Thoughts on Pitching a Comic Book

I recently worked with someone who is going to pitch a book to Image comics.  Looking over their work and the pitch requirement has gotten me thinking, what makes a good pitch?  How would I pitch if I was going to? I'll be honest with my current project The Chronicles of the Tal Nor, the thought of pitching it never really crossed my mind.  The plan was always that I wanted to be a comic, so I would just make it myself.  That being said looking at the road not taken was a fun exercise.

According to Image's pitch Guidelines the pitch should contain the following things:

1. a cover letter
2. a one page synopsis of the overall story
3. a sample of at least 5 fully finished pages
4. a cover mock up

While the synopsis is important, that really just the idea of your story and not the story itself.  The sample is her is the key to getting your pitch picked up.  Think about it, a good story idea will make a terrible comic if not executed well.  The opposite is true too.  List your top 10 favorite stories, then boil them down to their base idea, I bet at least one or two of them is kind of terrible idea.  But when the right people came together they knock that idea out of the park and made a good story.  Synopsis just shows that you have a road map for the story.

The sample then needs to be an example of storytelling.  If you want Image or anyone else to pick a book up the sample should tell a complete story with a beginning, middle and end, or failing that it should at the very least be a complete scene.  It should work even if the person hasn't read any of the other materials one includes in a pitch.  It should tell the reader a little bit about the character and give them a sense of the world.  And it should show off that you know how to tell a story.

I know this is a really hard thing to do; it's much harder to write a short 4-8 page story and accomplish these things than it is to write a whole 24 page issue.  I have tried and failed at writing these types of short piece myself several times.  In fact I think that my newest piece "IHate When They Run" is the only time I've truly succeed in telling the kind of story I wanted to and accomplished everything I wanted.

A great example of what I'm talking about is the first scene in the movie Captain America 2: The Winter Soldier.  Here we have Cap, The Black Widow and some of the strike force guys in a Quinn Jet about to assault a boat.  As Cap is getting ready to jump out of the jet, Black Window is giving him dating advice and trying to set him up.  Right away we know what kind of relationship they have together and we know a ton about who Cap is as a person.  When asked why he doesn't ask this one girl out and if he is "too scared?", Cap responds with "no, too busy" and jumps out of the jet.  At this point a Strike team guy ask his boss if Cap was wearing a parachute and the boss responds with "no, no he wasn't"  in the exchange we are shown through character reaction that Cap is a total badass.  The action the follows in the next scene builds on this as does the eventual confrontation between Cap and Widow about their missions, which does even more to establish their characters.

Another reason to do a short self-contained story is that if Image passes (even with the best pitch this could happen, a ton of publishing house passed on Harry Potter) you will still have a comic you can self-publish and build on.  This is one of the greatest things about comics as a medium, to be a comic book creator all you have to do is create a comic.  For my very first comic (which I won't be showing anyone, ever again), I wrote a really rudimentary script for a 6 page story and went online to find an artist.  I put up an ad on Digital Webbing offering $20 a page.  I was amazing the number of emails I got from people wanting to make my comic.  I found some who art I like well enough and seemed nice from their email.  I told them to make each page 8 by 5.5, the size of a standard letter size piece of paper folded in half.  This was so that I could go down to Staples and have them just print out the pages on standard printer paper.  I spent a good week up in my room after work folding and stapling together the book.  From the moment the first two staples went into that first set of pages, I was a comic book creator.

We live in the most amazing of times, with the help of the internet, if there is a creative thing you want to do you can do it.  The only thing that stands between you and your creative goal is hard work and time.  You put in enough time and hard work and you can make almost anything.   Now, getting your creations out in the world and in to the hands of people, all the while making a living at creating things, well that I'm still working out.  If I find any answers, I'll let you know.

Till next time, keep making things and don't let anyone stop you.  Not even me.

T.