Pierre Speaks: Submissions

My goal has always been to make comics.

I have been wanting to do that even since I was a kid reading the Incredible Hulk awesomely drawn by Sal Buscema. Or Spider-man by Ross Andru. Or the Avengers by George Perez. Or the X-Men by Dave Cockrum.

Can you tell I am an “artist” kind of guy?? ;)

So even while I was making a good living in animation, I still was developing my “Heroes” project. And I still was making some blind submissions from time to time

The very first submission was a comic I had made around 1985. It was a short 4 or 5 page story. I never heard from the editor, and sadly I was too much of a fool to realize that I should have made a copy of my work before submitting it.

Although I later got a few pin-up published a little later.



I had made it to stardom. ;) I was the “star” of my neighborhood for a while thanks to getting 3 pin-ups published.

Then I figured… no more monkey business. Time to get serious and I came up with some sample pages to submit to Marvel Comics no less.

Ahhh… the foolishness of youth.

I had NO CLUE as to what I was doing.

I was still drawing on 8.5 X 11 paper with the 3 holes on the side.

Damn how I ignorant I was.

I had just bought the “Best of Marvel Comics” volume one(Awesome book), and was blown away by the Thor story “The wrath of the Wrecker”. So I HAD to try to capture the magic of that tale by including the Wrecker in my submission.



So I came up with a bunch of pages with Spider-man and the Wrecker.





















Sadly, that became my first rejection letter.



But it did teach me a thing or two from the various comments in the letter.

Then I submitted to DC, but I did not know many DC villains, so I used the best one….Darkseid. This was after Crisis. So since there no longer was a Superboy, I foolishly decided to come up with a “new” Superboy.











Of course…. Once again it was rejected.



I was a fool and all I could think of was to submit to Marvel and DC.

I should have submitted more to small publishers or even to fanzines to try to get at least some experience/published pages under my belt.













But I was a fool and what I really wanted was to work at Marvel.

Heck even DC did not appeal to me much at the time. Although thanks to Crisis and John Byrne’s work on Superman, I was slowly changing my mind about DC.

But again, back then I was a fool.

What I failed to realize back then was that, before working for Marvel, George Perez, John Byrne, and others I fail to mention were published in fanzines and other such publications.











Although now that DC, and Marvel as well, no longer take blind submissions, maybe now many will not be as foolish as I once was. Maybe many will submit their work to smaller publishers now.

We shall see.