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CHAPTER SIX I remember the exact moment I gave up on comics. There was a scene, on page 20 of issue #1 of a thunderously ignored miniseries called TOTAL JUSTICE, where the Flash was racing across a beach with Robin and Green Lantern. It was supposed to be this incredibly devastating moment for Wally West, a guy who is so invested in his super-power that the power literally makes him who he is. Due to plot device/McGuffin hoo-hah, everybody's lost their powers, and Flash experiences the humiliation of not quite being able to keep up with the sprightly Robin without them. As Wally invests in trying to attain even this small victory— trying to pass Robin on the stretch— an even greater horror befalls him: Green Lantern passes him, too. I thought I'd had a Great Mark Waid Moment (TM). Something that might actually be remembered long after JUSTICE had become yet another forgettable toy tie-in. To my horror, when the finished comic arrived, I flipped to that scene to see the artist had chosen the exact wrong angle to shoot this scene. You see, in comic books, you can't ever portray speed with n object coming right at you. Well, you can, but you have to be exceptionally talented. Comic books use still pictures. Objects coming at us look static and lose perspective with the world around them, so it's difficult to portray immediacy or speed. If you have three guys running across a beach, you can shoot that form most any angle you could imagine, except the dead-on angle. And that's how the artist chose to draw that sequence: three guys running right at us. The scene had no feeling of speed, time, or place. No sense of motion whatsoever. The three of them looked as though they were standing still, the horrific moment when Flash was overtaken by Kyle Crab-Face Guy (TM) was obliterated in bad storytelling and day-glow color. And I knew, for me, that it was over. TOTAL JUSTICE, which began with some arm twisting and assurances that we would, "Take it seriously," was clearly about to begin the drain-circling that was typical of most everything I was doing in those days. When I seemed to be the only guy on any of the books I was doing who actually cared about the work and invested himself in it. Most everyone else seemed to be in it for the paycheck, with not a lot of thought about doing a good job or telling a good story. Okay, sure, it's my fault. The script never said, "Don't shoot them coming right at us. Have them run ACROSS the page," but, to me, it still seemed like little or no thought went into it.
I don't remember how we ended up with three artists on a three-issue mini. I can't help but think if one guy can't draw even three issues of a comic book in a timely fashion, he or she really needs to do something else for a living. TOTAL JUSTICE #1 was actually not terrible. The artist was exploring his more extreme side, moving away from his Buscema influences, so there was some wonky, experimental-looking stuff. Issue #2 was terrible, the artist just clearly phoning it in. It was Paycheck Comics in its purest form, and it killed every little bit of enthusiasm I had for the project. I realized no one else involved with JUSTICE gave one whit about it. And suddenly, neither did I. From a very strong start, with lots of interconnecting emotional conflict and interesting character bits, TOTAL JUSTICE quickly devolved into Paycheck Comics. Flat, predictable, formulaic plot and truly wretched art by people only interested in the special rate DC was paying for this promotional book.
Between these projects and the apparent creative coma my STEEL artist slipped into around issue #45, I became completely demoralized and seriously considered bailing out of the business altogether. It was clear to me that I was never going to make much of myself in comics, as my name value attracts only this level of mediocrity. And, mind you, it wasn't that the artists sucked: these were talented, very talented, people. They just didn't give a damn, and that I hold them accountable for. It's akin to a penciller doing glorious work, work he totally invested in and totally committed to, and having those pencils sent to an inker who's only interested in a paycheck. An inker who just hacks it out and ruins the pencillers work. That stings. And it takes a long, long time for that sting to go away. It's like getting bad chicken from KFC. Takes you awhile to walk back through that door again. I think, the only thing that really saved me in those days was MD Bright's consistently quality work on Quantum & Woody, and Matt Haley's very, very nice work on a little Huntress story I did for Batman Chronicles. And, of course, ChrisCross' gorgeous work on Xerø.
In any good giant-people story, the city or their environment is a major character in the story. The city helps define the giants and gives them perspective. Without it, it's very difficult to even understand what we're looking at. In this case, New York City was the set piece, and the script called for glorious buildings, Flash passing out and slamming against the Chrysler building and so forth. What I got was trick angles to minimize backgrounds, in-jokes (like the man blithely reading the paper, oblivious to the chaos around him; I suppose the artist thought that was funny) and butter sticks for buildings. Confusing layouts, difficult to follow action sequences, and, despite huge color notes and several phone calls, the Arrowplane was not colored yellow. The Martian Manhunter intercepts Batman in the Arrowcave beneath Olliver Queen's mansion, but the artist chose, for no apparent reason, to use a fisheye effect on the establishing shot so you really couldn't get any sense of where they were. Later, Olliver Queen returns from Tibet and stands outside his old mansion, kind of saying good-bye to his old life as a tycoon. The artist drew an inner-city tenement instead of the Queen mansion. And on and on. Someone asked me online about why I wasn't asked to handle A-List gigs. This trail of miserable, unreadable, horrible comics must, in my estimation, contribute to the overall sense that I'm just not an A-List guy. And I can hardly fault anyone for thinking that. The end product of, say, a Karl Kesel comic is an accessible, enjoyable, professionally-produced deal. The average Priest comic, at least in those days, was an indecipherable mess. And, I guess just before Sal Velluto was hired to draw BLACK PANTHER, I figured that was simply the way my career was going to go: to be forever at the mercy of inexperienced or arrogant or simply lazy or stupid people who know nothing about how to produce a simple comic book from a fairly complete, un-mysterious script. I certainly hope those days are well behind
me, now. Time will tell.
Priest's adventures in the comics trade continue in:
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It was yet another scene from yet another
comic drawn from yet another script that I worked my *butt* off on, that I
wholly invested myself in and committed to, and was later handed off to an
artist who seemed only interested in his page rate. Mine is a career of
torpedoes, visual storytelling consistently ruined by artists, yes
artists, who don't think visually. Who, most of the time, don't
care, or whose investment in the work depends on the sales figure of the
book. For example, the same guy could draw an issue of X-Men and
he would bust his hump to make that the stellar job of his career.
But, handed TOTAL JUSTICE, he just blows it off.
Most everyone else I was saddled with was a
beginner, like the very talented but seemingly arrogant guy who drew
LEGENDS OF THE DC UNIVERSE #11&12, my Justice League: Critical Mass
story. This guy simply chose to change things in the script, to use
different angles, and to apportion panels differently from what I'd ask
for (say, making a tiny panel huge, thus leaving no room for the really
important scene that followed it). The major problem with
"Critical Mass" is, well, the JLA is supposed to be 200 feet
tall (Dan Raspler's idea) and growing, endangering the Earth. But the artist
chose to use a lot of forced perspective (possibly to minimize the amount
of the city we would actually see and thus making it easier for him to
draw). Forced perspective pulls foreground objects forward, making
them look huge. So, some guy on the street reading a paper looked like HE
was 200 feet tall, or that he was bigger than the lumbering, giant JLA.