By Shaenon K. Garrity
Our columnists are independent writers who choose subjects and write without editorial input from comiXology. The opinions expressed are the columnist's, and do not represent the opinion of comiXology.
Pop nonfiction alert: I'm reading Malcolm Gladwell's
Outliers, about the social factors involved in individual success. One of the theories Gladwell covers is the "10,000 hour rule": no one, no matter how innately talented, can master a craft without practicing it for 10,000 hours. That usually comes out to about ten years of dedicated effort. That's even true of child prodigies; they just start earlier. Mozart, the classic model of the "natural" genius, worked for ten years between his debut as a music prodigy and his first great compositions. In fact, Mozart took longer than ten years to get to his peak period, so maybe Mozart wasn't so hot. You hear that, Mozart?
Comics has long been a reassuring medium for those of us who haven't quite produced a
Maus yet, because the field is littered with late bloomers. Jack Kirby, for instance. Kirby joined the comics industry at a young age, drawing newspaper comics in his late teens, but he didn't start producing the work for which he would be remembered—that is, everything from
Fantastic Four #1 onward—until his mid-40s. That's way more than ten years from amateur to master.
But Gladwell's 10,000 hours don't include every time an artist picks up a pen; they represent a crucible of focused, dedicated practice. Kirby didn't draw comics regularly for most of that time. He worked other jobs. He was drafted in World War II. Even when he drew comics, his output was sporadic. If Wikipedia is to be believed (and, in areas of nerd interest, it generally is), Kirby only started throwing himself into comics in 1952, after the birth of his third child forced him to chase paychecks. He and his partner Joe Simon formed their own publishing company, Mainline, which kept Kirby drawing like a madman. When Mainline folded, Kirby moved on to a steady stream of freelance assignments.
Fantastic Four #1 hit the stands in 1961, nine years after Kirby stuck his nose to the grindstone. (And it'd be over ten more years until the screaming man-bats issue of
Kamandi: The Last Boy on Earth, in my mind the peak of Kirby's career.)
How about another late bloomer, Carl Barks? Barks was a drifter: born to a poor, isolated farm family, he wandered the country picking up jobs (and women) and dropping them when he lost interest. He always enjoyed drawing, but his art education was limited to a correspondance course he took in high school, which he gave up after a few lessons. In 1935, at the age of 34, Barks landed a job as an inbetweener at the Disney Studios. Animation can be dull, tiring, repetitive work, but it sure as hell forces you to draw. By the time he quit in 1942, Barks could draw the Disney characters with his eyes closed. He'd also done a small amount of comic-book work for Disney, drawing about half the artwork for the one-shot
Donald Duck Finds Pirate Gold.
Barks moved east of Los Angeles to start a chicken farm, but to make ends meet he sought more comic-book assignments from Disney. In the end, the chicken farm was unsuccessful, but the Disney work kept coming. Barks would ultimately draw around 500 stories about the Disney ducks. The one that immortalized him, however, was "Christmas on Bear Mountain," the story that introduced his character Scrooge McDuck. In ran in
Four Color Comics in 1947, twelve years after the Good Duck Artist joined the Disney Studios.
Even the aforementioned
Maus came at the end of a long training period. Art Spiegelman was active in underground comics circles starting in the 1960s. His artistic career was interrupted by a nervous breakdown, for which he was hospitalized. He returned to drawing and publishing comics in the '70s, working on
Arcade and then on
Raw; he and his wife, Françoise Mouly, soon became major figures in the world of underground and alternative comics. The period between Spiegelman's return to comics and the publication of the first volume of
Maus in 1986: a little over ten years.
Many comic strips took ten years—often exactly ten years—to reach their "mature" state. The grind of a daily strip is an excellent crucible. The most famous example is
Thimble Theater, which E.C. Segar drew for ten years before introducing Popeye.
Alley Oop was a straightforward caveman strip for ten years before V.T. Hamlin and his editor came up with the idea of changing it to a
time-traveling caveman strip, which turned out to be the winning formula. Eleven years passed between the debut of Chic Young's
Blondie and the birth of the Bumsteads' daughter Cookie, the last central character added to the strip. (
Blondie continued to change to a small degree, only becoming permanently frozen in time when the kids were in their teens.)
Gasoline Alley found its daily formula relatively early—Walt adopted Skeezix in year three—but Frank King started drawing his famous painterly, meditative Sunday strips a little over ten years in.
Of course, not all cartoonists follow the schedule. Robert Crumb exploded in his twenties, rocketing from designing cards for American Greetings in Cleveland to selling
Zap Comix out of a baby carriage in San Francisco in about five years. Crumb's artistic crucible probably occurred during his childhood, drawing obsessively at the command of his equally obsessive older brother Charles. And some cartoonists take longer than ten years to reach their peak. Between the first
Dykes to Watch Out For strip and the publication of
Fun Home, Alison Bechdel drew comics for over twenty years. That's dedication.
What's the point of these number games? Just giving myself hope, really. I started drawing comics regularly, really working at it, in 2000. If Malcolm Gladwell is right, I'll have a chance at drawing really good comics starting sometime next year. That's something to look forward to. Start now, and you can have something to look forward to, too. You're probably a quicker study than Mozart.
Shaenon K. Garrity is a manga editor at Viz Media and is best known for her webcomics Narbonic and Skin Horse.
All the Comics in the World is © Shaenon K. Garrity, 2010
