my trial by fire

Saint Sinner
© Clive Barker &
Marvel Comics inc

Writer: Elaine Lee
Art by: Max Douglas
Editor: Marc McLaurin

In 93' after working on two issues of Night Breed for Epic [1][2], I was hired on as the artists for a new title, part of the Marvel Razorline [home of the Barkerverse] called Saint Sinner. The Razorline was a set of 4 titles conceived by horror author and film maker Clive Barker, to be marketed I was told in competition with, the then Brand new, Vertigo comics from DC,which had proved there was readership big enough for a line in horror and fantasy books.

For me this project was no small thing at all, at 22 it was the first time someone had asked me to do a monthly title. I had no idea if I was up to the monthly schedule yet, a concern I expressed to Marc a few times.

But Marc expressed an unflinching [ & I now tend to think of as unfounded ] optimism and trust in me to be able to do the job. I think that perhaps, had I enjoyed the book, I may have been able to keep a monthly deadline. My experience since has shown that if I have to deal with too much interpersonal stress on a job, I fair very badly. The demotivation spreads to all things tainted by the conflict. Suffice to say bad moods don't help motivate me to draw very much, and while I can just DO it, the work's, and eventually my own quality wavers. Stress sucks, hard.

Things didn't end up going so well on Saint Sinner, and in the end I quit the book after 4 issues. Inking the 5th as I passed the book to the next artist, Richard Pace, who I had brought in already to do Breakdowns on #4 as a prospective replacement for myself. The title was canceled along with most of the line by issue 7.

A big part of my leaving was due to failure to produce on schedule, this was in large part due to the working environment. And I think many of my reasons for quitting are also In my opinion, contributing reasons to why the books were ultimately canceled. The stories behind many of the pages from these books explain why I say this. So I'll be posting the art in installments here with brief background stories. I'm a firm believer in the spreading of knowledge, and if some who had the sort of experiences I had back then, had told me about these sort or issues that inevitably come up on WFH comics jobs [as they do in most professional creative work], and had maybe suggested ways of dealing with them other than just 'suck it up. That's the way it is', well... it would have been a big help. So I'm going to try to be as fair and balanced as I can here and see if I can identify the issues that came up, and how I might have dealt with them better, knowing what I do now

:: THE COVER ART ::

Book 1

For the first issue I did a number of roughs and after approvals we went with this design (a). The art was used for the cover of

Dread #9 [ The magazine of the first Official Clive Barker fan club (The Breed) ]-.

But then just before the deadline Executive Editor Carl Potts told us to redo it, sighting the Cross † imagery as potentially offensive to the Christian Right...With my eyebrows arched [ the book is called 'SIANT SINNER' people! ] I drew this second version of the cover (b)...this also was rejected two weeks later. Exasperated and focused on trying to meat the deadline for #2 I told them to use it or not but that I didn't have time to do more versions. In the end they cut and pasted the two into the final version that was used (c), adding a embossed foil cover despite my firm objections. It hadn't been desinged for it at all and it was being slapped on as an afterthought shortly before things were to go to press. Frankly I think they did to cover for the mess they made of it, but they told me point blank that it was to boost the sales by exploiting the collectors boom sales numbers. In point of fact I warned them that the prospective market was more likely to be hostile towards gimmickry. I'm still convinced this was a factor, the 'work' done to my cover art to obstencibly 'improve them' made for ugly covers.

Now there's not much to be done in this situation. I think you can try to make your case, but in my experience, when the publisher gets it in their head that something will either hurt their bottom line, like offending some group who may make trouble for you, or improve it, like adding a gag cover to boost sales numbers, they seldom can be talked out of it.

Believe me I've tried, all sorts of ways.

Also, for any publishers reading? Might pay [literally] to prove me wrong and listen to your talent. I'm not sure how much Elaine pushed this but we both expressed concern about the way the script was being chopped up and made to suit their formulas rather than trusting our instincts, and we were resoundly ignored.

And to prove us right, the books frankly sucked in the end and sold horribly.

Oh we did a decent job all things coincided, but nothing we could do would save us from the incredibly overbearing and narrow sighted editorial death grip from the publisher on this project.

I mean, you hire your talent because, ostensibly, they know how to do something well enough that you are willing to pay them for it, right? Well then show some trust in your own decisions and Let Them DO the Job! And if they tell you something is a REALLY bad idea, maybe you might just want to pay attention, no? Micro managing is NOT a good idea, especially in a creative field.

Oh, and that embossed foil cover? It got us huge orders on book one, which resulted in big bonus checks. 6 grand for me!...

...But as it turned out, it was a fiction...you see someone at Marvel botched up in sending out the checks when they did, before the News Stand Returns came in... So 6 months after, when I inquired as to why I had not received a check for some time for work I had recently completed, I was told that I actually owed them another $600!! to balance my 'account' with them before I'd see anymore money, effectively I had worked for two months for free... It terns out that the gimmicky cover didn't help sell anything, so almost ALL the news stand books had been returned [not to mention Saint Sinner 1 lines the bottom of more than a few 50 cent bins in comics shops all over], supposedly effectively canceling the royalties - no, sorry, at marvel they call them 'gratuities' thus legally unbinding them from having to pay them if they don't want to.

That they didn't even tell me this when it happened, but rather, as they had already paid me my 'gratuities', they garnished my wages! Some how it seems I owed them- !!! -Aside from being legally questionable, It really fucking busted my britches and my wallet. In effect I paid big BIG time [you try missing 6 grand from your budget without warning] for some other fuckups mistake.

Pardon my French but as I said, this incident was a sour point for me. To add insult it came on the eve of a vacation that I had planed for 5 months that I deeply needed at that point. I ended up having to cut it much shorter than planed. I was long off the book by the time this went down, and it was in effect one of the reasons I resolved to not work for Marvel for almost ten years, and I still feel pretty steamed when I think about it.

This is where you publishers take note; my 6 grand was just a small part of the total sum Marvel had to EAT on those books, and they didn't pay us enough to make it all back by stealing it from the talent on that book.