Fear The Walking Dull

I don't normally blog to slam creative work, preferring instead to focus on the things I like and have merit for success; but on that rare exception, when it's obvious that the sole reason for a series was financial instead of creative, and a half-hearted effort went into its writing, I have no qualms about speaking my mind. When I watch a zombie show, I expect to cringe at the gruesomeness of the undead eating people I've grown to love...people I am rooting for to live and be happy. When I am instead cringing at flaccid dialogue and actions that have no bearing on reality, I know there's a problem.

Free Art For Profit

Vincent Van Gogh: Starving Artist

On a seemingly innocuous Website called Internships.com resides an ad titled, Artist Needed for Graphic Novel, asking for an illustrator to help develop a 90-page graphic novel for free. The average illustrator can produce one to two comic pages per day, so at minimum, this is a 45-day, full-time commitment. To non-creative types, this internship looks innocent enough--the ground floor of something potentially career enhancing. But those in the creative fields know better, and ads like this in American business are a dime a dozen. 

To paraphrase my old friend Kevin, a working illustrator with a family: "It's infuriating enough that this guy is asking to get a 90-page graphic novel developed and drawn and is calling it an 'internship'--but the real jewel comes near the end of the pitch, when he casually drops the suggestion that the book will get shown to a *gasp* Hollywood producer, but fails to stipulate whether the artist will have any profit participation in a film deal, which of course guarantees none."