When Tim Seeley showed up for work late last week at Devil’s Due Publishing in Ravenswood, he planned to spend the day drawing elves. Instead he wound up dealing with a mailbox full of congratulatory e-mails and interview requests. Variety had just reported that Rogue Pictures, the genre division of Focus Features, had purchased the rights to Hack/Slash, the satirical horror comic he thought up two years ago while soaking in his tub.
Despite the adolescent atmo-sphere there’s not much chatter coming from the cubicles. “So many comics studios are more like a dorm-room hangout,” says Blaylock, a 28-year-old with a green-streaked quiff cut. “It’s usually too much of the artist’s influence, not enough of the business influence, or vice versa. You’ll be talking to other studios and they’ve got Xboxes and PlayStations. That’s cool, but there will never, ever be a video-game console in here. If there is it’ll be locked down at certain hours, because it’s a place to fucking work.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Until the early 90s Marvel and DC dominated all but the tiniest corners of the comic-book industry. Once he decided he wanted to create comics and not cartoons, Blaylock took inspiration from indie publishers like Image, a group of seven Marvel artists who broke away and swiped a significant portion of the market share with titles like Spawn, The Savage Dragon, Youngblood, and WildC.A.T.S. “At the time I was 14 and here’s these guys coming out with their own comics, their own characters, and making toys, movie deals, all that stuff,” he says. “They were pretty much achieving the dream of any comic-book creator. That’s what I wanted to do and then here were people doing it.”
Though his artwork was subpar, Blaylock says, he managed to secure distribution for Minotaur through the major comics catalogs. He sold around 1,500 copies by hauling the series around to conventions–enough to break even–but, more important, he made contacts and taught himself the basics of self-publishing. His father, Larry, who invested a couple thousand dollars in Minotaur, encouraged his son’s new strategy: “I would tell him you can’t just depend on your art talent, because there’s a lot of people out there and they might blow you away. I said what you need to do is learn to use other people’s abilities. Keep an eye out for other people that are better, try to use them, get them working for you.”
In early 2001, after picking up temp work for a few months, Blaylock got the license from Hasbro. He then made a deal with Image to help publish the series. Most comic-book retailers were unenthusiastic about bringing such dated characters back; it couldn’t have helped that Blaylock didn’t have much of a track record. “I think someone internally at Image had to convince the publisher it was a good idea,” he says, “because I got a lot of the reaction, ‘Why would anybody want this 80s stuff?’”
“What happens more often than not is it’s ‘too booby, too violent,’” says Seeley. He thinks there’s something about the relatively solitary lifestyle of a comic-book artist that results in the preponderance of big-breasted female characters: “That happens to me, and I have people around me. Every once in a while I’m like, ‘Whoa! Get the eraser out. I got a little crazy there.’ It’s this weird lonely job where they start to vent their romantic and sexual frustrations. I think if more comic-book artists were starving there’d be more comic books about meat loaf. Fortunately most of them are well fed. They’re just undersexed.”
