Back towards the beginning of my time at Marvel, I turned in a page that my art director was NOT happy with.
I was the color artist. Meaning that a penciler drew it, an inker inked it, and my job was to color the black and white page. I don’t remember what exactly my art director didn’t like but I kept totally trying to throw the the inker and the penciler under the bus. After all, I don’t change what they do for the most part, I accentuate it.
So if it looks crappy it’s not my fault. Maybe “they” should fix it. And not. Me.
My art director told me something that melted down my paradigm like butter in a furnace. He said in his message that making the page look better was my job, not an excuse. That one stung a little. But on the flip side he gave me permission to make changes.
I think I was sensitive to do this because when you work as a team on a page, consensus is, we HATE when our work gets changed without our permission. My first gig in comics was working for a small publisher as a color artist. Sometimes I would see the comic once it was printed and some pages would look totally different.
I manned-up and got over it.
On the surface it looked like my art director just gave me a good old-fashioned buttox chewing. And let’s face it, he did. But what he really did was he empowered me to take responsibility for the ENTIRE page. Owning it and making it better. And not making excuses for why something doesn’t work. That doesn’t do any of us a bit of good.
Oh look… Embeded in that experience is a life lesson that could be applied anywhere. If something doesn’t work in your life or your business, change it.
Actually, there’s two lessons tied in there…
This is why you always want to work with great people or ‘A Players’. They push you to make you better.
Adam
P.S. The page above is not the page that initiated the ass chewing.