Mine, All Mine

My author’s copies of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Drawing Superheroes and Villains Illustrated finally showed up yesterday. It’s the first time I’ve held a printed copy of the book in my hands, and it looks great. Yair Herrera did a wonderful job bringing everything I wrote to life.

On a personal level, the best part about the book is that I own all of the characters in it. Most of the writing I do is for tie-in novels, computer games, or book packagers, and while I can’t complain about the contracts, I don’t own very much of that writing. In this case, I negotiated a deal that gave me the underlying rights to all of the characters in the book. After all, what would IDW do with them?

Now, of course, the trick is figuring out what I should do with them. Seems a shame to let an entire book’s worth of superpowered characters lie fallow. Hmmm.