My Future Shock Hell! (Chapter 1 of 4)
This four-part essay is an updated and extended version of a piece first published on my blog back in 2014, itself prompted by a popular talk I gave at Bristol Comic Expo the same year
Art by Brett Ewins
I submitted my first script to 2000 AD knocking on twenty years ago. Back then the legendary British sci-fi anthology was your most viable option if you were unfortunate enough to be living in Britain and deluded enough to want to work in newsstand comics. The venerable war title Commando took open submissions, but everyone else - Titan, Panini and The Beano - were a brick wall.
To get in with these publishers you needed to have gotten in somewhere else first. Similarly, the notion of writing for Marvel or DC was something akin to the whimsy of a crack-addled Leprechaun.Today, if you’re British and want to ‘break in’ to comics, there are several other doors to publication that await your crowbar.
Crowdfunding is now an option if you’ve got the time, the know-how and the followers. And if you’re funding a project with nothing but passion, potential collaborators can be easily reached via social media. You can host projects online on the platform of your choice, forming the basis of a big shiny portfolio over which potential editors can then feign interest.
Taking these routes to assembling a complete comics project can take months, maybe years, in between day jobs and other commitments. On the other hand, writing a single four-page script can take only a week or two of solid focus. Almost two decades on from my first sale to 2000 AD, I can safely say that if I were starting out now then I’d still be making cold submissions wherever I could...
