I had a chance to talk with Matthew K. Manning today. For those not familiar with him, he’s a comics legend. He has a degree in comics illustration and is a prolific storyteller. He has worked for Marvel, DC, IDW, Disney, DK Publishing, and many others. He has done TONS of Batman comics, including the Batman / Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles crossover series. He’s delved into the history of comics with such books as The Ultimate Guide To Batman, and Spider-Man: A History & Celebration of the Web-slinger, Decade By Decade. He has worked on things as diverse as a comic miniseries on World War I to Spongebob Squarepants.
To say the guy is prolific is an understatement.
I asked him how he got to be so prolific and what his work day was like. He said he got his first comic writing assignment right out of college (Batman, of course) but he didn’t get another comic assignment for a year. He worked a day job, watching TV and writing trivia questions about the program as it was airing that would be sent to people in a Nielsen ratings like environment. He worked on morning shows and late night shows, spending a lot of time between them writing and illustrating his own comics.
He said he didn’t start doing comics work full-time until he was 30. Then he’d spend six or seven days a week until he got more established and could start pitching and picking more of his own projects he wanted to work upon. He’s not working quite that much any more (getting to spend more time with his family) and gets more say on what he is working on.
I asked about how he gets projects. He said he usually sends a ‘pitch’ to an editor, a short synopsis of the proposed project he wanted to do detailing the story. Some editors would love what he pitched, others said no, and some never responded because they were already swamped with projects and couldn’t look at anything new.
In his early days, he used to hang around DC comics just talking to editors all day and asking if they had any assignments for him. Persistence paid off as he started getting assignments here and there, and then some editors would call him up and say ‘We need a story around character X, can you do it?” (The answer to this question is always ‘yes!’.)
Sometimes he got strange requests from an editor, like the time he got a request to do a story about zombie unicorns. (I’m going to have to look that one up, it’s so weird.) He said he wasn’t sure he even wanted to take the project until he told his daughter about it. When she didn’t stop laughing he knew he had to take the project. His daughter even helped him work out details of the plot, like the fact the zombie unicorns had their headquarters in a junkyard, because they only ate trash, and if they didn’t eat trash, they’d barf rainbows. Kids have the wildest imaginations.
He said it was important to get projects he loved and wanted to work on because the readers can tell if you don’t love the project. The storytelling will be off and the characters will come off as flat, and the action undramatic. Readers will pick up on these things, and it can impact sales, and even end up killing a comics line.
My final question was how different writing comic scripts is different from writing prose stories. (He’s written two absurdist slice of life novels.) He said if nothing else, the dialogue is vastly different. You have to carefully choose each word in a comic due to small space and trying to get the most impact in each panel. In prose he has a little more ‘wriggle room’ and can let the dialogue flow more freely as he isn’t under those constraints.
Our conversation was over too quickly. It was great getting to talk with someone who is further down the road of where I want to be some day. I’m going to have to hunt down some more of his work and read it. Especially the rainbow barfing zombie unicorns. Sounds like my type of weird.
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