This came to me this morning from Bruce Bennett…
I think your "Passage of Time" post may reflect a gap that I think happened in the seventies.
I worked at a small, independent comic book company in Michigan in 1976. It went under pretty quickly from bad management, and naiveté among most of us who worked there. When the business ended, I found work locally as an illustrator, graphic designer and storyboard artist (TV commercials) for ad agencies, newspapers, etc. I didn't continue to pursue comic book art, and honestly, you have written in your blog about all of the reasons I was not interested in continuing in comics in many of your posts about what dealing with some of the comic publishers and editors of the time was like. My bad experience in Michigan was not unusual, apparently.
The seventies were an odd time for comics. The look of the art had changed and so did the audience. I met Neal Adams at conventions, and he was working more in advertising and doing storyboards as well, and I have to believe he was getting the top rates in comics. I met Bernie Wrightson and he was trying to break into book illustration. These guys were my heroes and they were worried about the future of comics at that time.
So, I wonder if there was a chunk of time in the seventies when people were leaving comics and new people were not coming into comics, and you were just one of the few to succeed (although you were earning income writing sitcoms at that time, too!). I know many of the people steadily working in comics in the sixties and seventies were creatives who had been doing those jobs for a couple of decades already and may have been a little hesitant to leave. Do you think there may have been a gap in interest then?
I think there have definitely been gaps when very few people wanted to plunge into the comic book industry — or if they did, viewed it as a job like working at McDonald's that you do when you're young until you get a foothold in what you really want to do the rest of your life. In the fifties when comics were getting bad press and a lot of publishers were folding, I think very few folks said, "Hey, I wanna work in that industry!" An awful lot of people who'd been in comics for years were looking for a way out.
In the seventies, if you took a hard look at the business, it didn't look like a business that would be around much longer. The whole distribution system was collapsing. When "direct distribution" got its act together and became a viable way to market comics, it saved the industry but until then, it did not look good for comics.
None of this affected my interest in working in comics nor did I ever for one minute think I would be full-time in the field. I wanted to write other things and if I ever had imagined a lifetime career in comics, that idea would have been tamped down by meeting people like Jack Kirby and Jerry Siegel. Their work had made zillions for their publishers yet they were not financially secure.
My high school was a few blocks from where Jerry lived and I would sometimes visit him after classes and hear how bitter and worried about providing for his family he was. My thought process was, more or less, "If you can create Superman and wind up like that, what are they going to do to me?" When I worked with Jack, it was much the same.
Also: To get steady work in comics, I believed then, one had to live in or around New York. Nothing against New York but I was very happy in Los Angeles. (Before anyone asks: In the early seventies, I did get pretty steady work from Gold Key Comics, which had one of its offices in L.A. and I have no idea why that didn't occur to me then. In any case, work there started petering out a few years later, by which time I was working in television.)
So yes, definitely, there were fewer kids in their twenties getting into comics in 1972 so there are fewer veteran comic book writers and artists in their seventies today. I just feel like there should be a few more than there are.