How Not to Ask An Artist To Draw Manga For You

[telophase]

One of the people I watch over on DA just posted a work in progress, and the second comment received was this (line breaks and spacing preserved):

Hello! my name is [name redacted],

and i am currently writing a

Fantasy story, i was wondering if

you would be interested in

making some Fantasy Manga for me, it is

original and all i need to do is

get the story out there, my hopes

are to get the story out into

video games and cartoons

eventually,
but i haven't climbed that far up

the mountain yet.
If I do earn money from this

project, i can assure you will

get some of the bid.
Well, send me back a message if

you are interested.
my msn is

[email address redacted]

send me a message for further

details

A look at the person's Activity on their DA page reveals that the same message - with one or two minor differences in wording - has been posted on ten different people's art in the past 16 hours. Including a wallpaper made from video game screenshots.

Dude gets points for persistence but MINUS SEVERAL MILLION for common sense.


*and now I'm getting ideas for a HOW NOT TO ASK ARTISTS TO DRAW MANGA/COMICS FOR YOU tutorial.

Comments

[ruffwriter.livejournal.com]

Oh dear Lord.

Rudeness aside, manga isn't the only form of storytelling, dude. Of course, fiction won't get you VIDEO GAMES AND CARTOONS. My goodness. XD

[telophase.livejournal.com]

And none of these people that I can tell has any experience with or interest in sequential art!

Fallacy Number One: Drawing pictures in a manga style and being able to do manga-style sequential art are TWO TOTALLY DIFFERENT SKILLSETS!

[ruffwriter.livejournal.com]

Right? Manga-style sequential art, as far as I've heard, sounds like a complete time-suck. Not exactly something you do for random strangers on the internet.

Something tells me this dude wanted all color pages, too.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

God, yes. I mean, I essentially struck up a partnership with a random stranger on the internet, but she had credits I could check - a book in the publication process, connections to a publisher, a degree in screenwriting, published articles online for places I'd heard of - and a grasp of what the publishing business was actually like. Not like this guy, who demonstrates in a quite efficient manner that he has no clue about the business or about the English language.

I bet so. And lots of fighting, and a cast of thousands.

[ruffwriter.livejournal.com]

Sounds like the best kind of random stranger, though! And it worked out well for both of you, it seems. :D I've only done these sorts of things with friends, but they never really get off the ground. (Which I understand: as the writer-half, it takes much less time for me to write a script than for them to visualize everything, fit it to a page, and draw everything out.) But if you're going to approach someone out of the blue, credentials are definitely helpful. As is proper grammar and capitalization.

Definitely. And lots of tits, I'm sure.

[txtriffidranch.livejournal.com]

Lots of fighting, a cast of thousands, and lots of tits? Gee, that's practically a money printing machine. I wonder why s/he hasn't been able to find anyone else to do this?

[ruffwriter.livejournal.com]

Seriously. You could market it to the shounen crowd! Its selling point? No pesky plot of any kind!

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Waste space on character development?! BAH!

[txtriffidranch.livejournal.com]

Oh, boy: this twit expects you to do 90 percent of the work, because I'm willing to bet that s/he has no bloody clue on how to interpret that story into visual form, and you'll "get some of the bid". This is the sort of letter I got all the time from wannabes who figured that they had an idea, I'd do the writing work, and they'd magnanimously share half the money with me. And people wondered why I quit writing.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I've got this sort of thing multiple times at cons and online. Occasionally from people with a clue, who I could politely decline (or flakily forget to answer, which I feel horribly guilty about), but the majority of the "Draw my AWESOMETASTIC comic and I'll pay you when we get published!!" variety.

The best part about having books with "that yaoi stuff" in them on my artist alley table? The stream of guys asking me to draw their superhero comics stopped dead. XD

[txtriffidranch.livejournal.com]

You mean you don't want to work on spec on my carnivorous plant comic project? *ducking* (Seriously, if I were to contact you on something like this, then I'd have half of your fee ready in advance, before you ever touched pen to paper. That's only right.)

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Sure! Four hundred pages of polished art due three months from now in a style I'm not good at? Want color with that? I'm in!

(GAH you would not believe - well, ok you would believe - the number of Alan Moore wannabes who kept insisting to me that their superhero comic was different!! And to whom "superhero deconstruction" meant "sit around on badly-lit rooftops whinging about their lives." Not all that different from superhero comics back when I was reading them, come to think about it...)

[tammylee.livejournal.com]

Heh. I wrote a lengthy reply in a forum I hang out at explaining to a writer how you have to establish a relationship with an artist, or pay cash, to get someone to work with you.

Good to see someone is excited about their own work but c'mon, they aren't even finished writing their story yet!

[telophase.livejournal.com]

And the times when you don't do either, you should be bringing publication credits or something like that to the table! Professional, agented comics writer with published works under her belt? Good person to hook up with art-wise! No-experience wannabe? Cash in hand, plz!

[matildarose.livejournal.com]

It's like some sort of weird word poem. It demands an EPIC READING in the style of FULL LIFE CONSEQUENCES, even if it'd only amount to a minute's worth of audio.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

*snerk* I am tempted - but not enough to actually do it - to do a Dramatic Reading of it on mp3. XD

[droiche.livejournal.com]

What fish is going to bite that hook?

Sure, I asked a friend to do a "cover" illustration for my super long fanfic, but a) she read the story in question first and b) I have no plans to publish the story outside of my personal webpages and no plans to sell it period, so neither of us expects to make any money from the project. It's just something we're doing for fun and practice.

Before I would enter into a serious collaborative project, I would require seeing several samples of the other people's work with some kind of proof that it *is* their work.