We were lucky to catch up with Jim Higgins recently and have shared our conversation below.
Jim, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.
I actually knew what I wanted to do when I was in elementary school. I knew I wanted to work in the comics business. At that point, I wanted to be an artist. Numerous people discouraged me. I made the mistake of getting good grades in school, especially in math and science, so I was often told how tragic it would be for me to not use those abilities by going into the arts. The fact that I’d be neglecting my creative skills for some reason bothered them not at all. It was all about making money. Almost no one asked me what I wanted to do that would make me happy. My mother regularly told me how I could go into engineering and make good money and get good benefits. Good benefits!
Over the years, my goal of working in the comics business changed. When I was in college, I wondered if I had the art skills to get a job working in comics. I eventually decided I wanted to be a writer. I knew I had things to say about life and the world, and that I wanted to do that in the comics medium. The slogan the comics store I worked for back in the day was, “Where art and literature meet.” That’s a good explanation of why the comics medium appealed to me. At that time, I was reading a lot of literary fiction and submitting prose stories to literary journals. I understood visual storytelling and wanted to bring my knowledge of great contemporary fiction to the telling of stories, whether they were superhero stories, or slice-of-life type fiction. But becoming a writer in the comic business isn’t easy. Like a lot of creative professions, the competition is fierce, and just getting your work in front of someone who might hire you can be very difficult.
After college, I took a job as a social worker. I didn’t know where to turn for a regular job to pay the bills. My friend Christine told me that there were openings for family and teen counselors at her agency. I was skeptical about getting the job since I had no schooling in that area. She said that she thought I would be good at it and that the agency would train me. Also, three people had left at once and the agency was a bit desperate. Never let it be said that I wouldn’t take advantage of someone else’s desperation.
I got the job and became a counselor. I liked the work a lot. When your job is helping people who are in trouble and struggling, you sleep well knowing that you’re doing something good. I got good feedback from my supervisors about the quality of my work. But after about four and a half years, I realized that in order to get promoted and move up the ladder in social work, I’d have to go back and get a Master’s degree. Going back to school was last on the list of things I wanted to do. So I decided that it was time to put all my energy into getting a job at a comics company.
Just to clarify, I was looking for a staff job as an assistant editor. Comics writers and artists are freelancers, so if that’s what you’re doing, you get hired on a per-job basis. People in editorial were on staff. My thought was that I’d get a job working on staff for Marvel or DC Comics, and pitch my stories while I was there.
While I was doing social work, it isn’t like I stopped wanting to get into comics. I had an interview at Marvel for a position in their marketing department which I didn’t get. And I had gotten to know a couple of editors by going to local comics conventions. One of them, Lou Stathis, had written for the same media and culture magazine as I had. When he was looking for an assistant editor, he told me to interview. I also interviewed for two other positions. It was good that I did. Lou hired someone else (and was apologetic, though I thought that was unnecessary) and I got hired in a new department that was publishing things besides superhero stories. I’d arrived.
At the risk of sound like a cliched self-help book, from the time I made the decision to go full force trying to get into the comics biz and when I got hired was only six months. Did I get the job because I changed my thinking? That was only a part of it. I’d spent a couple of years developing some contacts at Marvel and DC Comics, and so when something came up — that Lou was looking for an assistant editor — I was there to take advantage of that. I got the job because I’ d done the leg work and because I had good luck.
And what did my mother say when I told her I’d gotten the job at DC, which was owned by Time/Warner? She was thrilled, partly because I had gotten the job I wanted, but also because there were such good benefits. Benefits!
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
I wear a number of different hats working in the business of making comics and graphic novels: editor, writer, and teacher. I teach classes through an organization for professionals called The Society of Illustrators of Los Angeles. I’ve done them at various art school such as Calarts, Otis College of Art and Design, UCLA, and The School of Visual Arts when I lived in New York. I also do some at comics stores, which works well since lots of people looking to learn to create comics shop in comics stores.
In college, I majored in cinema studies at a City University of New York school. When I discovered that there was a Master’s program in cinema that was a teaching fellowship, I applied and got the position. But unlike many other fellowships, I wasn’t assisting an instructor, I was teaching my own class. The thought of teaching really appealed to me. When it came time for the first session, I don’t want to say I was petrified… actually, yes I was petrified. I remember going into the class, standing at a lectern, and holding onto it — white-knuckled — for dear life. I was terrified that someone would ask me a question I didn’t know the answer to, which would then lead to all the students walking out of the classroom in disgust.
Like most things, you do it long enough and you learn the ropes. I eventually got comfortable and enjoyed teaching. And when you’re teaching in college, you have an incredible amount of freedom. My friends who were high schools teachers for the New York City Board of Education were jealous that I could pick all the films that the students studied all by myself, that I didn’t have tons of paperwork to do on a regular basis (besides midterms and finals, the most challenging paperwork I did was taking attendance), and that I wasn’t given an outline of all the things I had to cover in a semester. My joke at the time was that I could be serving beer in the class and the school wild never know.
I eventually got a job at DC Comics as an assistant editor. After a few years, my boss there started teaching a comics class at The School of Visual Arts. He didn’t really like doing it, and eventually stopped. But that made me wonder if I could get a teaching gig there because I worked at DC and because I had taught cinema for almost five years. I pitched a class to them that would be in the Continuing Education department and they gave it to me. I was thrilled! My micro-managing boss, on the other hand, was shocked because I’d only worked in the comics field for four years. but he treated all of us in our tiny department like we had all suffered some traumatic brain injury, and couldn’t possibly know enough to do things he did.
Teaching for me is a passion. I am an evangelist for the art form of comics and graphic novels. When I do a class in the community, as opposed to at an art school, I get people who have all different types of jobs. Since I’m in LA, I do get a lot of people in my classes who work in the entertainment business. But I’ve also gotten high school teachers, hair dressers, software developers, musicians, business managers, and others. In many of the classes I do, there are people who’ve only been reading comics and graphic novels for a short time. Many of them have been given a graphic novel that’s one of the “gateway drugs” that gets people interested, like Walking Dead, Fun Home, or Watchmen. I show them the incredible diversity of subjects and genres that exist in the comics world. I assign various different graphic novels that we cover in the class.
If you’re going to teach people to write stories, you need to have some connection to your own emotional life. We’ve all seen movies where there is a lot of action, but which leave us feeling nothing, because the emotions of the characters were given very little attention. Good stories move us, make us feel something, and make us connect to what we’re seeing on the screen. You’re going to have a tough time teaching how to do that if you don’t understand your feelings, your own mental trials and tribulations, your own joys and happy times.
An autobiographical graphic novel like Fun Home does that. Written and drawn by Alison Bechdel, it depicts various parts of her childhood and late teenage years in which she’s struggling with coming to realize her sexual identity as a lesbian. It also shows her complicated relationship with her father, who, she discovered while in college, was having sex with various men and teenage boys all throughout his life. Heavy stuff, right? Watchmen is a dystopian future graphic novel about a group of superheroes and the trials and tribulations they suffer. Written by Alan Moore and drawn by Dave Gibbons, the story shows what the cultural and geopolitical ramifications might be if superheroes existed in the real world. But the story also reveals the intense struggles of the characters. Without that, Watchmen would never had the success that it has or sold over a million copies over the years.
I get good feedback from students about the story structure material I teach. Some students are grateful for the help I’ve given them in regards to their art. but the strongest thanks come from people who didn’t expect to learn about writing deep stories or that they would learn more about themselves in the process. Those are the only stories worth telling.
In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?
I think the education system needs to understand the importance of teaching art. Art education isn’t just something that should be treated as a recreational activity. There’s lip service paid by school officials and administrators who say they know it’s important, but are oftentimes the ones who cut art classes first when the budget gets tight. A longitudinal study sponsored by U.S. The Department of Labor and published by The National Endowment for the Arts in 2012 showed that “students who have arts-rich experiences in school do better across-the-board academically, and they also become more active and engaged citizens, voting, volunteering, and generally participating at a higher rate than their peers.”
Educators have become so focused on improving reading and math scores that other important aspects of education, like the arts, are getting forgotten. I think we people in the creative communities need to convey our concerns about the reduction or loss of art classes in schools. And yes, the arts can have positive effects on academics and educational outcomes, but we also don’t need to be so achievement-oriented, so worried about STEM subjects, that goals like gaining a sense of well-being, of independence, and even of transcendence, through art, are lost.
Is there mission driving your creative journey?
I hope that people who I work with as a comics editor, who read the stories I write, and who take my classes, learn the power that storytelling can have. We are, by nature, storytellers. We’re narrative engines. It’s how we see and make sense — or don’t make sense — of the world. It’s how we communicate information, how we explain how we think and feel, how we look at the past, or speculate about the future. For example:
You come home, and you tell your spouse or partner how your day went, how that one guy at work who always does crazy things did the craziest thing yet. You wonder where the guy gets the guts to do things like that at work. He’s a nut. But wouldn’t it be nice to be so uninhibited? Another example: You’re at a bar and while you’re waiting for your drink to come, a woman next to you notices your ring. She asks you where got it. You tell her how you bought it from a Rastafarian guy at a street fair in San Francisco years ago, and that he called it “The Spirit of Infinity.” You talk about how much that gave the ring meaning for you. Profound meaning. You explain how you lost the ring, which made you really sad, and how years later, you wound up in SF at the same street fair. Lo and behold, the same guy was there with the same ring. You picked it up and told him how happy you were to get another one. “It’s the Spirit of Infinity!” The guy looks at you, completely uncaring and unimpressed and says, “Yeah, whatever, man.” You are devastated.
Life can be absurd, right? Sometimes we bring our own meaning to things. And sometimes a street vendor comes up with a great yarn just to sell a five dollar ring. And that’s one story. There are zillions of others waiting to be told.
If you’re interested in my classes or are looking for a comics editor, go to www.newsuit.net
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.newsuit.net
- Instagram: @jimhiggins63
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jim.higgins.14606
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jimhiggins/
