By Todd Allen
Do you REALLY want to work in comics? Have a got a deal for you. There’s a job posted over at eLance (a portal where you bid on jobs, lowest bidder frequently winning) that gets you into digital comics production:
Hi, we’re a comic book publisher (www.smartercomics.com) and need help with formatting our comics for iPhone Apps.
Each comic with 60 pages needs to be cut into panels for reading the comic on the iPhone.
Attached are the exact guidelines.
Thanks,
Franco
Bids are currently running between $115-$99 for the gig.
All you’re really doing is going into Photoshop and cutting out panels that fit into the dimensions of an iPhone screen. It isn’t particularly a particularly difficult thing to do. Many moons ago, I did something similar for Marvel’s Daredevil movie adaption dotComic. There’s a little art clean-up involved with this (deleting bits of extra panels if the borders aren’t squared off), so I’m guessing you’re probably looking at 5-6 hours per 60 pages if you’re moderately familiar with photoshop, depending on exactly how much clean-up is needed.
It’s not exciting work. It’s not going to be a cash cow, especially if you’re slow. But it’s a comics job.
IN most fields, paying somebody to give you a job is perceived as a shell game. This reminds me of when some of my friends were offered $2 per page to reletter manga for TokyoPop, who then didn’t even pay them that.
Yes, it’s drudge work, but it’s still work. Volunteering is one thing, but paying a for-profit entity to work for them? Shabby.
No, you’re bidding on how much you’ll do the job for. Now with crowdsourcing, you _do_ see a lot of overseas labor bidding very cheaply, but the bids I saw would put this in the $15-$20/hr range, possibly a bit more, depending on how fast you can do the work.
The term for paying someone to let you do work for free is “self-publishing”. :)
I do work for SmarterComics… this job is a little more than just cutting things up. There will likely be times you will need to rearrange text or make it legible at a smaller size. So entry level graphic designers may find this a bit tedious and challenging.
Ah, I see. My apologies for my misunderstanding!