Smoke and Kat and Mouse’s Alex DeCampi talks about her experiences pitching for Vertigo:
It was great, in that it made me realise that I really have no interest in making any further efforts to get published by Vertigo, ever. There’s just nobody there I click with.
When Shelly [Bond] came out to get me from Reception I swear to God I thought she was the floor security guard. Black man-trousers, sensible shoes. skinny red stripy tie and white blouse. I was like NO I WASN’T TOUCHING THE KRYPTONITE, HONEST MA’AM oh you’re Shelly? HIIIIIII.
When we got to her office, Shelly dismissed all my ideas out of hand - the pitch-book that Federica and Bertozzi and I took like two weeks to make, without even looking at it - then asked me if I wanted to write a pitch based on a newspaper article she had read that morning.
I know people produce some great work there, but oh dear heavens, not my kind of place.
The Minx freebies were so bad, I left them at Haspiel’s place as I couldn’t be arsed to take them home.
Brian Wood offers a more cautious view:
yeah, getting a book going at Vertigo is a total trial by fire, and one of the reasons I think its such an exclusive shop. spending 18 months writing a couple dozen drafts of a proposal tends to separate the wheat from the chaff. that’s why I didn’t bother from the time my first Vertigo series ended in 2002 and when I tried again in 2004… i couldn’t bear to go through that again. but it got better, or i got more used to it.
(Via Alan David Doane’s blog, and it’s been a long time since I’ve typed those words.)
