The real measure of success

The girl came over because somebody at the bar told her I’d sold a million books that year. “Is that true?” she asked.

I nodded.

“So you’re a success?”

“I guess I am.” (I could have added, “This year.”)

She slid into the next seat with a sudden smile. “I admire success,” she said significantly.

This for me was a moment of real interest. (The only one in that conversation, actually; she worked in marketing.) It was the moment that I realized I don’t admire success. I admire talent, I admire craft, and I admire achievement. They don’t always come with success as a package deal. Just ask Van Gogh – or Dan Brown.

So when a publisher pressed me recently to say what I thought about Mirabilis, it was hard to give an answer. The publisher meant: did I think it would be a success. But all that matters to me, really, is have we been successful at what we set out to do.

And that we have. I am always praising Leo’s and Nikos’s and Martin's work, but in this instance I’m not too shy about praising my own either. I wanted Mirabilis to be “a modern Tintin” in the sense of an adventure with a family of characters who you feel warmly towards. I’m very happy with how it turned out. If it were a movie, it would be what Tarantino calls a hang-out movie. You keep coming back to it because it’s fun hanging out with these characters. “Only connect!” - that’s what I’m proud of. The achievement is what matters.

The movie question was what the publisher was really fishing for an answer to. Did I think Mirabilis would join the long stream of graphic novels getting turned into films? I might have said there are an awful lot of graphic novels that don’t. I might have said that most graphic novels that get turned into movies should never have been. But what can you answer, when your own criterion for success is personal, a measure of craft, and theirs is financial? The languages are too different.

You’ve got to have at least a sprinkling of the second kind of success, otherwise the first is unobtainable. Can’t paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling if the Pope never heard your name. But how much success do you want? Well now, there’s a question.

“Just enough,” I’d say. If twenty people grok your comic – well, you’re going to have to fit it in around your day job. If twenty thousand people love it, then it can be your day job. If two million people like it, though – well, bask in that, but it’s probably not your comic anymore.

Take Watchmen, ticking over pretty nicely with a hundred thousand fans for a couple of decades. The movie comes out and suddenly a million copies of the graphic novel are sold. Twenty million people pay to see the movie. Is that a good thing? Only if you sell action figures; I don’t think it meant a jot to Alan Moore. If he enjoys meeting interesting Watchmen fans, I’ll bet he found far more of them among that original core group. All success did was to dilute the people who appreciated Watchmen the way Moore intended in a vast ocean of casual browsers who didn’t really get it. That’s fashion, not passion.

Elitist, you say? Gimme a break, I’m a comics fan. I’m not talking about the poems of Rilke here. I’m speaking as an artist, not a critic. You create a work of art to communicate something. And what you want is for the people to whom that something has meaning to come across your work and be moved by it. And the people who find some other reason to like it – well, good luck to them. They should have a nice life. But you have no investment in them. They admired your garden as they walked by, that's all.

Being true to your own vision doesn't have to mean starving in a garret. The choice isn't necessarily personal success or financial success. Stephenie Meyer's Twilight books come in for some flak because most reviewers find them tame. And that may be true; her brew of teen alienation is administered in a very weak dilution compared to, say, Kate Thompson's Creature of the Night, or Lionel Shriver's We Need To Talk About Kevin. I've only read the first book in the series and, while I don't share the opinion of those who think it's badly written, still it doesn't have anything like the subtle emotional insights of an author like Jill Chaney in her book Angel Face. But my point is that the Twilight books are genuine. Ms Meyer is writing what she wants to write. This is her version of vampires, and you may not care for it but at least you can't say it's manufactured to find an audience. That it did find quite a big audience is the icing on the cake for Ms Meyer, and I hope she enjoys talking to all the fans. I suspect she probably does. But her real achievement is that she had a vision and she put it on paper.

Francis Ford Coppola said recently, “The bigger the budget, the stupider [the movie] has to be, because it has to appeal to everyone. The smaller the budget, the freer you can be.” Another wise gentleman spoke to me the other day of having “a keen eye for volumes brimming with tone, atmosphere, character, and individuality - the comic book version of the great film producers of early Hollywood.”

And between those two statements I realized that’s where we want to be with Mirabilis. This is a labor of love. We do want it to make money. I think it will. We need it to make enough to pay our grocery bills, at least, so that we can go on with it and tell the whole story. But we don’t have to chase success – we must not – at the expense of the story and the characters and the soul of the thing. God forbid it turns into Pirates of the Caribbean 2 and 3. (Comparisons with PotC 1, you will notice, I find perfectly acceptable.)

All our experiences with Mirabilis over the last year or so have led us to this point. Like any revelation, it makes life so much simpler. We now know what we have to do: just be true to the work, make it available to those who want it, forget about anything that doesn’t serve the creative honesty of the project. Yes, it should be obvious. What can I say? Sometimes you have to go on a journey to arrive where you started and know the place for the first time.

That’s why Mirabilis will stay in our control, and no offer of movie millions (or even television thousands) will take it away from us. Because then it wouldn’t be Mirabilis, it would just be the latest corporate pod-product pretending to have a heart. It would risk becoming the awful zombie parody of itself which all wildly successful franchises eventually fall prey to.

You may now be saying, “Dream on, buddy. Your little comic strip would never get as big as something like Star Wars anyway.” And I agree. I hope it’s too personal for that. As big as Stardust would suit us just fine.

Quoted in The Guardian, Ricky Gervais says that the secret is to care about the project, not the money or the accolades: "I went into every meeting [about The Invention of Lying] with one great strength - I was always ready to walk away. I don't care if they say no and that makes me bulletproof. They don't know what to say when I say I don't care about the money. The room literally goes quiet." He adds: "If you want to make a good film, try to make your film for £40." (Note that laser-focussing on the quality of the work itself has not meant that the other kind of success eluded Mr Gervais - far from it.)

The satisfaction of a craftsman, the pride of a creator, the rapture of an artist. Those are the true measures of success. Accept no substitutes.

The sweet smell of success - and why lucre doesn't have to stink either

Often on Cloud 109 (best blog in the universe) I'm reading Peter Richardson's fascinating accounts of the greats of comic art and writing, and the dismal truth dawns that most of these guys were chewed up and spat out to watch their creations soar to the heights while they expired in the gutter, usually with the consolation of a bottle of Jim Beam in a brown paper bag. And then you spend a little time working in videogames or TV or movies and you begin to see a pattern. It isn't just comics. Wherever there is creative talent there's a rip-off waiting to happen.

Jack Ember delivers a passionate speech about this in Winter. It comes close to the end of the book so I won't spoil it here. He seems to be talking more generally, and indeed I guess he is. When creative talent gets chewed up, that's the perfect Platonic embodiment of money oppressing labor, after all. But the wrath, determination and socialist sentiments expressed by Mr Ember come from Leo's and my personal experience. It's a theme David Mamet explores in many of his movies, such as The Spanish Prisoner, above, or The Verdict, below. (Though I should add that Mr Mamet is hardly going to want me lumping him in with us socialists; sorry, sir.)

Anyway, there's never any point in being defeatist. When you talk to people who want to oppress you, if you dig in they will start to talk over you. That kind of person views all talent as unworldly, so they will alternately try to bully or charm you. They are trying to turn you into a victim. This you must resist. It is said that genius is always to be found begging at the gates of wealth, but that is old business thinking - the zero sum game. There are now investors and business partners who have the vision to seek a new model with creatives. They are out there; you must find them. As a creative man or woman, you must learn enough about new business thinking to talk to these worthwhile partners and forge win-win deals. Remain positive and there is nothing apart from the raw quality of your work to prevent you climbing up the ladder to a new and better creative/financial model.

Here, like the stages of Dante's hell, are the thresholds you must cross to get there. Forewarned is forearmed!

1. At this stage, people are not interested in your project. They don't just pass on it, they act as if Derren Brown has put them under a hypnotic compulsion to ignore it. If you give it to friends and they don't give you any feedback, that's actually a good sign. It means that they don't know how to break it to you that they found it too weird. Too weird often (but not always) equates to original, which is what the project needs to have any chance of reaching stage 5.

2. People try to shoot the project down. This means that they feel there is a serious risk of it being successful. Tellingly, they see that as a risk to themselves - in most cases, they're envisaging that it will be a success for someone else. So they tell you all the reasons why you should abandon it. "Science fiction is not testing well with the 8-12 year-old ABC1 female demographic." Again, take heart. If they actually thought it wouldn't get anywhere, they wouldn't bother trying to discourage you. (Also, anybody who thinks that kind of marketing speak has anything to do with creative success is a moron anyway, so do you really care about their opinion?)

3. Now it's getting serious. People will come out of the woodwork telling you why you won't get anywhere without them. I'm not talking here about potentially useful partners like investors or publishers. These are people who you're not even sure exactly what they plan to do for you. They keep everything vague, which favors them because they don't have anything concrete to bring to the deal. You can recognize them in an instant by the lingo: fluent bullshit. Sit it out - they're just the early swarm of parasites that tells you real partnerships and deals are on the horizon.

4. Success is close now. You can smell it. Serious players turn up wanting a slice of your project. The only problem is, they don't want the goose (that's you), they just want the golden egg. Money will be offered. More money than a ditch-digger could make in a whole week, yay. This is the reverse of stage 1, as gradually you'll notice at meetings that people are talking about "our" project. Yeah, they like it now. They want to go home with it, and you're just the old chaperone who's getting in the way. The history of creative endeavor is a bloody battlefield littered with talent left clutching a few dollars while the big boys sit on piles of gold sucking their cigars. They'll do it without a qualm - they don't even think you deserve it. After all, they did all the work, didn't they? Beware of this stage. Having come this far you're probably desperate for a payday, but don't weaken.

5. Real success is when you find partners - publishers, studios, investors - who both have something real to contribute and see you as more than an upstart who found a treasure map in the attic. They know that you are the best champion the project will ever have. They figure that having created it, you might just come up with even more good stuff next week. As this type of deal is a genuine win-win, each partner may have smaller percentages but of a much bigger pie. I should add that few creatives ever get this far - most sold it at stage 4 or earlier to pay the rent. But if you have a good project, believe in it. The only thing that stops you reaching stage 5 is all the frogs you need to get through to find a prince.