tirade again.
Of course, we started at the local comic shops. In case you don't remember, we live in south central Pennsylvania, near the state capital. That'd be Harrisburg for those of you who fell asleep during the "state capitals" portion of school. Don't worry, I have no idea what your state capital is either. If we include the area within a radius of about ten or so miles from H-burg, we're looking at a population of about 150,000 or so. That's a pretty healthy pool to draw from. But not healthy enough. We netted ONE reply, and that was four months after we had concluded our search. We did find out that one of the comic store guys was an artist and had some interest in our projects. But then he quit the store and moved away, never to be heard from again. We were off to a great start!
My mother is a portrait and landscape painter who happens to be a member of all of the area art associations. So, she took a handful of flyers and made them available to the many members. One person referred a friend of his to her, and she referred him to us. Yes, I'm 34 years old and I still need my mommy. My therapist says I'm making great strides.
Of course, that didn't pan out either. He was incredibly talented, and asked for commensurate compensation. Fortress Publishing is incredibly poor. So when an incredibly poor publishing company meets talent like that, then the only thing that can happen is we remain without talent. So, we were oh-for-two and ready to paper the local colleges with flyers, wondering how many replies we'd get from people mistakenly looking for a couch. But we decided to turn to an old friend first-- the Internet.
We had heard rumors that there's more to the Internet than porn, fantasy sports sites, porn, eBay, and brokerages. The rumors are true! We found a few sites that do a great job showcasing artists' talents. However, there was one site that stood out head and shoulders above the rest when it came to helping outsiders (like us) find the specific talent we're looking for-- Digital Webbing. What really sets them apart from the rest is their "talent search" section. Whatever you're looking for, you can post an ad telling all who enter exactly what you're looking for. That's what we did and jackpot!!
Our inbox overflowed with submissions. Okay, it wasn't that bad, but we did receive about 50 to 70 submissions, mostly within the first week of running the ad. The submissions came so fast we had to double-check our ad to make sure we didn't accidentally say we'd pay money. What truly impressed us was the fact that we considered less than 10% to be unacceptable. Then we noticed that a lot of them, probably half, came from outside the American borders. So, we needed to run to our lawyer again.
We were concerned about the contractual side of the deal. How do we make a contract with a person whose laws are different than ours? Would he or she recognize the contract? What currency do we use? After he gave Chris and me paper bags to breathe into so we wouldn't hurt ourselves hyperventilating, he told us what we needed to know. First we needed to make sure that the United States had parity with the county in which the artist resided. Upon hearing a lawyer word like "parity," Chris and I started breathing heavily into our paper bags again. But our lawyer calmed us down by saying (despite Bush's best efforts) that we were in good standing with most of the world's countries. Meaning, that when we wrote the contract, we would have to explicitly state which country's laws we'd be using. As long as there's parity between the countries, then all parties involved with the contract had to follow the laws of the country stated within the contract. Whew! When it comes to what currency to use, that must also be stated explicitly in the contract. Double whew!
With some fears alleviated, Chris and I went back to reviewing the submissions. We looked at all the standard stuff-- storytelling abilities, panel usage, plot flow, and (most importantly) the art itself. We're not the biggest fans of abstract. And sometimes an artist sacrifices too much realism for style. It was quite a difficult task narrowing down who we wanted to contact since there were so many samples we liked. But we did and made a few contacts. Some of the artists were further along in their careers than we were, and we simply couldn't offer them what they wanted. However, we did find four that we worked well with and out went the contracts. Currently, things are progressing better than we hoped with these guys, and we are still on track to meet our deadline.
Even though we have all the artists we need for our main project, we're always interested in seeing artwork for other projects we have going on. So, if you're an artist and you want to share your work, we'll be more than happy to look at it. Just send it to comicbookmonkeys@yahoo.com and we'll let you know what we think.
Brian and Chris reside in south central Pennsylvania where Brian is often chased by angry villagers wielding torches and pitchforks due to his uncanny resemblance to Sasquatch while Chris can often be found in newspapers and magazines under the headline "Cro-Magnon Man Found." Their obsession with writing is pretty thorough; their compositions range from stories to novels to articles to comic books to poetry. They even went so far as to start their own publishing company called Fortress Publishing. Their main mission in life is to simply do what the screaming voices behind their eyeballs tell them to do. Click here for more of Absolute Write's resources for comic book writing.
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