In Mick Foley’s book Foley is Good, he talks about the unprecedented number of people that never pick up a book again after they get out of education. It is actually quite disgusting. Think of this, if a book sells a million copies, it is a superstar best seller. If a movie only sells a million tickets, it is a flop. For someone to read a 700-page book, it can be quite intimidating. This is why I am so impressed with kids who read the last four books of the Harry Potter series. So if reading a 700-page book can be intimidating, imagine writing one… Now I will scale it back a little bit.
Over the last few months, I have been writing 80-page graphic novels. That is it is 80 pages of art. The scripts for these books usually run close to 100 pages of type, not counting character profiles and visual guides for my artist. I love to type on the computer but I prefer to edit from a hard copy. So when I edit during my lunch hour at my 9-to-5 job, I walk into the break room at my work and drop the hard copy on the table. Many people – especially the high school kids – are tremendously put off by the size of the script. Most people are intimidated to read a 100-page script, much less write one.
And because of that, I realize that what I do is pretty darn special… because not everyone can do what I do. I am not saying that my job is hard because it does come rather easily to me. Could anyone write comics? With the right training and mentoring, it is possible but I cannot see a person doing it for a living unless they truly love it. Holding yourself at that keyboard is something that is done out of love. And if your heart isn’t in it, you shouldn’t be.
My mom used to always complain about how much professional athletes are paid. However, I could put every single person in the state of Oklahoma on a football field and say, “Tackle New York Giants’ running back Brandon Jacobs and I will pay you $500,000.” Yeah, tackle this 264-lbs freight train. How many could do it? Not many. Which is why they should get paid the big bucks. And I won’t even talk about athletes contributions to the economy… Still, if you can do something that not a lot of people can do, you should be compensated financially for it.Now, just to prove my point, let’s take it in a different direction. I work right now in a job at my local grocery store. I don’t make minimum wage but I like to call it “minimal wage.” I’ve worked in the place for a while and occasionally you work with these employees that think, “This place would fall apart without me.” At one time, in my youth, I thought I was that employee. But the truth is it wouldn’t. Right now, if you think you might be this employee, sorry, you are not. With or without you, the show will go on.
I like to say that it is just a grocery store. It is not a nuclear missile silo. We are not making heart and lung machines. And as movie producer Les Grossman once said, “A nutless monkey could do your job. Seriously. A nutless monkey.” We had a new employee come in and she was trained in a week. She has now been involved for three months and is doing an excellent job. The translation is that I could be easily replaced. I freely admit it. So I probably should not be paid a tremendous amount of money.Of course, when I see how much money the company makes with so little compensation for its employees… Well, it doesn’t really inspire me to work very hard. With an hourly wage and no profit sharing, I get paid the same if we have 200 customers an hour or 2. And I think this is a major downfall for many companies. I am smart enough to recognize this problem but I am not intelligent enough to fix the problem or suggest a way to improve the American business landscape. I write stories involving muscle guys in spandex and capes. But sometimes just acknowledging a problem is the first step…
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