Things to Come

Originally published January 15, 1993, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1000

(As a bold experiment here at BID, we have decided to withhold the column intended for the 1000th issue of CBG and instead go straight to the column for the 2000th issue of CBG–which, by our rough calculation, will see print some time in the year 2012. Once we actually get to 2012, we will then run the column originally slated for the 1000th issue–currently in a time capsule buried in the back yard–to serve as a testimony to the current state of affairs.)

BID: Good day, and welcome to the 2000th issue of CBG. As a special treat for you today, we have an interview with the hottest creator of comics today: Gabriel Jones, the creator of– among other things–Flagman, the best-selling comic book hero of all time. Gabriel, how are you doing?

Jones: Terrific. It’s great to be here.

BID: Gabe, it’s phenomenal the amount of stature that you’ve achieved in the industry, when you’ve been in it such a relatively short time. How old are you, anyway?

Jones: Nineteen.

BID: Nineteen. That’s really hard to believe.

Jones: OK, OK. I’m nineteen next June.

BID: And yet Flagman, published by Marvel Comics under their DC Comics imprint, has already made you a multi-millionaire.

Jones: It’s amazing, I know. And nowadays, being a multi-millionaire really means something. It’s not like the old days when I was born, when the Democrats were running the show for a brief time. Thank God that whole thing self-destructed and we got the country back in GOP hands, heading in the right direction.

BID: So tell us about Flagman–the genesis of the character, that sort of thing.

Jones: Well–I hope this doesn’t sound too manipulative, but frankly I sort of created the character based on all the things that make a character hot today. First and foremost, of course, was to make him a cowboy.

BID: Well, of course. That’s almost a given.

Jones: I mean, c’mon. If a new comic title today isn’t a western, romance, or science fiction, you can pretty much forget it.

BID: Of course. And since you’re looking to tap into what makes a comic book hot, that’s also why you made him a pacifist.

Jones: Absolutely. He never kills anyone. If he’s in a fight, he sticks strictly to passive defense maneuvers and never throws the first punch. A character of high moral standings and ethics–that’s what the people want to read about.

BID: And yet he’s incredibly promiscuous.

Jones: Well, now, that’s one of the remarkable contradictions about this country, isn’t it? On the one hand you have the highbrow morality preached by the government. On the other hand, the simultaneous development of the AIDS vaccine and the ready availability of male birth control pill, both of which came around at the turn of the century, increased the amount of sexual activity in this country a thousandfold. It was like a volcano had been capped for a while and suddenly unleashed.  Naturally, you want your hero to reflect the times.

BID: And when you developed Flagman, the deal you cut with Marvel was–?

Jones: Oh, industry standard. The usual 50/50 split of all income generated through all forms of sales, both print and electronic. Plus merchandising, dramatic rights, all that sort of thing. And, of course, when I decide to leave the character, I choose my own replacement and continue to act as creative overseer–and, of course, continue to earn half of all money brought in on the character.

BID: Sounds like a good deal. Do you work with an editor?

Jones: “Editor” isn’t really the right word. The correct term is “liaison.” She acts as my traffic manager, making sure that the final product gets to the printer, and also to the data base, so it can be properly distributed.

BID: I still think the electronic dissemination of comics is among the most fascinating developments in the past few years, don’t you?

Jones: Well, it was only to be expected. Downloading the comic from a central base and paying for the download–and the best thing is, when you read the comic one time, it then automatically erases. Prevents that annoying pass-around aspect.

BID: It was also the final nail in the coffin for the entire comics-as-collectibles notion.

Jones: Pardon?

BID: You don’t know?

Jones: Know what?

BID: Not too long ago, one of the main audiences for comics consisted of speculators who would buy comics and then hoard them for resale value.

Jones: Get outta here! Really?

BID: I’m surprised you don’t know. It’s fairly recent history, relatively speaking.  At any rate, the bottom fell out of the entire speculation thing about 1994. A whole bunch of retailers went belly up, which resulted in the bankruptcy of one of the major distributors. That was around the time DC was sold to Marvel–before that, it was jointly owned by Warners and some Japanese investors, having dissolved the DC corporation a year or so before that. Big shake-ups. For a while there it looked like Image might buy DC first. They had a massive cash infusion since they’d abandoned the direct market and signed an exclusive distribution deal with a national chain of retail stores. But they backed off DC at the last minute and Marvel got it.

Jones: Yeah, well, who cares? That’s history, over and done with. What’s now is what is.

BID: So how do you go about putting together a comic book? I’m sure all our readers would like to know.

Jones: Well, you see I’ve got my computer set-up right here. Let’s take this sequence I’m working on right now, where Flagman is about to have a shootout with the bad guy.

BID: But he’ll only shoot the gun out of his hand.

Jones: Oh, of course. Now–I need a decent shot of Flagman squinting against the sun. So–I access my art file, calling up head shots. There, that’s a good one. Now I add some of the options: Beard stubble. A bit more squint. Now let’s angle the face a little…maybe about, oh, 11 degrees to the right. There, you see? It sounds like only a little, but it makes a ton of difference. Now, we add shading. The sun’s overhead, and his hat is acting to block it, so we should be shading the upper half of his face.

BID: Readers, although you can’t see it, you should be aware that Gabe is making all this happen just by touching the screen.

Jones: Of course. The touch-sensitive screen is standard now. I mean, c’mon. What’d you think I was going to use? A mouse? Get real. So there’s the basic art. Don’t need much dialogue here, but this is the slightly tricky part. Once I’ve activated the dialogue mode, I have to watch what I say, because the computer will automatically enter whatever I say. Once I was dialoguing and my girlfriend came in, and she was feeling frisky, and–well, Flagman was suddenly saying a lot of things like “Oh God, yes!” and “More!” in the middle of a poker game. Which kind of made sense in context, but it was still a little weird. So anyway, here we go. Dialogue mode on: “Draw, fella.” Dialogue mode off.

BID: And there the words appear on the screen, already ballooned.

Jones: Right. Now, that was the last panel on the page, so I’ll color the whole page now. Hold on. There. Done.

BID: That took no time at all.

Jones: Well, most of the colors are already pre-determined. The coloring program just makes adjustments for things like shading, light source–that sort of thing. Only stuff that really needs much involvement from me is crowd scenes where I indicate what I want emphasized, so the computer knows what to highlight and what to do as knockouts. You have to let the computer do it. With over 900 colors on your palette, there’s just no time to make all the decisions yourself.

BID: I’m kind of curious about the actual art selection process. You didn’t draw that picture yourself.

Jones: No, of course not. I couldn’t draw to save my life.

BID: Then where did the original illustration come from?

Jones: The original? Who knows? Some pencil jockey did it years ago.

BID: And you just copied it.

Jones: Well, I didn’t just copy it. I tweaked it a bit, put it at a slightly better angle.

BID: Yes, but still…

Jones: I mean, why in the world should I have to sit and draw something? A face is a face, a body is a body. I have over 8500 different pieces of art in my art file–and that’s just for figurework. Not counting all the elements I combine to create backgrounds.  And the best part is it’s an ongoing project. If I find in some old comics other drawings that I like, I just use the scanner, feed them in, and capture the basic linework.

BID: But isn’t that essentially theft?

Jones: Of course not. It’s swiping. It’s hardly anything new. In the old days, there were pencilers who would draw whole books composed of nothing but swipes. All this is is the next logical step in the evolution of that practice. Technology didn’t invent the practice. It just perfected it.

BID: But doesn’t that limit the scope of what you can do?

Jones: Not at all. There’s thousands and thousands of different combinations. In fact, it gives me more variety than in the old days when you’d have pencilers drawing the thing. Because either the pencilers would work within the bounds of their own abilities, which means that they could only go so far and no further. Or they would swipe–except that they had to do it clumsily, instead of with the computer perfection that I use.

BID: So, in other words, what you’re saying is that the penciler is obsolete.

Jones: Oh, absolutely. Excess baggage. Why in the world any writer would need a penciler is beyond me.

BID: That’s kind of ironic, really, that you’d say that. For example, a mere thousand issues ago, back in 1992, the biggest debate was who was more important to a comic: The writer or the artist.

Jones: That’s certainly a dumb debate. Then again, who can figure out the older generation? Hold on a second.

BID: What did you just do?

Jones: Well, that was the last page I needed to finish for this issue. So I modemed the whole thing to my liaison at Marvel. She’ll handle it from there.

BID: So how long does it take you to put together a complete, 32-page comic?

Jones: From start to finish? About, oh, a day or so.

BID: And for a fan to read it?

Jones: About, oh, two or three minutes.

BID: Doesn’t sound like there’s that much writing involved.

Jones: “Writing” is almost as obsolete a term as “penciler.” What I am is a storyteller. Except I tell stories using pictures. Today’s audience doesn’t have time to linger. It’s not like the old days when you could kick back and watch a slow moving film like, I dunno, Die Hard II. People don’t want to get into a story. They want the story to get into them. Oh great!

BID: What?

Jones: Coming up on the screen–it’s fan letters for Flagman.

BID: For which issue?

Jones: The one I just finished.

BID: Finished just now? A few minutes ago?

Jones: Right.

BID: You weren’t kidding.

Jones: Nope. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I gotta get started designing the splash page for the next issue. I think I’ll start with a Liefeld pose or maybe Kirby or maybe…yeah, I’ll mix and match.

BID: Thanks for taking the time to talk with us.

Jones: Think anyone will read this? If you’d like, I can do some illustrations to go with it. Won’t take a second.

(Peter David, writer of stuff, congratulates all the folks at Krause Publications for reaching the 1000 mark. So–what have you done for us lately?)