Meet Jim Higgins

We recently connected with Jim Higgins, who edits, writes, and teaches about comics and graphic novels, and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Jim, thanks for sitting with us today to chat about topics that are relevant to so many. One of those topics is communication skills, because we live in an age where our ability to communicate effectively can be like a superpower. Can you share how you developed your ability to communicate well?

Over the course of years from when I was about 18 till my mid-20s, I spent a lot of time thinking and trying to figure out how to best be understood by people, and also how to have an argument that stayed on the issue in question. In my home growing up, my parents often didn’t have a lot of respect for the opinions of myself or my brother and sister. At times, they were either dismissive or openly devalued what we thought and felt. That hurt. I felt like what I said didn’t matter, or had no value. There were other times where communication was fine and we were able to discuss things. But there were often problems.

Later in life, it was upsetting to me when someone didn’t try to understand me, or tried to dismiss what I thought or felt. So my goal was to find the words that would work best to say what I wanted to say. An example: If you’re talking with someone who, let’s say often says, “You’re not a good driver.” You want to avoid saying, “You always tell me that!” The truth is that no matter how frequently the person may say that, they do not always say it. That person may then completely derail the discussion by insisting that they don’t “always” say that (because that’s true.)

Another example: if someone you know says or does things that are hurtful to you, you’re going to need a specific example of what you object to if you want them to listen to you. If you say, “I can’t stand when you insult me,” and you don’t have an example, the person is very likely going to be dismissive. And with reason — they might not know what they do or say that upsets you, so the discussion can’t really go anywhere.

One more: I try not to get bogged down when the person I’m having a disagreement with doesn’t like the words I’m using to frame the issue. For example: You say to your friend, “You were pretty out of control at the party last night, don’t you think?” They say, “I wasn’t ‘out of control.’ ” You: “Don’t you think you were out of control when you were knocking things over in the living room and saying insulting things to Our Mutual Friend?” “I was not out of control.” You: “Okay, it doesn’t matter what we call what you were doing, the point is that it was upsetting to Our Mutual Friend.”

These are just a few things I figured out. They’re not ways to win an argument. But they may help you stay on the issue at hand instead of getting lost in arguments that take you further away from the point you’re making. They sometimes help make it clear that the argument you’re having is not going to be resolved. But at least you’re arguing about the thing you want to argue about!

These strategies are only a small part of a whole approach to communication. They’ve helped me. Maybe they’ll do the same for you.

Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?

I am an editor, teacher, and sometimes writer of comics and graphic novels and have been since 1993. I was an editor at DC Comics in an eclectic and interesting department where we published a line of non-fiction comics and mystery graphic novels, which included Road to Perdition and A History of Violence, which were made into two very good films. I got the job I’d always wanted when DC hired me. In college, there were a couple of years where I was kind of lost. I’d swallowed the Kool-Aid given to me by my parents and the teachers in my college-prep type high school that I should go into a job where I could make good money and benefits ( my mother was really focused on me getting those good perks.) But part of me was not happy or satisfied. I eventually got a B.A. and an M.A. in cinema studies. I taught cinema part time, but was never going to get a full-time job without a PhD. I worked for five years as a social worker (which I did like), but eventually realized I had to work in the comics business if I was going to be happy with my life. And that’s what I did.

So what does a comics editor do? A comics editor is the project manager. We hire the writer, edit the script (not just copy edit — an editor makes sure that the story is a good one), hire the artist, make sure that the images make visual sense and aren’t confusing to read, and then see the process through the lettering, coloring, and graphic design process. Then we send it all off to the printer. I’ve also been a comics teacher for over 25 years. When I’m teaching, I’m essentially acting as their editor, only I’m giving instructions on each step along the way. Comics has a language all its own. It consists of words and pictures, just like movies and TV, but the images are still. The reader decides how long they’re going to look at a panel, as opposed to having it fed to them like in film and TV. And the images are drawn. So we look at the juxtaposition, the “flow” of the read, and see that the important and/or dramatic moments are served by the art in each of the panels.

I love what I do. Isaac Asimov, the great science fiction writer, was often called “The Great Explainer,” because of the enormous amount of popular science articles he wrote that were easy to understand (and were often filled with great humor.) As a teacher, that’s what I aspire to. Us humans are storytellers by nature. When you come home from work, you tell your partner about something odd or interesting that happened there. While at a bar on Saturday night, you regale someone with colorful accounts of the various misdeeds you and your cronies got into. When your daughter asks what her grandmother – who died before she was born – was like, you tell her stories about your childhood, about the love you received, about how her grandmother helped or hurt you, and how when you grew up you realized that she was just a human being who did the best she could.

As an editor, I work now as a freelancer. I’m often in with people in the early stages, when they’re putting the story together. I think that’s where my strength is — getting the story to be as good as it can be. And also, that it’s the writer and artist’s story, not one that’s filled with suggestions from me. I ask questions so as to know what the creators want to say. I’m not there to write their story for them, or to insert me into it. I’m there to shepherd it.

If you’re interested in creating some comics, I have a class called Making Comics that’s for any skill level, whether you’re a writer, artist. or both. I teach in colleges, but I also teach adults online and in-person. My students have been college professors, hairdressers, high school teachers, screenwriters, restaurant owners, animators, you name it. If you’re ready to tell the story about a powerful period in your life and you want it to be a graphic novel, get in touch with me. If you have a great idea for a near-future science fiction story and you want it to be an ongoing comics series, I’m your guy.

If you don’t have a comics project now, or just want to know when I’m starting new classes. you can get on my mailing list. Email me at [email protected]. To find out a little more about me, go to my website at www.newsuit.net.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

As a teacher and an editor, I spend a lot of my time giving feedback. At some point, I realized that if you only point out the weak points in someone’s work, they’re never going to know what they’ve done right. In anyone’s creative work, there’s *always* going to be something that is done properly or well. Sometimes it’s just the fact that they did something at all. Creating art can be a wonderful fulfilling experience. But it can also be scary, difficult, painful, and demoralizing. Getting at least some part of a creative work done can be an accomplishment. If you want to see me get really angry, tell me about a teacher who rips into their students, viciously explaining all the problems in their work and making them feel like crap in the process. There are decades of education research that show that students need positive reinforcement as well as critical feedback. BTW — there’s a cure for that type of teacher. You know what it’s called? Psychotherapy. Come back in 10 years when you’re a human being.

When you’re writing a story, there is a protagonist and their opponent, the person (or persons) that is the antagonist. It’s easy to fall into the trap of making the antagonist all bad, as someone who only does terrible things. But human beings are more complicated than that. Howard Chaykin, a master class comics writer and artist, was asked how it was that he created such memorable villains. He said, basically, that no one really thinks of themselves as the bad guy in real life. Dictators think it’s their right to take what they want, whether it’s someone’s life or a country. The strong one wins. That’s the way of the world, right? That stayed with me and is something I tell all my students and the clients whose work I’m editing. But it’s also a way to navigate the world and the people in it. Allowing yourself to get into black and while thinking — that people can be all good or all bad — can cause some serious problems for both you and them. People do things for reasons. The ability to remember that when dealing with a difficult person is extremely important. Empathy is crucial.

I was a social worker for five years counseling families where there was abuse or neglect. I saw people that were in real crises, in really difficult situations. I’m a very verbal person, which is a nice way of saying I talk a lot (as you can tell by the length of my answers here.) Being a counselor meant that I had to become a better listener. I also had to try and pick up the underlying meaning of what the person was saying. It’s as if you heard the words they were saying, but there were subtitles telling you what they were actually feeling. It took a while to develop that skill, but I do it now as a matter of course. Plenty of people do this, too. But I really became aware of that when I started counseling.

Tell us what your ideal client would be like?

An ideal client is a good communicator, someone who can explain what they want from me as an editor, what their expectations are in general, and what they think are the key problems they’re wrestling with. It’s good if they’ve done some homework about what the tasks at hand entail. I recently had a client whom I started working with as a writer and editor. After the first piece of the script was done, they did the math figuring out how much they would be paying the talent (including me) and how many copies of the comic they’d need to sell to break even. You’d think that would be one of the first things to do. I still haven’t heard back from them. If they actually respond to my emails., I’ll consider it a late Christmas gift.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.newsuit.net
• Instagram: @jimhiggins63
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jim.higgins.14606
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jimhiggins/

Image Credits

The pictures are all owned by me, Jim Higgins.