I'm guessing David Hopkins and Paul Milligan are really fun guys to have a beer with. Anything depicting Dallas Mayor Tom Leppert attempting to sock Big Tex in the groin is at least worth mention. Dudes, you're officially invited to my Halloween party.

David Hopkins

Media: comics/graphic novels

Number of years in this space: 5

What do you enjoy most about working here? When my girlfriend, the product designer, moved in, we had the office divided in two — one side for her desk and one side for mine. It took us an hour pushing furniture around to finally come to an arrangement we could tolerate. I like sharing the room. As a necessity, I junked my funky amoeba-shaped Ikea desk, opting for a more efficient Container Store table. The self-important amoeba took too much space. How much square footage does a comic book writer need? Smaller desk, less mess, and while some might feel cramped, it's actually rather cozy.

What would you improve if you could? A rug might be nice to make the space a tad more friendly. Also, a rug would prevent me from wearing a hole through the wood floors when I scoot around in my roller chair. Most of my wants are computer oriented. All the cool-kid scriptwriters use Final Draft; I'm stuck with Microsoft Word. It's hard to justify the cost. I have an external hard drive, but a back-up to the back-up would help me sleep better.

Inspired by Bradbury: Presentation & Panel Discussion
moderated by John Cordova
Thurs. Oct. 23, 7 pm

Graphic novelist David Hopkins will present the very personal and professional ways in which Bradbury and his work have inspired new generations of writers and readers over the years, including Bradbury's role in the early history of comic books. Hopkins is a comic book writer, an essayist, and a regular contributor to D Magazine and the Smart Pop Series from BenBella Books. This "Writers as Readers & Readers as Writers" Moderated by John Cordova.

Mesquite Public Library
North Branch
2600 Oates Dr.
Mesquite, TX 75150

All events are FREE and open to the public.

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"Traditional publishing is a confusing mass of former small publishers (which worked rather the way independent comics publishers do now) that were encompassed by larger ones and then by larger ones until publishers were bloated, sprawling citadels and suburbs with no defining vision, populated with new CEOs who have never worked in publishing, disaffected and dread-filled editors, chummy agents, superstar and attempts-at-the-next-big-thing authors who receive mind-boggling advances, writers whose talent aren’t enough to get them book deals because all the money was used up on advances for other authors, and the very occasional author who finds success and can make it stick. And they’re all a little nervous about their futures."

"And consider this -- shelf space isn’t just a matter of the bookstore chains’ systems of categorization; prominent placement is also for sale: Kachka writes in his article, 'Publishers also pay for placement in big bookstores, which they call ‘co-op,’ under a complicated arrangement meant to cover up the fact that it’s payola (or, as some call it, extortion).' I won’t speculate about whether DC paid for prominent placement for Minx and what the potential answers to that question say about why the imprint 'failed.' (I don’t think it actually did fail; Minx was not around long enough to fail or succeed.) I am interested in this detail because it reveals that the bookstore system is much different from the one comics publishers are used to. If we offered money to comic book store owners for prominent placement, it might be called bribery. If they asked for us to pay in order to get good placement in their stores, our sense of ethics might balk."