Posted in: Comics, Recent Updates | Tagged: Batman, christmas card, dave taylor, dc comics

A Very Batman Christmas

Published Sat, 25 Dec 2010 11:03:32 -0600

This is comic artist Dave Taylor's Christmas card this year.

Dave Taylor is currently working on a new prestige format Batman series. Which is a remarkable turnaround from a few years ago.

I was working on World's Finest, a book about Batman and Superman for DC, and I had been contracted to pencil and ink it. The colourist on Tongue*Lash, Scarlett Smulkowski, was supposed to be colouring it.

I had drawn about 20 pages at the time and Scott Peterson, the editor, left to become a freelancer.

Another editor took over and from that moment, things were not that good anymore.

It was decided that the deadline would be brought forward, because DC needed to make a certain amount of money the next year, and I was chosen to be pushed forward.

They asked me to use an inker, and I had to go through a long search to find a good one. Robert Campanella was the best inker I could find. Then, there was a change involving the colourist. DC had just bought Wildstorm, so they wanted Wildstorm FX to colour the series, instead of Scarlet.

As the project was becoming less and less what it was supposed to be, I started to become disillusioned with it. In the end they were forcing me too hard. I was used to doing maximum 5-6 pages per week, and I ended up having to do 8 or 10 to meet the deadlines. The quality was dropping, and this was the book that was supposed to set me up to be much more comfortable in the industry!! It was becoming something that would actually ruin my career. I basically backed out of the project. DC convinced me to do the covers, and then the last book, so I ended up doing half of the project, basically. I was really exhausted, and, at the same time, my wife and I divorced. In three months, I got divorced and left DC, pretty much ending my comic career, and got a double hiatus hernia, which is something old men get. At the time, I was 36. I had to have a very serious operation and actually couldn't sit at the desk working because of the pain I was in, constantly. It's taken me three years to get over the operation that I had. It was a very difficult time to go through, losing my career and my marriage. And my health… it was a bit of a tricky time!

…

I was given the impression, about a year after I left DC, that nobody would employ me, in the industry. A few people gave that impression, but it turned out that it was just wrong.

Looks like one or two Scrooges may have been visited by ghosts of Christmases past…

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