Around San Diego 2001, I had begun, thanks to my now-fiance, Elizabeth, learning how much information you can get online. I was completely new to this phenomenon. I had a computer that was probably ten years old, and all I had used it for until then was as a data processor for writing scripts. I had no other reason to use a computer that I knew of.
But Elizabeth showed me how much information, and how many people, can be accessed through the internet. I started looking around online, and finding that a lot of my favorite artists had their own websites, or at the very least, had places where their comics or original art were sold, or their representatives could be contacted.
Early on, I found a site dedicated to inkers, that had interviewed tons and tons of great artists, many of them pencillers who inked their own work. The site asked questions about the tools they used for inking, how long it took them to ink a page. Technical questions. I found the questions moderately interesting, but the site was amazing, because it listed most of these artists’ websites and often their emails!
This began my fanboy letter-writing phase.
I fantasized about all my favorite artists, and made lists and lists of everyone I could think of that I might like to write to, and included their websites or emails if I could find them. I started sending out letters to a number of artists I admired, or even to artists I just admired a little. For some reason, I thought it was okay, if I liked one thing about an artist, but wasn’t keen about other things, to let them know both of those things. I would let them know what I liked and didn’t like. Pretty much, whenever I wrote these kinds of letters, I wouldn’t hear back from the artists. If I were one of those artists, I would have been pretty pissed to get a letter like that, I think.
But if I wrote nice letters of adoration, I still sometimes wouldn’t hear back from the artists…but sometimes I would. It seemed I would hear from artists with more regularity if I mentioned having an interest in buying some of their original artwork, in which case they would write back and tell me where online their art was for sale.
I remember getting a nice letter from Michael Lark. I had told him how great I thought “Batman Nine Lives” was. What can I say? I loved how noir it was. I imagined that he was maybe some hard-boiled fifty-or-so-year old, who slaved away at his art board, and didn’t have much understanding of technical advances like computers. I imagined he watched old movies and read old novels and had very little contact with the outside world, let alone computer access.
He wrote a kind note about some of his favorite film noirs, and I was surprised to see Joan Crawford’s “Sudden Fear” on the list. I wrote back that I hadn’t had him pegged for a noir melodrama type.
I wrote a letter to Brian Michael Bendis about how great I thought his Daredevils were, firing up the story arc with the Kingpin getting hit. I wrote my personal feelings that character-driven stories are overrated and got on my nerves, because now no one cares about a good, rippin’ story about events, because they’re so busy exploring how their character feels, and what s/he’s gone or going through, and all that bullshit that doesn’t interest me. He of course never wrote back.
I was learning that if you want your idols to respect you, you should show them respect and appreciation, and not be a little twit who’s so eager to tell them all the things you don’t like about their art or stories. I was realizing there’s no need to tell artists what you don’t like, because they have to worry about that enough, every panel they draw, without all the little twits reminding them of their shortcomings.
But also, I was learning that this industry is very accessible, and you can hunt a lot of people down quite easily, and write to them and say hello, and if you’re nice about it and they aren’t too busy and have a moment, they’ll even write you back. Wow!