Posted in: Comics | Tagged: Artifacts, Comics, marc silvestri, matt hawkins, Talent Search, top cow

Top Cow Talent Search Gets Over 600 Entries

Published Sat, 08 Feb 2014 19:00:19 -0600

The annual Top Cow Talent Search just passed its entry deadline and I got a quick moment to talk with Matt Hawkins writer and CEO/Publisher of Top Cow about the process, the purpose and the sheer volume of material that came in.

BC: Let's start off with the obvious first question, why? Why do you do a talent contest and what do you hope to gain out of it?

MH: Couple years back Marc Silvestri and I talked about how we wanted to find some new art talent. We've done online art hunts before so I first started conceiving of it as such. At some point I started thinking about how writers break into the business and realize that there really aren't very many entry points. So, factoring that in, we decided to add a writing component to it and I was SHOCKED at how many people turned in writing submissions. We had 800 last year. We're still tabulating this year's but we're at about 600. The thing I like about our Talent Hunt is there is a guaranteed mechanism to get them published.

BC: The last few winners appeared in books recently. How much more involved did you have to be working with inexperienced creators?

MH: That's the beauty of the volume of submissions to filter through. There were about 20 that, in my opinion, could be writing comics today. I picked the best of those based on the criteria I had set and was able to easily get them going. There was some editorial involved, but not much more than we would normally do.

BC: The contest entry period just ended, what was the response to the contest? How many entries did you end up getting?

MH: Like I said we're at just over 600 so I'm very pleased with that.

BC: How will the winner chosen and when will you notify them?

MH: For the artists, Top Cow Editors Betsy Gonia and Ryan Cady in our offices will go through all of them and narrow them down to the top 25% or so and then send those to Marc Silvestri to pick the winner. For the writers, a similar process with them going through and narrowing the volume down to about 1/4 then I'll go through and pick the winners. This time we're actually picking 4 writer winners and some runner ups so there's more opportunity this time around.

BC: Has it been decided what project the winners will work on?

MH: Not yet. It may be additional issues of Artifacts or something else.

The last two writing and art winners were featured in Artifacts #34 and #35 currently on sale.

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