Here is some advice for pitching your comic idea to a publisher from Warren Ellis. Matt Badham linked to a blog post from last September on The Comic Book Script archive, which itself unearthed the advice from Ellis’ old ‘Come In Alone’ column on Comic Book Resources. Ellis has a lot of experience at this and a lot of wisdom to share, as well as valuable tips for writers, such as this:

“There’s a rule-of-thumb for dialogue writing you might want to try. Stan Lee used it, Alan Moore uses it. An average-sized panel can stand about twenty-eight words of dialogue. Try it for a while, before you go your own way; no more than twenty-eight words in each panel.

Larry Hama’s got a trick to keep the page turning and the eye flowing across the page. He makes sure he has a caption or a piece of dialogue in the top left corner of the page and the bottom right corner. Try it for yourself, look at the effect it can create for action stories.”

Over on his blog, Comics journalist Matt Badham has an in depth interview with professional comic book letterer Jim Campbell. A must read for any creators out there who intend to do it all themselves, or just for anyone interested in the theory and method behind perhaps the most under-appreciated aspect of comic art. There’s also some intelligent discussion of the future of digital comics and nuggets of wisdom such as “the better you get at it, the less people should notice it”.

Link

An excerpt from Dan Pussey by Daniel Clowes.

A while ago the comics writer Jaime S. Rich posted some advice about how to pitch your work to a publisher. He gets straight to the point and keeps it simple, this is what you need to do: Work hard, listen to advice and be polite. Rich goes into very helpful detail about the specifics of a pitch, how many pages to send, what to do if you’re a writer without an artist etc. and his advice is well worth anyone’s time.

He also links to another essay about asking other writers to read your work, which you may want to consider when hoping for free feedback and useful advice from someone you’ve never met.