Ever wanted to work in the medium of comics?

From now to May 13, you could make your dreams a reality by sending in a submission to Darby Pop’s Breaking Into Comics: Women of Darby Pop competition. The publisher is looking for both scripts and artwork containing one women from the following titles: Indestructible, City: The Mind in the Machine, The 7th SwordDoberman, Dead Squad, Side-Kicked, Dead Man’s Party, and or Fake Empire. The publisher noted that multiple creative teams will be able to be published, encouraging many different submissions.

Fresh from the Darby Pop website, here are the characters that you can actually choose to include in the upcoming project:

Stingray, Princess Power, and Gaia from Indestructible; Vargas, Ayala Tal, and Dr. Nash from Dead Squad; Superfecta 5 and Kathleen from The 7th Sword; Chloe from City: The Mind in the Machine; Angela Garcia from Doberman; Atalanta from Side-Kicked; Charli, Lucy, and Jill from Fake Empire; and/or Cynara Veil from Dead Man’s Party.

Newsarama ran a press release this morning, with an image containing various women from their publishing output. Darby Pop ran the initial contest in 2014, when they were only accepting script submissions. Darby Pop founder Jeff Kline noted that he was satisfied with the initial output of material that he saw in the original competition. This is the second ever competition from Darby Pop to seek out new talent in the industry, broadening the scope for both writers and artists this time 18 months after the first competition.

Here’s a breakdown of the actual assignment from the press release:

Assignment: WRITERS will need to submit a 1 to 4-page complete comic book script (including dialogue and panel descriptions) and featuring at least one female character from Darby Pop’s lineup.  ARTISTS will need to submit a sample pin-up or sequential page featuring at least one female character from Darby Pop’s lineup, plus 1 or 2 pages of sample sequential comic book art.  Once Darby Pop has selected the winning Writers and Artists, they’re going to pair you up.  Then, the winning Artists will bring the winning Writers’ scripts to life for the ultimate anthology.

Prizing:  If your script or artwork is chosen, it will be published by Darby Pop in their Women of Darby Pop anthology, a double-sized issue, which is scheduled to hit stores in September 2016.  Winners will also receive copies of the finished book.

Aspiring competitors can go here to submit their work. 2014 writer, runner-up Eric Palicki launched a comic book, Fake Empire at Darby Pop. The publisher even noted what the next steps of the project were after deciding some of the winning artists;

Once we have selected the winning Writers and Artists, we’re gonna pair you up.  Like at summer camp when you go swimming.  With the winning Artists bringing the winning Writers’ scripts to life for the ultimate anthology. (Yeah, we may suggest some edits/tweaks before everything is final.  ‘Cuz we’re anal-retentive like that.  But, we promise not to make this little contest a lifelong experience for you.  And, who knows, maybe you’ll even learn something.)

Good luck to all those striving to compete!

wdp

2 COMMENTS

  1. Never heard of Darby pop. Never seen their products. Must be a US only publisher? Are their books any good? The image here looks computer generated, not drawn.

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