Welcome to The Corner Box, where your hosts, David Hedgecock, and John Barber, lean into their decades of comic book industry experience, writing, drawing, editing, and publishing. They'll talk to fellow professionals, deep dive into influential, and overlooked works, and analyze the state of the art, and business of comics, and pop culture. Thanks for joining us on The Corner Box.

[00:28] David Hedgecock: Hey, everybody. Welcome to The Corner Box. My name is David Hedgecock. I'm one of your hosts, and with me, as always, is my very good friend,

[00:35] John Barber: John Barber.

[00:36] David: Amazing, talented human being, the man, the myth, the legend, John Barber. Today, we have the true hero of the independent comic book realm, Pat Shand. Hi, Pat.

[00:49] Pat Shand: How’re you doing, man?

[00:50] David: Welcome to the show.

[00:51] Pat: Thanks for having me. Happy to be here.

[00:53] John: All right. You’ve covered everything.

[00:54] David: No, that was good. Good show. Good job. Thanks, everybody. We'll see you next time on The Corner Box. No. So, Pat, for those who don't know, is a long-time writer and comic books creator. He spent several years at Zenescope, doing pretty much everything they do over there, as far as I could tell, and then has, recently, I guess—I don't know if recently is the right word—probably in the last four or five years, Pat? Has it been longer than that?

[01:20] Pat: I think I left Zenescope nine years ago.

[01:23] David: Oh, so it has been a long time. At a certain point, you transitioned into more of your creator-owned work, and now you're what I like to call an expert of the Kickstarter comic book community. So, we're excited to have you on, talking about this stuff. So, Pat, we usually start things off by asking our guests, what was the thing that got you hooked on comic books?

[01:49] Pat: When I was a kid, my uncle Tony brought me this shoebox full of comics, and a lot of it—back then, I was mostly reading Goosebumps books, as a kid. I liked the prose, and I always saw myself being a novelist, but I liked a few of the books that he gave me in that shoebox—Creepshow, the Stephen King/Bernie Creepshow, this big, oversized comic, and there was a Rocketeer issue, and I would just read through it, appreciate the art, and Creepshow scared me, in a way that the Goosebumps books didn’t. So, I would go back to it when I was ready for it, sometimes. As the years passed, I mostly focused on writing and reading prose, and then in college, I started to get more into exploring different areas of writing. So, I would write short films, I started to get into theater, and writing short plays off of Broadway. That kind of stuff. As a reader, I noticed that a lot of my favorite TV shows were being continued in comic books. So, we had Buffy and Angel. Dark Horse and IDW did those. DC was doing Supernatural. IDW was even doing books, like 24, which was crazy to me, just to see all these shows that I love to watch. They were stories that I hadn't gotten to read, because I hadn't explored the comics.

So, I started to read those, and saw, through those, how interesting that form of writing was, and I began to find the writers who were writing those licensed books, and followed them to their other works. We had Brian Wood doing Supernatural. I followed him to read his more independent stuff. Brian K Vaughan did an arc on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I followed his stuff. Brian Lynch on IDW—Started to read his webcomics, and all that stuff, and I just found that I loved it, and I loved how I could look at the credits of a comic and befriend the writers, in a way that you couldn't really do, at the time, with TV writers. I couldn't reach out to, say, Joss Whedon, but I could add Scott Tipton on Facebook and become a years-long friend with him after seeing his name in the Angel credits, and that more close-knit community in comics drew me in, and I began to work on pitches for comics, and eventually, I found myself focusing more on that, because that's where my passions and the success was, and I thought it was a really cool way to pursue that lifelong dream of writing, and then bring the collaborative nature into it, with the artists.

I still like writing prose, but I did fall in love with, while doing theater, that collaborative nature, where I'm working with actors, and workshopping, and directors, but I noticed that, in theater, you don't really make any money. My first ever check for theater was—I did a one-act play that went up twice. I think the check was for $75. So, it wasn't a really feasible way to make a living. So, I found that, comics—I was not only able to explore my passions, and to write stories that I wanted to, but also, make a living doing so.

[05:07] John: I used to know people that did theater with Brian Vaughn. I think Brian made significantly more money after he left the world of theater.

[05:15] David: I'm shocked to learn that there is a creative endeavor that is less lucrative than comic books. I didn't know that was possible. […] I don't think I've ever heard anyone say, “I was doing this other thing, but there was more money in comics.” Never, in the history of my life, have I ever heard anybody say those words.

[05:35] Pat: I have definitely had years of struggling to make a living in comics, but I mean, as far as writing goes, compared to any other thing that I've been able to get payments through, comics blows it all away. Prose, I've gotten checks for $0.12 of doing short stories in these anthologies, and then for the licensed Marvel stuff, you would think that “it's Marvel. You’re going to get paid well,” but it's a company licensing the Marvel books. So, what I can say about those is, I got paid for most of them. Some, I didn't get paid at all. The companies just go out of business. To make a living doing prose, in a licensed way, I mean, the output has to be insane. I would get, for a full novel of 50-70,000 words, I think I made $3000, and now on Kickstarter, you could launch, and if you have a solid launch, you can make that, multiple times over, in a day.

[06:36] John: I feel like that's a dirty little secret about a lot of prose writers, that the reason they come into comics isn't necessarily a love of the medium as it is, they pay a page rate, and you get paid every page on this stuff. I mean, I guess, when you get into the prose writing, there is such a wide gulf on that. There are definitely some people that get paid more to write books than the books make, and there are people that get paid significantly less than the books make. It’s not necessarily what you think, from the outside. It’s probably what you can guess, but probably, from the outside, you probably don’t know.

[07:07] David: Not having worked in prose, at all. I've always worked in comic books, but I get the impression that it is a tough road, only because my good friend, Jonathan Maberry, who is a quite popular novelist, and has many bestselling books under his name—Dozens at this point—The amount of output that that guy's putting out is just incredible, and I think, part of that is because that's how his brain works, and he just does that much, because that's what he's doing. I think part of that also might be just, the prose industry is not all peaches and cream, much like any creative industry, I think. So, comic books is the thing you're like, “Hey, I'm getting paid for this. I'm going to do a little bit more.” Do you remember what your first true paid gig was, in comic books?

[07:52] Pat: It was a dream come true. It was IDW. Angel and Buffy were my favorite TV shows. Those, Sopranos, and Six Feet Under. As fun as those licenses would be, no one has ever picked up a Sopranos or Six Feet Under license for a comic. I would read them. I wouldn't be able to get over my sense of burning jealousy, the “it should be.” So, it was Angel. I had really focused on Angel, because I was a fan of the books and the work that IDW was making, and I was doing, at the time, a Blogspot review site. Every time one of those Angel comics came out, I would do a review, and I would often do these interviews with the writers and artists. Brian Lynch, Scott Tipton, Stephen Mooney, all those guys. So, there was one time that Stephen Mooney posted on his blog that he was dying to do an Angel story, set in Season 5, that focused on Wesley and Illyria. So, I saw that post, and that night, I wrote a three-issue outline, and a 22-page script for what I would do with that story, because Stephen Mooney was talking about how no one else wanted to write it, that they were all focusing on the post-series stuff.

Brian and all the editors had these gigs where they were doing Angel: After the Fall, and then continuing that arc, which was post-TV series. So, I scripted this entire pitch to Stephen, and I emailed it to him, and I was like, “hey, this is probably weird to do this, but I saw your blog. It inspired me, and I know you probably can't do anything with this, but here's at least something for you to read,” and the next morning, I had an e-mail from him that said something to the effect of, “not going to lie, I like this. I'm going to see what I can do.” So, he brought it up to, probably, Chris Ryall. He got back to me and said that “Angel, at this time, is IDW’s top-selling title. So, they can't give a miniseries to a writer with zero credits, but it's cool that you did this.” That planted the seed that this artist, who has drawn many of these comics, likes what I've done, and there was at least a conversation about me. So, that inspired me to keep pushing at that specific title, and I kept doing the interviews, essentially promoting the comic for free.

At a New York ComiCon, word was spreading that IDW was losing the Angel title to Dark Horse. So, they were talking about ending it, and I knew what number issue the comic was ending on, but what I learned there, from Chris, was that they were doing a special one-shot to pay tribute to this title that had been a landmark success for them, and it was Angel Yearbook, and I talked to Chris. My friend and I, Alina, were both in the same boat, where we were friends with them, promoting them, and conversations happened, and essentially, we both go, through conversations at that ComiCon, a chance to pitch for a 2-page story each. So, we both pitched stories, and got it greenlit, and I remember, at the time, I wrote my first draft on receipt paper. I essentially did what I would have done in a miniseries, in 2 pages, and I showed Scott Tipton, and he’s like, “this is cool, but this is 12 pages as 2. So, just do something a bit smaller.” So, I revised that, and I essentially drew it up to make sure it could fit on 2 pages, sent it to them, they improved it, and Stephen Mooney ended up drawing it. So, my first-ever paid gig was that 2-page Angel gig. It was a dream come true.

[11:38] David: That's fantastic. That's a good one. Stephen Mooney, making it happen for you. So, then you got your wedge, you got your foot in door there, got a taste of it. You got Stephen Mooney, who can be very good when he wants to be, drawing your stuff, and then, what happened from there? Also, by the way, you also were working with IDW, who actually paid you, which, for an independent company in comic books, is not always a thing, but I will say this about IDW, my time there at IDW, and I think before, obviously, everybody at IDW, the top brass, in particular, at IDW, they were very keen on making sure people got paid on time, and got paid what the contract said, and I always really appreciated that about the company. It was one of the things, when I came in and started working there—It’s so nice to be able to work for a company that I can go out, with confidence, and say, “hey, I'm going to hire you for this, and when you do the work, you will be paid.” It's a weird thing, to say that, but when you're talking about the industry, sometimes that's not something you get to say. Thankfully, I've never really been in that position, but I know others who have. So, it's also good that you happened to fall in with IDW for that first gig, because I'm assuming that was a good experience, all around, for you, all the way through to the payment process.

[12:56] Pat: At the time, that was my first gig, and in prose, it hadn't been this way, with the prose novels that I did, and with the theater I did, I gave my address on a contract, and they mailed me a check back then. I didn't know to invoice. So, when I wrote the Angel story, I was waiting to get paid, and I hit up Scott Tipton, because I really didn't know who else to talk to, because he was my in, kind of. So, I was like, “hey, they have my address, but I haven't gotten a check,” and he was like, “Oh, okay. I'll call them for you.” So, he talked to Chris, and he told me that Chris talked to the assistant editor on that book, and he was like, “listen, Pat doesn't know he's supposed to invoice, but you should have told him. Just treat him like he's a pro, because he's trying to be.” So, my heart was warmed, that even though I had no idea what to do—I think that Chris was the Editor-in-Chief, maybe at the time—that he would treat me in such a nice way and hold my hand through the process, and the rate was high, compared to work that I would do later. It took me years to find another publisher who would do that page rate. At the time, it was 2011, and it was 50 a page. That's still okay for a writer, 14 years later.

[14:22] John: Unfortunately, yeah. It's funny, because it’s not like there's some universal standard on comic publishers on how to invoice stuff. I actually, literally today, just realized that an extremely high-profile artist that had done a cover for me, I was going through some payments, I'm like, “wait a minute. We didn't pay this guy. We never actually worked with him before. We never actually got his bank information. We just talked to him before,” and I'm like, “hey, dude.” He's like, “oh, no worries.” Everything was cool, but it was just like, “man, how dumb was that, on my part?” That definitely wasn't you that didn't know how to do that, and I agree with David. I would always tell people when they were coming into IDW, “we make mistakes, but they are mistakes, and we fix them, and nobody's trying to not pay you.” I didn't mean to go off too far in the “John's inability to pay people properly.”

[15:10] Pat: With IDW, I've always had good experiences. Where I actually met David is when I was living, briefly, in San Diego, and I pretty much just cold-emailed him and asked for a meeting, and we had lunch, and talked about the work, and then he showed me around the office, and it was great. Yeah, I have nothing but praise for IDW. At the time—besides, I mean, I did a good job on my page to Mooney. So, I like to think that they thought I was capable, but there was really no reason beyond, “he can write, and he's been promoting us for years,” to give me a short story. That book, Angel Yearbook, it had stories from Peter David, Brian Lynch, Scott, and Jeff, who had worked on entire Angel runs, and then me. So, I look at that as them being very gracious. There was absolutely no reason to put me with those guys. That was my first, and as of now, last Angel story, and it was 2 pages, amongst people who had been the Angel guys for 10 years. So, I look back at that, very grateful.

[16:26] David: I like that you threw that “as of now.” You're like, “look, Angel might come back, and I'm going to be the writer for it.” I like that. That's some positive thinking.

[16:34] Pat: As soon as Boom! dropped the license—because Boom!, they did this Otherworld stuff. So, they had Angel as a game show host, or something. That, I couldn't really follow, but they dropped the license, and as far as I know, obviously, the logical thing is that if there were to be more comics, because Fox is owned by Disney, probably Marvel would do it, but as soon as Boom! dropped, we hit up Fox, trying to get that license.

[17:00] David: From your imprint?

[17:01] Pat: Yeah.

[17:02] David: You have a couple imprints, right?

[17:03] Pat: Yeah. So, the main company is Space Between Entertainment, and then our Cheeky imprint is our more adult stuff. Dark Veil is less of an imprint and more of a universe. So, those are all still Space Between titles, but the Dark Veil stuff just takes place in an interconnected horror fantasy universe.

[17:21] David: Got it. So, you did the Angel two-pager, and then, what was the journey from there?

[17:29] Pat: From there, I used that Angel two-pager as, essentially, my calling card. I would hit up all these small publishers, and go to Cons, and essentially say, “hey, I'm looking for work. I wrote on Angel,” and I would never say “2 pages” until they asked for the sample. So, the early work that I did, or conversations that I had, even back then, I was talking to APE Entertainment. I'm not sure—where Aaron Sparrow was editor, at the time.

[18:02] David: I owned Ape Entertainment.

[18:03] Pat: You did?

[18:04] David: Yeah.

[18:05] Pat: Wow. That's crazy. I was pitching to you guys. I got an invite to pitch on Casper's Scare School, and I pitched a few titles, and the response from Aaron was, “hey, these are cool, but they're all about Casper being an actual ghost, and the licensor doesn't want any reference to death, cemeteries, dead kids,” and I'm like, “I mean, their guy is a dead kid.”

[18:33] David: I mean, it's been so long ago. Some licensors, you can work with, and you're like, “man, this is a dream, and we're going to make a lot of money, because the licensor understands the space, and they understand how to let the publisher do the publisher's job,” and then there are some licensors who don't do any of that, and it's almost like, once the contract is signed, there's this honeymoon, when you're in the negotiations, and having the discussions, and everything's going to go exactly the way you think it is, and then the contract is signed, and the money is sent, and then, suddenly, the reality of it comes on, and it's 180° from what you thought you were getting into, and Casper was one of those. The handcuffs were put on us so quickly. It's like, “wait, we're just going to do Casper. There’s an expectation in the industry of what a Casper comic book is like,” and they're like, “no, let's do this other thing that's a really bad idea.” That was a tough one.

[19:29] Pat: No, I mean, licensors can, for sure, be tough. Even just as a freelancer, working for publishers who have these licenses, I mean, it's so easy to tell, from the notes, who's going to be a tough licensor, based on if there's a logic to what they're asking for. So, my focus, at first, was on licensed comics. So, I pitched the Casper’s Scare School stuff, and I pretty much hit up everybody who had a licensed comic. At the next New York ComiCon, I was exploring the small press section, and I talked to Big Dog Inc, who was just starting out, back then. Great guys. Tom's an awesome guy. He had one title, at the time, or two. I think he had a Critter and Legend of Oz, and I pitched on both, and I got a one-shot on the Critter stuff and a miniseries on Oz. At the same time, I was talking to Zenescope, which ended up being, for years, my main gig.

My idea there was Charmed, because a friend of mine got the e-mail for, at the time, the Editor-in-Chief and co-founder, Ralph Tedesco, who's become a great friend. My friend got his e-mail by writing to their warehouse. So, he noticed that all the emails coming back to him from his warehouse question about when his orders were coming, had a format to them. I won't say what it is, but it was something @Zenescope that you could figure out, based on their names, that wasn't just their name, but it was a way to do it. So, he's like, “if you plug Ralph Tedesco's name in a format, this way at Zenescope.com, I beg you could talk to him.” So, I did, and all of a sudden, I was talking to Ralph, and I told him that I wrote for Angel, and I saw that he had Charmed. The TV show, Charmed, ended at Season 8, and they were doing the Season 9 comics, just like how Buffy did. I saw that it was ending. So, I thought, “this would be good time to pitch a one-shot, or a miniseries.”

So, I hit him up, and asked if it was okay to send some stuff, and he said yes, and immediately, we were talking about me doing Charmed, and as we were talking, he's like, “hey, as we wait for a response from CBS, and the current writer, Paul Ruditis, who’s going to take a small break, why don't you start out for me, doing some scripts that adapts Spike TV’s 1000 Ways to Die into comic book form.” So, I did five of those, and then he invited me to do some Grimm Fairy Tales one-shots, because their main thing was the Grimm Fairy Tales universe, which is this horror, superhero, dark fantasy world that people think it's just adaptations, it’s “Wonderland is Alice. Robyn Hood is just the poems with a chick.” No. So, their universe is essentially anything public domain in this interconnected horror universe, and it's Buffy and Angel-esque, in some ways. That was right up my alley, but when I started to get those gigs, I gave it my all, because I thought, “if I can do well on these, this is their main source of publishing. They publish multiple miniseries, ongoings, in this universe. So, let me show them how good I am at writing this kind of a character.” So, that was my focus with them, for that first year, as they worked on the idea of me on Charmed.

So, that was in November of 2011. By 2012, in June, they offered me an exclusive contract. So, I became a staff writer, and I started out doing about two miniseries a month, and then I worked my way up to doing between 5-7 single issues a month for Zenescope, as exclusive writer, for about 4 years.

[23:14] David: That is an insane output, John. Five scripts a month. You did 240 issues worth of material over those four years.

[23:23] Pat: Yeah.

[23:24] David: That is a lot.

[23:25] Pat: It was so much, but I was so excited to have a way to tell these stories. It probably wasn't the smartest, financially, to take on all these, because as staff writer, I was going to get paid what I was going to get paid, regardless, and as new miniseries came up, I could have been like, “hey, I'm strapped right now. I’m doing all these. Why don't you give that other miniseries that you have coming up to somebody else?” but I was genuinely excited to do everything, back then. So, pretty much, they had a slate of between 12-17 issues a month, in their highest output time, which was 2013/14. They were doing all these big events. So, I was doing my thing, Raven Gregory was doing some, and then Ralph and Joe, who owned the company, were doing some, and then about 2-4 issues a month would go to a freelance writer, but Ralph, Joe, and Raven, and I still plotted everything. I would go down to their office in Pennsylvania, and I would be put in a hotel for, say, Friday to Sunday, and I would go to the office, and we would plot out the entire quarter or half a year of stories, and then pick who's going to write what, and mostly, it was me, and then we would give the rest of the outlines to freelance writers. So, I had to also shepherd them through bringing our plots to life. So, it was sort of like being in a writer’s room, in some way.

[24:59] David: So, did you have editorial here, or were you handling editorial, as well? What did that look like?

[25:05] Pat: At the time, editorial and Zenescope was split into two things. There was interior editorial, and then, covers, and that ended up blending later on. Dave Franchini became publisher at Zenescope after me, and he actually, just—his last day there was today. He's now created his own imprint, called Weird Brain. So, at Zenescope, with Dave, they do fewer issues a month now. I believe that they do 3-5 per month, and Dave writes probably 3 of those, but now, his workload is—I did not envy this—He runs editorial on the interiors, and also books, something like 500-700 covers a year, which is—creating that many cover concepts is absolutely mind-boggling.

[25:56] David: Bonkers. I think their cover artist choices are always really pretty top-notch. They know their audience, they know what they're doing, and they get artists that really match their aesthetic really well. They do a really good job with that.

[26:08] Pat: Yeah, but when I was there, I was in editorial, working on interiors with two other editors. So, at first, it was Matt Rogers and Nicole Glade, and then Dave Franchini began to work in editorial, and somebody else who was there for a brief time. So, the three of us, together, would essentially run the interiors. So, on the titles that I was writing, I would sometimes do editorial, but mostly, somebody else would. Then on the books that other writers were working on, I would run editorial on their scripts and on the artist, to make sure that it all matches, it flows, and it meets the Zenescope vision. The editorial was a bit less demanding, as far as that, because the writing was just so much. Editorial, I was working on probably 3 books I didn't write, per month, as editor. The books that I did write, though, that I was working in editorial, were so much easier, because I knew the stories in and out.

[27:06] David: I don't know how you can know the stories in and out, if you're writing 5 or 6 books a month. I wouldn't be able to remember what the heck I was doing.

[27:13] Pat: It helped that they were in the same universe. What I write is a lot more varied now, because I'm writing my own titles, and my creator-owneds all stand apart from one another, but at Zenescope, my main books, for a while, were Robyn Hood, Van Helsing, The Grimm Fairy Tales ongoing, and Charmed, and then miniseries sprinkled in. So, Robyn and Van Helsing, and Grimm, are all in the same universe. I could pull characters from those books and have them cross over. It became easy for me to write in that universe, because I knew all the characters very well, and Charmed was more of a break from that, because it was a different thing. It was a bit easier to keep it all in line, and to understand the stories, because of how it was all in that Grimm stable.

[27:58] David: That makes sense.

[27:59] John: When I was at my maximum, writing Transformers stuff, though, I was so reliant on the fact that there was a wiki that somebody was making that was super up-to-date. So, I could go and find out stuff I’d written, and figure out where I'd left characters, and at the end of it, I was having to write stuff out of order, and we were double-shipping a lot of stuff, and I didn't have that, and it's like, “oh, man. This is rough. I’ve got to go back and look at my scripts.”

[28:24] Pat: When your output is high, that part genuinely gets hard. Jumping a bit ahead, just to comment on that, with my company, I'm copy-editing my own work, and I have 3-4 other editors copy-editing with me, but still, with all that, I was getting emails from this one reader, that “Oh, yeah. You spelled this character’s name in a different way in this one panel.” So, I was like, “you know what? That kind of thing is so easy to miss, for me, because I'm so in the rhythm of the story, I glaze over it.” So, I actually brought that reader in to copy-edit for us, because I wanted to make sure […].

[29:03] John: Diana on G.I. Joe. She still works on it. She's a G.I. Joe super fan, and she's the one that tells Larry what he did with his characters.

[29:11] Pat: That’s great.

[29:14] John: There were times where characters have just shown up there, because Larry forgot he killed them 15 years ago.

[29:21] David: I think that's truly one of the highest forms of flattery, is to have somebody so invested in the stuff that you're doing, that they are paying that close attention, that they will identify and notice those things. I love that version of fandom. Sometimes, it gets a little rough, but I do love that version of fandom, and I do think that it's charming, in its own way, when you find those guys like that.

[29:42] John: When I was in high school, my friend, Mike Yocum, would read anything that I wrote, so closely, and read into stuff. He wasn't this super—the only comics he read were comic strips I made. He was not into the medium, whatsoever, but that was the thing that just stuck with me. I'm like, “okay, I’ve got to make sure I'm doing this right for Mike.” He'd be like, “what does that mean, with that face that you drew there?” “Oh, I made an X and then forgot to color it in black.”

[30:14] Pat: Yeah. I mean, that kind of thing is great, and obviously, Transformers, GI Joe, those series, they ended up being hundreds of issues. So, just this really difficult balancing act, to push the story forward, while not contradicting anything from before, and I’m feeling the same on my book, Destiny, NY, right now. We've done 6 volumes. They're all essentially 200 pages, and then, we have multiple spin-offs. So, all together, all said, it's almost 2000 pages of comic books. So, I have to really trust my editors to pop into a chat, and be like, “have we named this supporting character’s mom?” “I’d like to, right now, but you have to tell me if I already did. If I have to read 2000 pages that I wrote, I’ll probably still miss it.”

[31:07] David: Yeah, you’re onto the next thing. You can't be dwelling in the past, Pat. You’ve got to be onto the next thing.

And with that, we're going to leave you to go onto the next thing. We’ll be back next week with the second part of Pat Shand’s interview. I hope you join us, and thank you, as always, for listening in. We’ll see you next time. Bye.

Thanks for joining us, and please subscribe, rate, and tell your friends about us. You can find updates, and links at www.thecornerbox.club, and we’ll be back next week with more from David, and John, here at The Corner Box.