David Walker joins us on the podcast. David is a big player in the comic book industry with his runs on Bitter Root at Image Comics, Young Justice with Brian Michael Bendis at DC, Luke Cage at Marvel, and many more. He has been in the game for 25 years. He is also a professor at Portland State University teaching a comic book writing course.
He started by publishing a magazine in 1996 called BadAzz Mofo. He says the writing was terrible, but he was doing the work he enjoyed. From that work, he somehow landed in front of Allen Gordon resulting in gigs at Rap Pages and later Giant Robot.
He never considered himself a good writer, but he had a knack for entertaining and capturing ideas with words. More importantly, he spent the time to improve his craft overtime by intersecting his skills with his personal passions.
During the lockdown, he is continuing to stay busy. He has a webcomic he is producing once a week, he has a few successful kickstarters under his belt that he is currently fulfilling to his thousands of backers, and a laundry list of projects pending release. He was a film critic for 10 years. With that comes 10s of thousands of reviews that were unreleased. He is taking the time to actually put them out with links to the videos on streaming platforms. He does this to give people something to do and watch without breaking the bank. There are a lot of good movies that have been out for decades. During the lockdown David understands that people may stumble upon something they would enjoy if he could nudge them in the right direction. He has always had an appreciation older videos. When he was younger, he worked at a video store. It was there that he developed passion for crate digging. The exploration has really paid off for him creatively because he has so many references and point of inspiration at his fingertips.
He looks back at how he became a writer and he noticed that he became a better writer as he researched the things he explored and put the pen to the paper. He laughs at the things he wrote in the past. Not because they were bad, but because he recognizes the evolution he has had with the craft of creating and writing. His past work is as much a stepping stool towards his current success and a time capsule for the experiences he has. Even if he has made money off they work he has done, it still hold value to him.
In this current climate, things are scary for creators and writers because the industry is compromised. Typically creators get paid based off when the content is published. When publication dates get pushed back as they are now, the timeline for getting paid for work that was already done is suspended indefinitely. For most, the notion of not getting paid for work that was done 90-days to 6-months prior can spread someone thin if they don’t know how to navigate the work for hire landscape. So if you see a book with David Walkers name on it, might as well pick it up and let him entertain you.
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