1976: Year in Review (Part Two)
Getting Down to Business
Building on Success
Michael Whelan’s sophomore year as a professional illustrator reached a turning point in Kansas City over Labor Day weekend in 1976. Earning “Best in Show” at WorldCon was both a professional validation and an opportunity to catch the eye of legends like Robert Heinlein.
Of the twenty Whelan covers that hit the stands in 1976, ten were published in the final four months. His last cover, for Michael Moorcock’s The Sailor on the Seas of Fate, would be the first of his masterworks. I cannot underscore this point enough—he was delivering masterworks in his second year as an illustrator.
The next year would see four more Elric covers, including Stormbringer, one of the most iconic images in all of fantasy. Michael would crack the New York Times hardcover bestseller list for the first time in 1978 with Anne McCaffrey’s The White Dragon, and he would follow that achievement with his dream project, illustrating the John Carter books by Edgar Rice Burroughs for Del Rey.
These early years laid the groundwork for his ascent to the top of the industry as he established a level of quality and consistency that would define a hall of fame career.
Michael Everett
Getting Down to Business
As a young illustrator, I spent the first couple of years learning the business side of publishing. Not long after I got my first assignments from DAW, I began to work for Ace Books.
Thanks to a call from the great and profoundly generous Neal Adams, I was introduced to Charles Volpe, the art director at Ace. Because I was a published artist by the time I went there, I was able to ask them for a higher fee.
When I mentioned to DAW that Ace was paying me more, they raised their fee to parity with Ace. So right away I saw how I would be paid more as I became an established artist. My prices have pretty much raised themselves over the years, which is great, because no artist feels comfortable haggling over the pricing of his work.
Getting an agent is one way to avoid this. However, I couldn't see paying twenty-five percent of my income to be at the bottom of some guy's list, doing only the assignments his higher-priced artists didn’t want.
No matter how many errors I made, I figured that they couldn't cost me more than that twenty-five percent, and if I paid attention the experience would be mine. I would eventually learn how to run the business end of things myself. So that's how it went.
Michael Whelan
Weekly Art Recap
Job: A Comedy of Justice - cover for the original Grand Master Robert Heinlein
Highgate Mist - finding sketching subjects in the most interesting places
At Winter’s End - cover for Grand Master Robert Silverberg
Fearful Geometry - study for At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft
The Tower Card - the Man in Black from Stephen King’s The Dark Tower
Unwinding - a slight departure from the End of Nature