Zub Tales

I received a comment here on my site that covers a common question I and many other writers get, one I want to answer and expand upon so I can point people toward it here in the future-

Hey Jim,

When one pitches a comic to a company (like UDON, IDW, Image, or something like that) is a four issue mini-series (like your Ibuki/Cammy comics) a fine request for someone with no experience?

Or would asking for something like a one-shot/issue comic be a lot more likely to be accepted?

Right from the start, you have the wrong idea about how this works-

A publisher will not look at any unsolicited pitch, one-shot or otherwise, for an established property and won’t ask you to submit one until you have creative work they can check out.

The key here is when you said you have “no experience”.

You need to gain experience by making your own comics (or at least other writing).

Create work, finish it, and then, if you feel it’s professional quality, send that work to publishers as a portfolio showing the quality you could bring to them.

A publisher is not going to approve a project proposal from someone with no credits to their name or portfolio to judge. Legally, they won’t even look at it, because if it’s similar to anything they’re developing it could open them up to legal hassles.

If you look at the long and rambling trail of my career, the vast majority of projects at the start were my own independent ones because no one would pay me for writing until I proved I could make writing worth paying for:

The shortest distance between the work you do and the work you want to do is key-

Quality work in another medium can bridge the gap if it’s a similar genre or has a similar mood.
Tom King wrote a superhero novel.
Brian K. Vaughan started with play and screenplay writing.

Most importantly, be honest with yourself-
If you were a comic editor and your job hung on hiring people who could hit the mark on a story and deadline, how much experience would you want to see to feel confident about giving them a job?

The smaller the publisher, the easier it will be to break in and gain more experience, but in most cases the pay from those smaller companies will also be low/non-existent. Expect that establishing yourself and your work will take time, effort, and there are no guarantees of success.

This is true for every creative career (and almost every non-creative one)-
The work almost always starts with independent creation – short film production, an indie band, indie game development, self publishing, local theater, you name it.

Finish stuff, release it, see if it gains traction, and then keep going.

If you found this post helpful, feel free to let me know here, share the post with your friends and consider buying some of my comics or donating to my Patreon to show your support for me writing this tutorial post instead of getting paying work done. 😛