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| 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."
