Mark Twain once said, “How often we recall, with regret, that Napoleon once shot at a magazine editor and missed him and killed a publisher. But we remember, with charity, that his intentions were good.”

While the fight for Creator Rights and creative control of one’s comic properties has brought with it a lot of good to the Comics Industry, one of the negative by-products of that battle in Comics has been the diminished influence of outside editors. While the “Big Two” still maintain a strong editorial voice and larger companies like Archie still have editors overseeing their books, there is a real belief by many comic creators that if they own a Character, then nobody should be able to “tell them what to do.”

That has lead to most totally independent books having no Editor at all, while other books employ editors who are closer to production schedulers and they are really only there to make sure a book meets it’s deadlines. While that level of “freedom” may sound good, especially to a creative person who doesn’t like being told “what to do,” it’s really a potential Failure waiting to become Epic.

Today’s lesson in Failing at Comics is simple: Ignore All Voices Except Your Own.

I have been around enough comic book artists and writers to know that, yes, there ARE some editors out there who have the reputation of sucking. There are a few editors who, I am told, try to force how THEY would do something on a writer or an artist rather than letting them do the job they were hired to do. And there are a few editors who get stuck on something insignificant and fixate on it because they really don’t know what the hell they are doing and want to make it LOOK like they are doing something to earn their paycheck.

Those examples, however, are really few and fare between.

In the vast majority of cases, and editor in Comics serves a function that is vital to the success of the project. Editors are there to offer an outside critique of material in progress, looking at what actually IS rather than what the writer and artist THINK the book is becoming.

Quite often, a writer or artist have something in their heads that they are shooting for that doesn’t quite make it onto the page and they don’t realize it. It’s not for a lack of talent- it’s the inability for them to leave their own heads that cause the problem. You know what you intend to be on that page, and to you it’s very clear. The editor, on the other hand, isn’t you. They can’t read your mind, and they aren’t interested in doing so. They are interested in how they see what you hand them. Yes, that is subjective. Then again, YOUR opinion of your own work is subjective too! But that subjective feedback from your editor is closer to what a person who buys your book will think than you because they lack the bias of being YOU. That in and of itself is a huge argument for editors, and if that’s all an editor did, they would be invaluable.

There is another side to editors, however, and it is THIS aspect that most creator owned die-hards don’t want to deal with. Sometimes you get it right, and what you envision in your head actually DOES make it to the page 100%. The problem is- sometimes that idea isn’t as good as it could be. Maybe you didn’t develop your script enough. Maybe you could draw a panel from a more imaginative angle. Maybe, just maybe, what you think is a finished piece of work is really just a good starting point… That’s something that nobody likes to hear, much less admit to themselves. That’s the beauty of an editor- remember, he’s not you, so he isn’t hurting his own feelings! He can tell you straight when something is going in the right direction but it just hasn’t gone far enough…

Finally, an editor has another amazing “Superpower.” Just like they can guide you to going further with your work, they can also tel you “No!” In fact, they can also tell you “Hell No!” and even the occasional, “No $#@#ing &^%* Way are YOU @&#! doing THAT!”

There really IS a point where you can go too far with something in comics, and that point is where you no longer serve what is best for a particular story. Anything that doesn’t make the story better may, in fact, be getting in the way of that story being everything it could be. Gratuitous elements like violence or profanity are easy targets as examples of this, but really anything that you put in your comic that doesn’t work within the whole can be suspect. Just because “everybody” seems to want something doesn’t mean that it’s doing YOUR comic any good. A good editor can be the voice of reason in such situations… that is, if you HAVE one.

You, on the other hand, should reject an outside opinion. Who needs a guy telling you what to do? So you book is incomplete or poorly executed or full of too much stuff that really doesn’t go anywhere… what’s that to you, anyway? This is YOUR vision! Don’t “compromise” and risk changing or, God Forbid, IMPROVING on your work! Kick editors to the curb and embrace you own inner Epic Failure today!

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