My longtime friend Paul Levitz continues the discussion about freelancers who do or do not get their work in on time. Paul spent many, many years of his life at DC Comics dealing with that problem and more than once, I was in the office when he had to cope with this age-old problem: A writer or artist had not delivered work when it was due and was running so late that it was creating major problems.
Some were of the human variety. Somebody was sick. Someone was in an accident. Someone's close relative had died. Someone's power was out for two days. There are a thousand excuses, many of them even true.
When comics are done on an assembly line basis, each person has to wait for the person before to complete their assigned function. If the work is passed from writer to pencil artist to letterer to inker and then to colorist, anyone's tardiness may screw up those who follow. The pencil artist, for example, can be sitting there waiting for the script, not earning a living because he has nothing to draw. That not only costs him or her money, it means he or she will have to rush and perhaps work insane hours to get the book back on schedule so the letterer will have something to letter, the inker will have something to ink, etc.
And some of the problems were of the business variety because the book was contracted to be at the printers by a certain date to be printed so it could be in stores by a certain date to be sold.
An editor or other person in Paul's position learns how to budget time, to build pad into the schedule, to know who will probably be late and so forth…to have a Plan B for the inevitable times when the assembly line just plain grinds to an unanticipated halt. On several occasions, I watched Paul cope with those halts, sometimes even shifting to Plan C or even D. He may not remember telling me this but once, on a book where one member of the team was famously irresponsible, Paul had a Plan E ready to go.
I've seen others deal with them and dealt with them myself. Paul was very good at that kind of crisis management and he just sent me this e-mail…
Another reoccurring cause of deadline trouble that I've observed over the years: many freelancers tend to time their ability to deliver off their best speed, the occasion when they could turn something around the fastest. Of course, our best speeds are usually a combination of factors that don't always arrive in conjunction: lack of distraction in our personal lives, our sympathy for the material we're working on, the requirements of the project itself, and, oh yeah, our health and mood. But there was the time I wrote a really good full issue script in one day, so of course I can do that again…maybe some day.
On the other hand, there are guys like Jim Aparo, who would do one page a day, pencilled, inked and lettered, so reliably that he'd sign a contract for 214 pages a year, and deliver them like clockwork. (Not even talking about the one man factories like Jack Kirby…)
Editors treasured a guy like Aparo and I had folks I worked with who were also utterly reliable. I doubt any artist ever had a better track record for delivery-on-time than Dan Spiegle and like Aparo, it wasn't just that the work was there when it was supposed to be. It was there and it was very, very good. That matters, too. A topic for another time is how a high percentage of the best writers and artists in the forties through the seventies were also very fast and very reliable.
And I'm not suggesting that writers and artists of the eighties and beyond have not been fast and/or reliable but the job description has changed somewhat. I can't find the actual e-mail right now but I remember it pretty well. A year or two ago, a top artist wrote me and said…
What is it with editors who don't get that I'm not drawing when I'm not home at my drawing board? I agreed to do all the art for this graphic novel in four months and I'd have no trouble meeting the deadline but every week, they call me to ask if I can fly to some other city and do a bookstore signing for my last project for the company. Or he calls and says, "We really need you at this convention in Toronto next month." I told him fine if we change the deadline because I won't be doing the work when I'm at the con and he actually asked me, "Can't you draw pages on the plane? Or in your hotel room?" I turned down the con so I could get the job in on time and now I'm hearing that I'm not a good team player!!!!!
I remember that pretty well including the five exclamation points. There actually are artists who can set up in a hotel room and get work done and I've seen Sergio working in both pencil and ink on airplanes…but some can't and it shouldn't be expected of anyone.
Anyway, Paul's right. A couple times in my career, I've written 20-24 pages in a single day but I can't always do that. Or at least, I can't always do that and also be pleased with what's on those pages. If I expected to be able to produce at that pace every time, I'd have been late with a lot more assignments and the quality of most would have been much lower.
Then again, if I'd been late with a lot more assignments and the quality of most had been much lower, I wouldn't have gotten as many assignments. So maybe some of this problem is self-correcting…