Submission Guidelines
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A typewritten cover letter with all contact information (name, e-mail address, address, phone and fax numbers) clearly printed on the TOP of the page. You don’t need to ramble on or be flowery or tell us how much you love Multitude Comics, introduce yourself and get on with it. If you’ve had published work you could let us know about it (or even include it) but we don’t need your résumé.
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A typed, ONE PAGE, synopsis of the overall STORY. We DO NOT want a single-issue synopsis—we want a synopsis of the ENTIRE series or story arc. As concisely and as succinctly as you are able, TELL US THE STORY, make us interested. Please avoid hyperbole—avoid questions as plot points (“What will Barney do when confronted with…?”), etc. We are the PUBLISHER, not the audience. TELL US WHAT HAPPENS! Explain why we (or anyone else) would be interested in this series. KEEP IT SHORT! We get thousands of submissions, cut to the chase—if you can sell us your book with a single paragraph, do it!
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Send photocopies of fully INKED and LETTERED pages (any size). DO NOT SEND ORIGINAL ART! We’d like to see AT LEAST five pages that are fully inked and lettered. If you have MORE than five finished pages, swell! Bring ‘em on! Five is the MINIMUM we want to see - not a maximum. We want to READ it. If the lettering sucks we may suggest a different letterer for the final comic book. The important thing here is that we can SEE that you know what you’re doing, that you understand where to place copy and how to tell a story.
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Color is OPTIONAL. If you have a colorist and can provide color pages, great! This means you CAN send in colored pages you just don’t HAVE to (although, if you want a color book, it would be advisable). We DO reserve the right to approve colorists as a poor one can ruin a decent book.
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Include a cover mock-up—this lets us know whether or not you understand the market and gives us a good barometer on your design sense. A good logo can be EASILY read from across the room. We DO make people change their logos OFTEN. Don’t be fancy or artistic—be CLEAR. You can send character sketches and or bios, but not in lieu of storytelling pages—we still need to see five finished pages of sequential storytelling, lettered and inked. DO NOT send script pages—DO NOT send unlettered pages accompanied by a script and expect us to follow along.
What We Want
Multitude Comics (MC) only publishes creator-owned material! In other words, we want to publish YOUR comics—we aren’t looking to have you work on books that WE dream up. When you’re submitting stuff to us at the home office, we expect it to be something original, not something utilizing existing Multitude Comics characters. Multitude Comics accepts only PROPOSALS for new comic series or graphic novels, etc. WE DO NOT ACCEPT writing (that is plots, scripts, whatever) samples! If you’re an established pro, we might be able to find somebody willing to work with you, but it would be nearly impossible for us to read through every script that might find its way our direction. DO NOT SEND your script or your plot unaccompanied by art—it will be discarded, unread.
WE DO ACCEPT inking, penciling, lettering, or coloring samples. We’ll keep them on file and may hook you up with other creators if and when the occasion presents itself. If your art-only submission is not kept on file, you will not get a response.
The books MC publishers are creator owned/creator generated properties and WE DON’T PAY PAGE RATES. It will be up to you to strike a deal with whomever you end up working with, and we’ll do our best to make it as painless as possible. Multitude Comics takes a small, flat fee off the books we publish and the rest goes to that comic book’s creative team. How that profit is split up is entirely up to the creators involved.
You can tell us whether you see it as a full color or a black and white book, a mini or on-going series, a Prestige book or an Original Graphic Novel. There are times, however, when we may have a better idea what might fly so don’t get married to any one format, but we’d like to know what you have in mind. Tell us what sets it apart from other comics and who the target audience is (“Everyone” is NOT realistic—there’s no single book on the market today that everybody buys).
Things often change from proposal to the printed page. If the intended title of your book is awkward or unwieldy, we may suggest changing it. If your logo is an unreadable mess, we may suggest changing it. There are cases where we’ve designed logos and helped redesign characters and done cover sketches. We WON’T do anything without YOUR approval, of course, but it’s not uncommon for us to get pretty involved. Our ultimate goal is to sell your comic book. If you succeed, we succeed. We’ll do what we can to help.