On his blog, writer Matt Fraction marks the fourth anniversary of the release of Last of the Independents, and the launch of his comics career:
Taking stock between LOTI in summer ‘03 and now, even counting the dead year where finished work rotted but nothing came out — Go Team Comics! — sees the release of four published shorts, fifty some single issues in the can, another graphic novel, and a half-dozen collections with a half-dozen more on the way. And I have a morgue file with 30 some projects in it adding up to literally hundreds pages of pitch work, script samples, botched liftoffs, written sketch pages, aborted projects or just plain old finished but never-published work.
[snip]
That earliest comics career instinct of playing at being the Coen Brothers or Steven Soderbergh looks like this today: I’m working on four ongoings at the moment, three for Marvel and one at Image. The Marvel books, PUNISHER WAR JOURNAL, THE ORDER, and THE IMMORTAL IRON FIST mean that I can afford to do CASANOVA at Image for nothing, where whatever money we DO see I shunt over part and parcel to my collaborators. The schedule gets grueling but I’m getting better at gaming it, at working it to the advantage of my sanity. The goal now is to write a little less and earn a little more but keep up this particular model. At least for the time being.
With the past four years inventoried, Fraction lays out his immediate future which, thankfully, includes more Immortal Iron Fist.
Related: Fraction Q&A at Newsarama
June 26th, 2007 at 11:32 am
Fraction’s work shows that by applying both hard work and a little thought into the process of writing comics, you can deliver stories that are both smart and entertaining.