At any comic book convention in America, you'll find aspiring cartoonists with dozens of complex plot ideas and armloads of character sketches. Only a small percentage ever move from those ideas and sketches to a finished book.
In the Golden Age of Batman, I penciled, inked, and lettered my strip by myself.
First of all there was a guy named Charles Nicholas, who used to do all of the inking that Jack and Simon didn't do. Simon used to do splashes and covers, but Charles Nicholas, after a while, did the inside of all of the stuff.
There is a sequence in my 'Detective Comics' run where you can't find consecutive issues by the same artist. That's intentional. That was done on purpose.
I'm happy I can sit home in my office and make up stories about superheroes. And I only have to deal with a pretty limited amount of people to get those comics produced.
Imagine, 24 pages of superhero adventures produced by the same writer and artist every month!! How did they do it? (What? By being professional about it? But that's too much like work!)
All of the penciling was consistently done by one person and the inking was whoever could finish on time.
I've written, like, 450 comics, and 'Secret Six' was the first one I've had ship late, ever. So it took a lot to make that happen. So we had a little bit of a stop-and-start, and then we had Convergence, and then Issue No. 2 of 'Secret Six'.
I still do some inking here and there and I've actually got a book that I'm going to ink entirely.
To me, I was always just standing on the sidelines because up until issue 50, we were just doing Spawn. I wasn't recruiting anybody because I didn't have any books for people to work on.
Let me tell you, writing comics is as hard as anything I've ever done - for me, at least. I'm now officially in awe of guys who can crank out multiple books a month and maintain a high level of quality. Comics are completely different than any other medium I've dabbled in.
I think a 23-page ordinary comic is an investment for the artist, but if you're doing something 60 to 104 pages, that's a really big investment for an artist. So unless you've got someone who wants to pay you while you're doing it or up front, it's kind hard to get someone to do that with you, unless you're the artist yourself.
I'm used to doing comic books, where every month there's a new comic book! I find that the movie business is not quite the same. It doesn't move quite as fast.
If I could have somehow been the kind of artist who could crank out two or three issues a year, that's different. That's sort of what it's all about, to get this thing out so that there's some kind of continuity. But to do a comic book every year or two was just so anti-climactic.
With comics, there's no budget. There's a budget in terms of you have to pay an artist and a colorist and all that, but you can do anything you want to do.
Most people don't realize that when we were producing 'Black Panther,' 'Quantum & Woody,' and 'Steel,' fairly few people were reading those titles. We were constantly threatened with cancellation.
If you want to, if you are a crazy person, you could go from idea to the stands in about four months. It does not cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to make a comic the way it does to make a television show or a movie.
In comics, collaboration saves your life. How well you can work with an artist, a colorist, a letterer, is how good your comic is.
When I'm working on comics, I have to give myself a million deadlines, or I'd never get anything done. Comics are just so hard to make - I find it very difficult to motivate myself.
