Steve asks: what does it take for a creator to win your trust? What has to happen for you to decide, I will buy this person's work, sight unseen, every time? And what has to happen for this creator to eventually lose your trust?
Gaining my trust is really easy. Just produce around three pieces of work (whether it be comics or even just an online column I follow) that I love. And then keep doing projects that seem interesting. Matt Fraction earned my trust quickly with his "Poplife" column and then Last of the Independents and The Annotated Mantooth. That material was enough for me to say "Okay, I'm a Fraction fan, sign me up."
Of course, the list of creators I trust is small. At this point, I'd say the list is: Warren Ellis, Matt Fraction, Joe Casey, Grant Morrison, Garth Ennis and maybe Brian Wood and Ed Brubaker. And I don't buy everything each of them does (or, at least, not right away). I love Casey's work, but I doubt I'll ever buy his Kiss or GI Joe stuff.
And losing trust is easy: fuck up. Do a few things I think are shit. I'll usually forgive a project or two that doesn't wow me, but by three misses in a row (or close enough together), the creator drops down to "We'll see what the project looks like/what people are saying about" status.
I think I'm like everyone else and it's all about results. Build up a solid record of great results and trust is formed that future work will be of equal or greater quality. Produce sub-par work and the trust is lost.
Steve: if you were to do an issue-by-issue analysis of a series/run, what series/run would you do and, um, will you do it, man?
Phoenix #5 annotations
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