What have I learned this year? Part Three: Off-Week
2008-12-30 12:17:02
We’re girding our comics loins for the post-Holiday crunch, where all the work we didn’t get done while we were too busy hanging our stockings by the chimney with care comes back to haunt us. Our printer is closed for the Holidays this week, so no books are leaving house. We’re gearing up for next week, where we’ll be sending out ASM 584, par tone of Marc Guggenheim and John Romita Jr.’s epic-to-end-all-epics, CHARACTER ASSASSINATION!
But these rare quiet weeks give me a moment to reflect, and when I reflect, I frequently look back on all the mistakes I made. That should give you a good idea of what my childhood was like. Putting out 36 issues of Spider-Man in one year, mistakes can’t help but get made. Many of you were kind enough to point them out to us in e-mails through out the year. It’s a cliché amongst editors, but I’m new enough at this to have never said it before: nothing kills you more than opening the first make-ready copy of a book and seeing a mistake. Cuz once it’s in print, that’s the ball game.
My first major mistake at Marvel was crediting the wrong guy for a cover. My boss was kind enough to take the rap publicly for it – after all, I’d been here about a month and he had to go out of town the week the book left house. But I’ve never felt worse about something. I ran into that same jilted cover artist at a convention later that summer, and when I apologized for it, he smiled and said, “the *check* had my name on it, so I’m okay.”
That does lead to the much more painful mistake you can make of not paying your freelancers when work comes in, which can occur from time to time. *That* one particularly stings you because when it does occur, it too often happens to the guys who really bust their humps to make the payment deadline.
It’s an odd situation being a comic book editor – much like a producer in TV or Film, if you do your job right, no one thinks you’ve done anything at all. But when you screw up, everyone notices. Even if they don’t, *you* notice and sometimes that can be even worse. (Especially if you’re prepared to hang yourself for every mistake you’ve made since 4th grade, like me.)
In a situation as unique as the thrice-monthly Spidey, I can sometimes get stuck with a case of tunnel vision. There will be moments where the assembly line mentality comes dangerously close to trumping doing it the right way. You can have a thousand eyes on a book and still miss the most obvious mistakes. ASM 581 went through all of the necessary sets of eyes and a few extra ones – and we only noticed right before we sent the book out that dialogue balloons were going to the wrong people in one crucial page. We caught it that time – but sometimes we don’t. That said, I think we tend to catch the big ones before they go out. Still, all the effort in the world won’t prevent a mistake from slipping through.
The best advice I ever received about those mistakes was from a very unlikely place – John Stockton, legendary point guard for the Utah Jazz and the only six-foot-two 46-year-old white guy who’d put a scare into the guys at The Goat Park (look it up). I was at a past job assisting in a web interview, and he said something akin to the following quote (I can’t find our interview with him – this is from another interview he did with a different outlet, but essentially the same quote he gave us)
“I make bad decisions, too. I think the big thing, and it came from a long time ago, is that you just don’t give up. I make a lot of mistakes. As you get older, people say, 'You don’t make many mistakes’ and ‘You lose a step,’ and I’m not sure either is true. All you can do is keep trying, regardless of what happened the play before.”
Corny a sentiment as it is – it’s true. We make mistakes, and we push past it. That’s not to say you shouldn’t hold us accountable – by all means, call us on it (if nothing else, we can fix it for the trade!) because ultimately this entire industry drives on is the passion of those of us working on the books in the offices and across the world and those of you picking up the books in the stores. It’s the reason we push through those off-weeks.
About this blog: Freshly spun news and previews from the office of the Amazing Spider-Man
About the author: Editor "Simperin" Steve Wacker and assistant editor "Typin" Tom Brennan take time out from bringing you Amazing Spider-Man thrice monthly and indulge your need to know everything now!!!
)
)
)
save this link
