Devin Grayson

Comic Foundry has a very detailed interview with Devin Grayson on what it's like to work as a freelancer.

Grayson on continuity:

. . . The industry goes back and forth between featuring more literate, less mainstream work that is often able to attract new readers to the medium, and more bombastic, continuity-heavy work that keeps the long-term readers invested. There’s no inherent reason that any given company couldn’t do both, and, indeed, Marvel had that going for a little while with the Ultimate line running side by side with the regular series titles, but usually the person in charge of a publishing company’s marketing objectives will have a strong preference in one direction or another.

Grayson on submitting a Batman story:

. . . I cannot start that script until [Schreck, Didio, and Levitz] chime in and agree. Sometimes that’s a matter of three minutes worth of e-mailing, and sometimes it takes four months (during which, if that’s the only project I’m working on, I receive no pay, even if I’m rewriting the idea – or pitch – every week to address various concerns).

Grayson on new talent:

Upper management (VPs or editors in chief) also has a lot of influence on hiring practices, so when you see, for instance, a lot of fresh, new talent, that’s a new editor or an edict from upper management. Similarly, when you see a trend towards, to put it bluntly, “star fucking,” when every book is suddenly being assigned to someone outside the industry who has some kind of major pop culture cred, that’s usually the result of upper management wanting to attract a certain kind of publicity and cache.

There's just too much interesting stuff to summarize, so go and check it out already.