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Crossing Boarders #3 by Andrew Goletz: Gathering the Gatherers

Published Fri, 25 Mar 2011 08:00:21 -0500

Then

We had a theme, we had a title and now it was time to make sure that we actually had enough people to make it actually happen. Doing an anthology with fellow board members seems to be an objective of many a comic book message board site, particularly one where you have a lot of close knit members who've been around for a while. It tends to be a natural progression from simply chatting about what comics you like or hate. It's the internet so there tends to be a greater emphasis on the hating part. I don't know the exact figure on how many anthology ideas went successfully from concept to execution but I had volunteered to write in a few of them that never made it to the end.

Part of the reason I wanted to take an almost dictatorial approach to The Gathering was that if this was going to fail I wanted it to be on my shoulders. I didn't want to argue with anyone else about a different way of doing things or put the work in just to realize that the project would never see the light of day. Having spent a majority of my message board time in one particular thread (Hi, DCU Oomph peeps) I felt like a lot of the people knew me well enough to understand that I wasn't going to let this fall apart. We might end up with a thousand copies that no one except for our moms wanted but I would make sure that the comic would see print.

In order to allow as many people as possible to participate and limit the amount of damage that would occur if people fell through I had decided on a two page limit for stories. For a 32 page comic we'd be able to use at least sixteen writers. I didn't think finding writers would be difficult at all. One thing that seems to separate comic fans from most other fandoms is that we tend to believe we can do the job we follow. How many times have you heard 'I could do better than that' in a comic shop or read the same thing on a message board when talking about a particular creator? Even if they never said the words aloud, I knew that there would be a decent amount of people who'd be interested in writing something. Finding enough artists to illustrate all of the stories and not delay the book for years would be the real challenge.

I was fortunate because Jinxworld is a haven for talent. Aside from all of the professional creators that pop in with advice, opinions or just to chat, I discovered an extraordinary amount of talented artists through various character redesign or other artistic threads. It was just a matter of contacting them and convincing them that this wouldn't be a total bust. The last thing I wanted was for people to get excited about the project and we'd find ourselves three months into it with artists backing out or disappearing altogether.

Within a week I was pretty confident that we had a strong line-up of writers interested in the project. Most, if not all, of the prospective creators had come from the DCU thread. They had heard about the anthology first and were able to get pitches into me right away. There was also the advantage of having people I knew make up the majority of creators in the first issue. People would be more willing to take the project seriously if you had a good relationship with them; even if it was only a 'message board' relationship. Through sheer dumb luck it turned out that a lot of people also turned out to be damn good artists who were also interested in giving an anthology yet another shot. Better yet, some of these artists had expressed a willingness to serve as back-ups on other stories should someone drop out. Having these back-ups in place was an important objective of mine as I didn't want the entire project to fall apart if we lost some creators' interest.

Now

It never gets old. The feeling of getting submissions in for a new issue or doing final edits on a current issue and sending it off to print still give me an unbelievable adrenalin rush as big as the ones I felt the first time around. We recently unveiled the themes to the issues of The Gathering set to debut in 2012 and will be opening up submissions for those volumes next month. Already potential creators are asking questions about the volumes in question and I feel that rush return even though we're over a year away from these issues seeing print.

Last week we wrapped up the forthcoming Heroes edition of book: Volume 3, if you were wondering. This double sized issue will feature some former creators from the first two books coming back to tell longer form stories. The issue is set to be released in April and we were well ahead of that deadline but with MoCCA coming up on April 9^th I was really hoping to get the issue finished, edited, printed and shipped back to me before then if there was any way possible to accomplish it. The only problem was we never turned around an issue in a month before. Everyone from the art director, Aaron Bir to production to the creators busted their asses for a 36 hour non-stop stretch to get the final revisions done in time. It was mentally and physically draining but we got it done and it felt great to know that if we needed to, we could turn a book around in a month…a double sized one at that. Less than sixteen months after first coming up with the idea of doing our own comic book and now we were getting out 64 pagers a month after a standard sized issue?

One of the other exciting aspects of putting together new issues is the snowballing effect of the guest professional. Gail Simone's support of and eventual participation with The Gathering gave us a lot more attention and made the idea of doing a story with us much more appealing to other comic book pros. Just this past week I received a fantastic script from Sterling Gates for a volume that won't see print for several more months. Part of me is thinking, 'wow, this is a completely different type of story than what I'm used to reading in his work' while the other part is thinking, 'Sterling Gates is sending me a script for my comic and in one email and another pro is asking about helping out in another one'. That's just flat out cool.

NEXT WEEK: So We Have A Theme, A Title, And Some Creators. Now What?

The Gathering is an ongoing, self-published anthology from GrayHaven Comics with each issue covering a particular theme. Volume 1 was Hope. Volume 2 was Despair. And Volume 3 is Heroes. The goal of The Gathering is to give new writers and artists a chance to have their work published and tell some pretty damn good stories while doing it. We also get some help from friends who are already pros like Gail Simone (Secret Six, Birds of Prey) and Len Wallace (Love Buzz).

Please check out www.grayhavencomics.com for the latest news regarding GHC and The Gathering. You can also follow us on twitter at http://twitter.com/GatheringComic and click on our Facebook fan page GrayHaven Comics/

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