A daily chronicle of creativity in film, TV, music, arts, and entertainment, produced by Southern California Public Radio and broadcast from November 2014 – March 2020. Host John Horn leads the conversation, accompanied by the nation's most plugged-in cultural journalists.
If you think that comic books and feminism can’t possibly mix, you need to talk to writer Kelly Sue DeConnick.
DeConnick is probably best known in the comics world for revamping the Captain Marvel series, which is slated to become a feature film in 2019. But while writing for big shops like Marvel brings prestige and industry credibility, those jobs are often just work-for-hire. Put another way, the writers don’t retain ownership of the stories or characters they create.
Wanting to control her work, DeConnick went to Image Comics with her original, feminist sci-fi series, Bitch Planet, a series she describes as "Margaret Atwood meets Inglorious Basterds."
"This is a sci-fi riff on women in prison exploitation films of the 1970s," DeConnick said. "But I'm trying to do it from a feminist perspective, which is kind of a bigger challenge than I think I knew what I was getting into."
Image allows creators an outlet to publish their work while retaining the copyright. So DeConnick and her artist co-creator, Valentine De Landro, retain the rights to the Bitch Planet universe. Now five issues deep, Bitch Planet has been collected into a graphic novel.
DeConnick joined The Frame from her home in Portland, Oregon, to talk all things Bitch Planet, plus she gives budding comic book writers some tips on how to break into and succeed in the industry.
The biggest mistake that people make is that thinking about writing is somehow writing ... There's not a moment to lose, you have to start now.
You have to get through those bad scripts first. You've got to get in there, you've got to start writing some scripts.
I give exercises [to budding writers]. I tell them: take your favorite comics and reverse-engineer them, try to produce the script that made that comic.
Read as many scripts as you can get your hands on.
Don't wait for someone to hire you to do something you've never done before, that's not going to happen ... You don't hire a plumber to fix your sink because he's a big fan of washing his hands.
If you are a creative for [Marvel], or for DC Comics or any of the others, you are a freelancer — there is no 401K, there is no retirement package. We have charities set up in our industry for the elders, the titans of our industry, who are not in a position to pay for their own medical care. One of the things that you can do to make sure that you are thinking in the long term, and being a responsible member of your family, is to make some work that's work-for-hire and then make some work that you are certain that you own, so you have assets that continue to bring in an income for you, hopefully for a number of years.