Caltrops - Still Life - Bad Memories

Forum Overview :: Still Life

by Motherhead 05/27/2005, 4:53pm PDT

In the early nineties I worked at a newspaper, this was the “exploit me, I don’t know better and I have a lot of marketable talent I will piss away for almost nothing” years. The Art Director was this horrible chancrous cunt that married way over her class to a Sales VP.

She, as Director of Art, had managed the full department budget. Working directly under her, she had a staff of either truly flaming (ill tempered) queers or a few perhaps just pretending to be flaming (ill tempered) queers. You see she had this notion of what a REAL artist would be like, and we were not fitting in this image.

My god did we hate her.

Her “A” team would grossly inflate the costs of some honestly stupid pet project with location shoots, models and so on. They also had first dibs on the best fucking equipment available, which we were allowed access to on a limited bases and only on strict homo supervision. But, since we worked much longer hours, we would use all their shit and pirate any/all software we can get her hands on. One of the reasons I have had a Mac for so long was the $10k worth of Mac software I would walk out of there with annually

My real boss was the Assistant Art Director, an enormous polock that could eyeball a layout from across the room and correct it perfectly in about 3 sentences. We were dicks; we were better artists, grossly underpaid, putting in ridiculous hours to meet several deadlines a week. Ours was the work that made the paper money. The editorial staff and the best of the sales team would hit our guy up first for any projects of any real importance. We were the "B" team.

Our little corner of the world was called “Oz” by the hard core old newsmen types, mostly because our chunk of the expansive floor area was covered in disturbing imagery and we had borderline personalities, all of us. This mitigated by the fact that we made them laugh and did good work. Also relevant was that the crabby old editorial guys hated her stable of offensive faggots with barely disguised dusgust. See, we fit the notion of what THEY thought an artist should be.

My god did she fucking hate us.

So, for all her faux haut monde artiste banter bullshit and mannerisms, it was revealed that, when Vice President boy found her, she was a tattoo artist. It was later revealed why she wore high-necked shirts with long sleeves in the summer. She had the most obnoxiously bad biker tatts from her wrists to her neck. Her husband would later be fired for embezzling, it turns out they both shared a several thousand dollar a week coke habit. Internal scandal raged in the sales department. Weirdness and politics everywhere. Eventually they investigated her department and she hid behind us, since we were operating in the black to her team's insane wastefulness. She at that point lobbied, hard, to get our guy removed so she could absorb us all. In the shit politics that followed 80% of our guys quit.

Ultimately so did our guy (after I left). Somehow she kept her job (?!), for all I know she is there today. I have never fucking worked for a corporate art department since.

Some other shit I won't get much into:Two of the guys that worked on our team also worked for DC comics. One was a penciler and the other did inks for some fucking line I never even heard of. Maybe it was Italian? I can't remember. The fact that they worked there as well points to how shitty paying that gig was. They couldn't sustain a living wage with it. I just read that the pricing guidelines for illustration has remained constant over the last 20 years, which means illustrators are getting pooched. The enormous polock's good friend was a "big name" inker for a couple of Marvel books, he would pay my boss to ink Silver Surfer if he was overwhelmed. He got some cash and perhaps some contacts but never got credit. This shit, apparently, went on (and perhaps still does) quite a bit in the industry.

Anyway, yes write. Get the fuck away from them. You can't leave people like that with any control over your lot in life.