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Top Cow Talent Search Gets Over 600 Entries

top-cow-logoThe 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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Dan WicklineAbout Dan Wickline

Has quietly been working at Bleeding Cool for over three years. He has written comics for Image, Top Cow, Shadowline, Avatar, IDW, Dynamite, Moonstone, Humanoids and Zenescope. He is the author of the Lucius Fogg series of novels and a published photographer.
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