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written proposal tied strongly into a Marvel character won’t work with cos metic changes made for another publisher, and a poorly-constructed pro posal won’t be green-lit by anyone, anyway. So, hopeful writers, sure, go ahead and do your Omega The Unknown revamp you’ve been waiting years to do; you may very well hit that lottery. But remember you only have one place to sell that proposal. Do the same amount of think-sweat on a new thing, and you have all the other comics publishers to offer it to. That’ll increase your chances, and maybe even get you noticed enough that Bill Jemas will come to you someday and ask you to take a crack at Omega The Unknown… Do. Or Do Not. There Is No ‘Try’ September 30, 2004 Long time readers of this column know that I'm the front man for the award-winning publishing house AiT/Planet Lar and it is in that capacity that I get pitched a lot of books. Even though I don't exactly make it a secret that we don't accept submissions because I have a lot of talented friends in the industry, and they all know who they are, and they know whether or not something they're working on will make a good fit with our line, and they know how to pitch me something. So, assuming we do 14-16 graphic novels a year, and I take a couple of slots myself, chances are pretty long that an unsolicited submission will be 1. actually good, 2. the sort of thing we would publish, or 3. from a cre ative team that we can work with. It's all very much the planets aligning, you know? So if someone asks me what our submissions guidelines are, I say we're not looking for anything, because we're not. Believe it or not, this weeds out 99% of hopeful creators. They just give up. Of the other 1% who send me stuff anyway, 99% of that doesn't fit the first three criteria. In five years, we've only published one book that came across the transom unsolicited by someone who I didn't know already or at least had been familiar with their work. I guess what I'm saying is what I said on page 17 of True Facts: "If you're reading this book, you're probably doing your own comics. A first thought may be, 'Does AiT/Planet Lar accept submissions?' The short answer is, no, not really. We have a lot of stuff in the hopper, and a comic by an unknown is a tough sell. This is what I heard when I was shopping around the astro-

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