While at New York Comic Con last week, I did a panel with editors Mike Marts (DC), Nick Lowe (Marvel), and Rob Levin (Top Cow), moderated by Glenn Herdling and hosted by the great Buddy Scalera. We were talking about how freelancers or aspiring artists should work with and approach editors, and we were  all pretty surprised when Rob said that most of Top Cow’s artists come from portfolio reviews at conventions. Mike and Nick and I seldom hire someone off portfolio review. Discovering new talent should be a priority for editors, and yet we find that we seldom do that. We tend to hire artists that have done something somewhere else, maybe much smaller scale than our own operations, but not someone who’s never been published before. It’s something I don’t like to admit, only for fear that it discourages aspiring artists—but if someone can show me what I’ve been doing wrong (Rob…?), I’d be glad to listen.

Jill Thompson, the amazing Chicago-based artist and writer of Scary Godmother and a host of other books, was at NYCC, in part to promote a new book with Dark Horse called Beasts of Burden, written by Evan Dorkin. Jill and Evan first created this bunch of neighborhood dogs and a cat who face down occult threats for The Dark Horse Book of Hauntings, and this summer we spin it into its own series. We announced the book in a panel where Evan went on one of his famous tirades, grabbing attention by announcing Flash would appear in the book, and we figured DC wouldn’t even notice because “Dan Didio’s too busy ruining something.” Jill and Evan both spent a lot of time in the DH booth, which led Jill to introduce me to a Pratt Institute junior who creates amazing comics pages, mostly in the computer, like a lot of the kids these days. I hired her on the spot for a story in Myspace Dark Horse Presents. Later that same day, Sierra Hahn and I were doing portfolio review in the booth, and the fifty-second guy in line was really good. I believe he was a student at RISD. We hired him for a short story, too. Rob Levin, I guess you’d inspired me. 

Frankly—and I’m gonna get letters about this one!—I’m usually not happy with the work I see from college students. I want to think that schools graduate students trained to professionally pursue the discipline they’ve studied. I at least would like to see seniors whose work I can look at and say, Okay, you gotta do this, this, and this, and if you can really pull that together, you could get work. But so often the work of college students looks marginally better than the work of high school students, and I just wonder how the hell the teachers can feel good about collecting tuition. If you’re being paid to teach a kid to draw, and you have three or four years to do it, you should either have the power to do the job, or get the kids to study something they can use. I hate the idea of these kids working their asses off for years only to get no closer to their dream after going into decades of debt. (Insert comments about “new economy” here, the buzz words that ran across the convention floor all weekend.) Anyway, after this convention, RISD and Pratt (go Static Fish!) redeemed, for me, the whole notion of paid education.

As I mentioned on this blog last time, I had some specific books I was looking for artists for. Neither of these college kids were right for these jobs—they were good enough, but their styles were all wrong. I spent about three hours in artists alley, and despite great conversations with Sean Murphy and Stephane Roux, and then running in to Joss on the show floor, I didn’t manage to find all I needed. My search continues, but while I’m no Rob Levin, I consider myself lucky for being able to pick two needles out of the New York haystack.

Scott Allie is the Senior Managing Editor at Dark Horse Comics. His writing includes the horror comic The Devil’s Footprints, set in his hometown of Ipswich, MA.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 13th, 2009 at 12:45 pm and is filed under News & Views. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.