What follows is the journal I kept, both for an internship seminar, and myself, during my time as a Marvel creative services intern, DC Comics editorial intern and Late Night with Conan O'Brien production intern. It won't tell you much about how to be a comic book intern, but it will tell you how Conan O'Brien likes his coffee. Okay, that's a lie, but if you cared about that sort of thing, I don't want you reading anything I write anyway. The truth is this page is useless to pretty much everyone. Oh, but if you close your eyes and wish, maybe fairies will sprinkle flying dust on your nose and you can dream of a webpage that makes you laugh!

How to be a comic book intern: can you press buttons? Can you put CDs in a burner drive and take them out again? Can you get along with others? Then you already know what to do.

4/1/01 - THE DAY BEFORE I START AT MARVEL
Walking down Fordham Road. Churros, hot dogs, cotton candy, salty pretzels, roasted peanuts like you can't get anywhere else in the world. Everybody owns a leather jacket (or has one on layaway). I cross the street because Walk signals are rare, a family coming towards me...pobre pequena, por que tu...crying?

My Spanish is weak. Very, very weak.

Back to Fordham, crashed on Christine's couch after dinner in the Village (always wind up there), even though I plan to go back to Fordham. Would have stayed at Christine's today but I had to change into my suit and surprise her with dinner at Tavern on the Green. I gave her a rotten Valentine's Day. You want a good Valentine's Day, date a poet. You want a good April Fool's Day, date a comedian.

4/2/01 - FIRST DAY
I now know more about the Spider-Man movie than anyone on Earth who wasn't paid to know does. Well, maybe the movie studio interns know more than I do. I spent the morning organizing shot after shot from the movie in a binder. Movie shots, behind the scenes shots, reference shots, head shots, press shots, concept shots, all punched, labeled, organized. I can tell you the details of Kirsten Dunst/Mary Jane's shoes (pink with beaded floral designs).

I guess the movie's cool. Apparently it follows Peter over a year of his life, it's not like "You're Spider-Man, now a week later you're saving New York City." I like Marvel.

4/4/01
More Spidey movie, hanging out in the Bullpen making faux cards for some Marvel version of Pokemon. Got to see the Knights offices, met some other interns, burned CDs. Began the long, arduous process of converting movie images into smaller versions of themselves. Love is not seeing somebody in a day's time, and feeling like it was a week. I wonder what Christine did today.

4/6/01
Apparently the cards I cut yesterday were A) for Bill Jemas and B) too skewed. But then again, everything I do is skewed. I think Bill walked by the office I was working in and yelled "How are ya!" to me with a smile. Cool.

More Spidey pictures. Sometimes Kirsten Dunst really looks like Mary Jane, the way Steve Ditko or Johny Romita Sr. would draw her.

I do miss Christine.

4/8/01
Burning, sorting, people in Creative Services are nice but I wonder if I'm to get a foot dug in as a writer or artist after graduation, I need to get into Editorial or at least spend some lunch hours in the Bullpen. Sometimes I aim too low. I believe I'll become President of the United States. Nah. Too many people shooting at you. That's the problem with jobs where you save the world; folks always want to kill you.

'Twas in fact Bill Jemas yesterday, speaking of Presidents.

Nothing of note: file, sort, organize. I know it's a similar job to what the Editorial interns are doing, but I think Creative Services is prepping me for a job in Creative Services.

College degrees are largely bull in the employment world. You have to have one, signifying nothing, because if you don't have one, it's proving nothing. A something that is nothing. Nobody will hire you without one, and yet your major has very little to do with what kind of jobs you can get. A lot of jobs don't require the knowledge of a 4 year-education. Sad truth is you could educate yourself at most libraries in a year for free with what you'll learn in a 4-year institution for 100,000 bucks.

I had a big Pretenders breakthrough yesterday. 11 issues and 26 pages left to figure out. Pretenders has to have individual issue themes as well as an overlying one. Questions asked each issue, revelations sprung.

Warner Bros. Called; I could be interning at either Marvel or DC this summer. Gotta call WB Human Resources.

4/11/01
More burning, file organizing. Blah. Got a tour of Marvel's new offices.

4/14/01
Mikey called last night to tell me Catch 22 is looking for a new lead singer. Hmm..even more desirable than an editorial internship. Might conflict with school though, especially since if I don't do the internship in the summer, I won't have enough credits to graduate in the winter. Or will I? I'll have to check. If I don't bother finishing Communications (and I won't), I don't need the internship anyway. Lookit me: as if I'll get Catch 22's lead vocals! So many opportunities, any one (but not all) possible.

4/16/01

Happy no more tax work day. Tapas party with Christine’s family tonight.

Scanned, saw Joe Quesada for the first time. Wandered around the Bullpen and watched a guy drawing. It turned out to be Chris Giarusso, who draws Bullpen Bits. Those are great! I actually recognized his style before he introduced himself. Hung out with him and Julio, the copy/print station manager. Julio’s a really cool guy. He was scanning in some droolworthy art from the new Elektra series, kind of a Bill Sienkiwicz style, which is, I’m sure why they chose this guy. All the Elektra art I’ve seen lately is beautiful.

4/18/01


Bad comic in gutter today, tired thread in its storyline. Magneto squirmed on its cover. This city is afraid of me. I have seen its true face.

The gutters are full of closure, and soon they will be filled to overflowing. And all of the hacks, the style-thieves and the incompetent editors will look up to me and say, "Help us!"

And I’ll look down and whisper, "No."

They had their chance. They could have followed in the footsteps of men like my father and Alan Moore, good men who believed in good writing for a good audience.

Instead they followed businessmen and bad girls, who led them over a sales precipice. Don’t tell me they didn’t have a choice. They made their choice. The industry stands on the edge, gazing down into the abyss, and suddenly nobody can think of anything to say.

"Hmmm. That’s quite a sales drop."

Cranky about bad comics today. It amazes me how some guys can get work based on the junk they once did. Look, I’m not going to deny that Jim Starlin’s INFINITY GAUNTLET and earlier work was awesome, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to read that COSMIC SAILOR crap he’s publishing now or whatever it is. John Byrne? Chris Claremont? Yeah, congratulations on your first run of X-MEN, guys. What have you done that I should care about in the last 15 years? Jeez, if we were buying on quality of previous work alone, Alan Moore would be outselling himself by about 10 times what ABComics make now.

I met the Deadpool editors today. They’re awesome, which is good because if Ruben Diaz was in there I’d have to slap him and lose my job. You never saw such a mishandling of a character; Rube kept hiring writers who said publicly that they couldn’t write Deadpool as he was supposed to be. To paraphrase: "Joe Kelly wrote a very hyperactive, talkative Deadpool, telling a joke a second. That’s not my Deadpool; I can’t write like that. My Deadpool is a much quieter, more brutal killer." Well pardon me for being right, but if you can’t write the character as he’s established to be for over a decade, why are you taking the job?

But okay, they hire Priest, who’s willing to give it a fair go, only they don’t give him a chance because they make the most difficult string of comics that jump all over the timeline of the story, and interrupt the whole damn thing -- which is a farce anyway because Ruben was obsessed with satirizing Lobo, not realizing Lobo IS a satire -- with an unconnected, unexplained, *silent* issue. Ruben also kept pushing Priest to write Deadpool as "Seinfield with supervillains." Fuhkyoo! Gesheundheit.

I swear to gog, give me ONE issue. I’ll write it for FREE. Just don’t befoul a good character any more.

Fortunately the new Deadpool editors aren’t like that. It’ll be interesting to see where they take the book. They’re both named Mike, and kindly shared their office space with my wide and googly eyes.

I also met the Marvel submissions editor who is, believe it or not, named Pond Scum. He gave himself that nickname. He’s a really rad guy. I spent my lunch drawing bad art and drinking lots of soda. I’ve met some other editorial interns, including Louis, Ralph Macchio’s assistant. Lou is a great artist; I am not. I wonder what happened to my style? I think I have become dysartistic. Skewed drawings, don’t you know.

4/19/01
They always make Spider-Man’s eyes wrong.

Spider-Man shouldn’t have big eyes. He should have freaky spider-eyes, like he used to have. This isn’t a big musclebound acrobat, this is a spindly monster dwelling in the shadows. I don’t care if he cracks jokes, any superhero that skitters up walls faster than anyone could walk horizontally is freaky.

Believe it or not, there are cute college-age girls working at Marvel. I just don’t want to draw them. It's a Christine thing. I'm wrapped up in her.

Click here for part 2.