Top Cow Talent Hunt

Well, the 2019 Top Cow Talent Hunt has finally drawn to a close, with the winners notified. It brings a belated sense of closure, but for me the point of the contest was never in the winning. 

I don’t remember exactly how I heard about the contest in the first place, but it must be either through social media or the comic portals that have worked so closely with social media for the last several years. Anyway, by joining the contest Facebook group I started thinking of the story I could submit and kept mulling it over for quite a while. I was pretty sure I wanted to do a renaissance variant of the Darkness character, but with 20 pages available I was trying to make it concise and to the point.

Unfortunately at 20 pages it also felt both too long and too short for my plan. Just like with a Millarworld talent hunt the year before I was on the verge of dropping the whole idea of submitting to a contest I had next to no chance of winning and only false hope to look forward to. It was at this point that I started following the Talent Hunt Facebook group more closely.

Seeing the artists come up again and again for questions and clarifications got me to email a couple of them. One of them even asked me for an 8 page script that he could illustrate and that we would turn in as a joint submission. In a manner of minutes he realized that the rules didn’t allow joint writer/artist submissions, but my mind was already made up. I could write an 8 page story and try to pass it off to one of these guys to illustrate.

I guess I was still hoping against hope to have it submitted, but I think that I was really looking for the chance to have my script illustrated. Anyway, I wrote my initial draft that night, which changed very little since. It was a complete eight page story for what it’s worth but I didn’t have an artist attached to it until a couple of months later when I finally broke down and commissioned one of the pencillers who submitted their work to the Talent Hunt Facebook group.

Seeing Francesco’s work on my script, first in the thumbnail form and than in finished pencils was transforming. Commenting on the layouts, making further creative decisions and finally splitting the crowded last page in two felt very empowering. Finally, contracting his friend to letter the story and making small changes until it was all on the page brought it all home. It was my first completed comics story.

Except that it wasn’t, with the rules of the contest clearly saying that the writer has to submit a 20 page written story and that the artist has to illustrate eight sequential pages from one of Top Cow’s existing scripts. Thus, I had a complete short story that didn’t fit the contest criteria and a writing submission that needed eleven more pages to be complete.

Francesco suggested to me to complete the script and submit it along with our collaboration, so that was what I proceeded to do. The problem was obviously that the short story worked on its own, so I had to write a prologue that used a new cast of characters. Basically, I was creating another story preceding the one we already finished. It ended up amounting to a long action scene highlighting the villainy of the titular Darkness character that was further explored in the illustrated portion of the story.

I went back and forth with it and having revised the ending of the illustrated portion of the story, I was managed to complete the script in time for the deadline. Due to the generosity of the editorial, I was allowed to link the completed comic with my script, which made me happy to know that what we worked to create would be considered.

After waiting a couple of months that included a horrible pandemic, the contest results are in and that’s that. 

Except that once again, it isn’t, since I have not stopped writing and producing comicbooks. As I said in my last post, the Talent Hunt was a start to something much more important than my submission itself, as it made me finally dare to truly get behind the idea of creating my own stories and seeing them to completion. 

I’ll be tracking that progress on this blog and my Twitter account, so I hope you enjoy what follows.