Hey guys, it's Scott.
It's Tuesday, November 29th, and I just wanted to make a quick post. I'm going to be doing this more often now where instead of just posting once a week, with half the posts free and half the post paid, we're going to try and throw up more stuff for you on the site. We're going to do this thing, just trying it out, but a post on Tuesdays where I’m gonna answer two of your questions that you've been posting in the comments that you've been asking in DMs, things that anyone that's been a part of Our Best Jackett has posed as a question about craft, about the industry, about my history in comics, my opinions on stuff, anything at all. So it will be like a Two Questions Tuesday, and on top of that, we will often try and post a bit of an art tease for things coming up. Today it'll be for our Nocterra: Val Special coming out next week. Really excited about it. It's Francis Manapul guesting on art, and it's kind of a big one-shot that tells the secret story of the beginning of the Ferryman. And also catches you up on the series if you haven't been reading it so that you're all set for our big third arc called “No Breaks,” which starts in February with Tony Daniel returning.
So yeah, so we're going to be posting Tuesdays, we're going to be posting Fridays, it's all part of a move over here from Twitter. As I was saying last time, it's just where I'm more comfortable.
I've made more valuable connections over here. I really feel like I can interact with you and get a deeper level of interaction and discourse, honestly. So I really like it and I hope you guys will enjoy it, too. We won't email you, though, about the Tuesday posts. I don't want to clog your inbox. If you guys want us to email, let us know in the comments and we will, but I just feel bad blasting your inbox twice a week. So these ones will just go up. You can find them if you want. And Friday, we'll do a bigger post. And I will be doing that bigger post from California.
So that's the other sort of big thing I wanted to put in front of you is that if you're anywhere near Los Angeles this Saturday, I will be at L.A. Comic Con with Greg Capullo and a bunch of other awesome creators—Donny Cates, Pete Tomasi, Ryan Ottley, and there's a whole whole host of great people and really cool entertainment guests that’re going to be there. I'm only there Saturday though. I'm only there one day because I took Jack, our 15 year-old to England, to announce our comic By a Thread, co-created by Valeria Favoccia, which is going great:
I really wanted to take Emmett, our 11 year-old, on a trip somewhere. He's a huge Disney fan and also a huge baseball fan. So we're only going for a couple days, I'm taking him Thursday night and we're going to go to Disneyland together, the two of us, on Friday. And then Saturday I'm at the con all day, I'll be there from beginning to end. I'll post my schedule here, or the best assistant in the world, Tyler, will do it here.
And yeah, just please come by! Come by and say hi, I'd love to see people love to hang out and catch up. If you're a paid Best Jackett member of any kind, you get to come up at the beginning of any of the signings posted and you can kind of jump in front and we'll have a little bit of time reserved for you guys to get your stuff signed first. So anyway, come check it out. I'll be back Sunday, so it's an absolute whirlwind trip of baseball card stores and Disney, but it should be fun.
And also, our class on December 15th at 9:30pm EST! I'm really excited, we've kind of begun narrowing down some of the submissions. There are so much great student work and aspiring creator comics out there. We're going to use ones that are both art and script this time, I think, just to make the lessons easier the first couple of months, but then we'll move over and use some of your scripts as well. If you have anything else you want to submit, just submit now. We're really at the tail end of looking at stuff for this particular session this month, so if it's been published, or you've published it yourself, that's all totally great. Send it to Best Jackett Press. Tyler will put the address right here, again, because he's awesome.
Comic Writing students, and students only, please send your submissions (along with the required submission agreement doc below) to ourbestjackettwriting@gmail.com
And yeah, I'm really, really thrilled to kind of dig in a little bit deeper over here instead of on other social media platforms. So a couple of your questions. So the first one is:
TJ Wilson asks, "At what point in your writing career did you incorporate or form an LLC? Is that a question best answerable by an entertainment attorney?"
So that sounds like a really inside baseball question, but it's actually really important. I'm really glad you asked that, TJ. I would recommend creating a Limited Liability Company (LLC) as soon as you can, honestly, if you're a creator. With an S-Corp or an LLC, obviously, you have to do it through a lawyer or do it through an accountant. Do it through someone who knows the ins and outs of the financials and can really help you. There's no kind of setting it up on your own. Talk to somebody who advises you financially, advises you legally. It's a really simple setup, but what it does is it creates a company that you run as sort of a holding entity for money coming in from people that are paying you.
So it sounds sort of complex, but really what it is as it allows you to redistribute the money that you're getting paid however you see fit. You're now an employee of your own company as opposed to an individual getting paid by DC or Marvel, or wherever you're getting paid for, Amazon, whatever it is. If I'm an individual and I'm making comics on my own and I'm also working for a licensed company like Amazon, so if I'm making comics for Comixology but I'm also working on projects on the side for myself, if I want to pay Tyler, if I want to make a comic or fund a comic by somebody else, when the money comes in if I'm an individual, if that money comes in from Amazon, or DC, or Marvel, I'm taxed on it, because as an individual that's income. So I get taxed on it, and then if I want to pay somebody or use it for another purpose, it doesn't matter, I'm already taxed on it. So I'm losing some of it before I use it for my own business purposes.
If I have a corporation, or a company, the money comes into that corporation and I, as the boss of that corporation, can distribute it how I see fit. So I can say “only some of this is actually income, because the rest I'm going to pay out to people in different ways.” And as you start to do more creative on comics, that becomes especially necessary, because any money that comes in from anywhere else that you plan on using to fund your own comics, if you're doing a Kickstarter or anything, you want to be able to designate as payout money, as money that you're using for your business to grow, not income.
And then, obviously, you have to use it honestly that way. It’s not like some kind of tax shelter. But that's how I'm set up, that's how everybody I know comics is set up. So I hope that answers that question. Essentially, the bottom line is, creating a company allows you to distribute money coming into you as creator how you see fit to fund your projects, to fund employees, to fund anything that furthers your career in a way that allows you to avoid getting taxed on it as income if you actually, truthfully, aren't going to use it as income.
The other question is:
SHANECRUISE asks, "Do you ever have to take a few days off from writing to regroup from how much you’ve been doing?"
Yeah, man, absolutely. The problem with my life right now is just that I don't get those days very often. I'm working towards trying to thin out my schedule a little bit so that I have more time to be able to spend just with my family and just doing things that I want for myself. But I'm really, really elated that I have as much work as I have and that it's all sort of self imposed. Everything that I'm doing right now is a choice to make things that I've come up with with co-creators that I'm excited about. And because of that, I sometimes take on more than I should for a healthy balance, I think, of life and work. That said, I do take days off. Like I said, I'm going to California, taking a day off to go to Disneyland with my kid. I did take a day or two off in England to go around with my older kid there. And I try hard, but there's absolutely no shame at all in taking a few days off here and there to regroup and recharge. I tend to do it when I finish something, like if I finish a big issue of a comic. For example, we just finished an issue of By a Thread. I like to take a day off after, if I can. I do some exercise, hang out with my family. So yeah, I think there's tremendous advantage to finding a good work/life balance where you're able to take time off.
And the other thing I'd say is, find the things that inspire you to go back to writing. Meaning for me, as simple as exercise. I like to go out. It makes me feel good to go for a run, it makes me feel good to go lift weights or train or do whatever. And then the next day I feel excited to go back to writing. Other things that inspire me, reading stuff totally outside comics. Reading comics can be really inspiring, but also just getting away from the whole world of it—listening to a podcast that you love, I love like science podcast and true crime podcasts and history podcasts and all kinds of stuff like that, reading a book this completely outside of graphic literature, listening to music that you love, discovering things that stimulate the parts of your brain that make you feel inspired to express yourself in new ways. So yes, definitely take time off if you can.
So we'll push some art from Val here. I hope you'll check it out next week. I'll do a post from California, I think, on Friday, so wish me luck with that! We'll be at Disney, me and my kid, Emmett. We’ll be a baseball card stores and there at the con. If you see us anywhere around the Golden State, please don't hesitate to say hi at Disneyland, anywhere. I'm always happy to say hello to anyone, it makes me look good in front of my kid, too. So thank you again for everything!
S
Newsletter 105: Disneyland LLC