Cause & Effect

“a gnat sneezes in the Amazon and it rains in India”  or “someone sticks his toe in the ocean in Florida and a tsunami hits in Japan” no that isn’t quite it either, how about “a cat is penned up in a steel chamber…” no I don’t think we need Schrodinger’s Cat but you get the idea.  Things happen and ripple and change and effect others in ways that we don’t think about.

For some reason I’ve been pondering this concept of cause and effect lately.  I think the BP oil spill is partially to blame.  I mean talk about cause and effect! There are thousands of gallons of oil flowing into the ocean every day thanks to a man made device.  Obviously, there are effects to consider.  The most obvious is the ecosystem.  All the little fishy’s and shrimps and baby what-have-you’s rolling around in toxic sludge.  Then it gets to the land and the birds and crawling critters are effected.  Then it gets in the gulf stream and goes on it’s way to who knows where.  Then there is the financial effects.  If you have stock in BP I’m thinking now is a good time to sell.  Even if they recover from the PR nightmare they are going to have to spend billions (that’s billions with a b) to get a handle on this mess.  That is inevitably going to mean layoffs of people who work in offices and drive trucks and whatever.  Then there is our dependency on oil and the fact that we are currently losing tons of with no means of modern science to stop it.  Talk about something that needed an exit strategy! Cause & Effect.

This gets me thinking about another water problem.  Did you know that there is a place in the ocean called “The Garbage Patch” estimates vary but it is for sure hundreds of miles long some estimates equal it to the size of Texas.  It is a floating trash pit in the North Pacific.  It’s full of actual trash debris and of broken up polymers of plastic.

When you watch as your napkin flies out of your car window, where does that go?  When you see a plastic sack rolling down the road where does that go?  When you see some moron pull over in a parking lot and dump out his ash tray and his McDonald’s wrappers where does that stuff go?  Well it hits our drainage systems, then our rivers and eventually the ocean.  (Although I’m pretty sure all plastic bags go to Yemen to die.  If you’ve ever been to Yemen you know what I mean, there are millions of plastic bags floating around that country!)

Who does this effect?  Watch this video you’ll be amazed or google “the garbage patch.”  (There are also a few books out there on it.) Cause & Effect.

So, you ask, what does all this doom and gloom (& water) have to do with comics?  Well it’s really the cause & effect I’m talking about and those depressing examples just happened to come to mind.

Let me explain… as most of us know comics are done in stages.  You have to have someone come up with the story (writer,) then you need someone to draw the story (penciller,) then you need someone to go over that and turn it into black & white art (inker,) then you need someone to add the words (letterer,) and lastly the color (colorist.)  Seems simple enough right?

There is always a catch, let’s take an example of a big publisher like DC.  You can’t just write a story that sounds interesting.  You have to figure out if those characters you want to use are already busy in another series or if they are dead or if something is planned for them in the future.  You also have to see what other books they are in ‘cause they can’t be in two places at once (sort of.)  This takes time and coordination efforts.

Once that is sorted out the penciller has to turn those words into images (at least some of them) and make them pretty.  You also have to find a penciller that isn’t already booked doing something else. Then the penciller and the writer go back and forth trying to figure out is this right, is this what you meant, etc.

Then the inker gets into the game and he has to consult with the writer & the penciller.

I should mention two other things here, first off is the editor.  This person is involved in every step of the project and also has to approve and weigh in on everything.  The other thing I need to say is that sometimes these projects start a year in advance sometimes not that long but in reality the writer & penciller have somewhat long deadlines due to all that coordination.

Back to the list, next comes the letterer and the colorist.  They get the files at about the same time (with the shortest deadlines by the way.)  If the penciller had 3 months or 3 weeks the colorist is lucky to get 3 days.  And we now get the input of the writer, the penciller, the inker, the editor, and sometimes the letterer (for word effects like BLAM or whatever.)  So not only are we doing 22 pages of full color in a very short period of time but we also have to wait for everyone else in the process to weigh in and offer suggestions or corrections.

After the colorist & letterer come the printer, the distributor, the actual truck drivers delivering to your local shop, the marketing people are in there somewhere, the owners of the comic shops and finally you the buyer of comics.

Now, the reason the colorist has such a hard deadline is that if the publisher misses a ship deadline that book becomes available for returns (meaning they don’t get any money and sometimes have to buy the books back.)  This tends to upset them for obvious reasons.

When the ship deadline is missed then the trucks have nothing to deliver, the shops have nothing to sell, and you have nothing to buy.  This seems inconvenient but really that is a lot of people at the end of the chain depending on a handful of people that started this process months ago.  When things are late or shoddily produced they don’t sell.  When things don’t sell people will eventually lose their jobs.

Seems like there should be enough planning that we never miss deadlines, but of course, that is a fairy tale world and things happen that can’t be foreseen.

Long story short (or not so short really) think about your actions as a penciller, colorist, worker-bee in whatever field your in… who do you effect.  What happens if you miss a deadline? Can you recognize the effect you have on the other people in your private and public life?

Pretty heavy I know, I gotta stop watching that oil gush out for a while it’s super depressing.

PS. I stuck up a picture from an issue of  World’s Finest #1 but this book was never late or too much of a struggle, so don’t yell at me Sterling, you were used as a GOOD example not a bad.

Kristy Miller

VP, Development

Hi-Fi Design