Comics
#TAP10 Comic Book Jobs
Published
9 years agoon
The current job climate is a precarious one to say the least. You either don’t have enough experience, or you have too much experience. Yeah, there is such a thing. Point is, bosses are stupid. Adults really. But in comic land, there are a few of those occupations that if you are trained or versed in any of the fields, you will definite have an abundance of work to do. Especially if you have hero / vigilante inclinations. So here is our #TAP10 list of jobs you’ll come across in the comic spread personals:
10.) Doctor / Physician
Hey, you can’t enter a society and think punching people and breaking bones is the only way to make a difference. The world needs healers too, of the mind and body. So if you don’t mind the late hours and have a good rapport with both the vulnerable and the ‘roided psychopaths that could snap your neck like a twig if their restraints ever got undone, then a job in health and medicine may be for you. Just think of all the good you could do.
Don’t be fooled by all the villains sporting the word ‘Doctor’ in their names. They aren’t certified or anything. Damn shame really. Some regulatory board should go check them out. This ain’t the NHS after all, can’t go running around calling yourself a doctor all willy-nilly.
So, physician, heal thyself. But deal with waiting room filled with a gang of broken bones after their run-in with a vigilante. Need help? Ask for these guys over the hospital intercom:
• Stephen Strange (“He’s surgical with his shit. May even give you a tarot reading after stitching you up”)
• Claire Temple (“mm. Night Nurse. Better than Tynenol”)
• Jane Foster (“Just hope the Mjolnir isn’t one of her surgical tools”)
9.) Lawyer
Arguably, a superheroes main job is to protect the innocent. But with any rotten city, there are bound to be a few innocents that get lumped in with the bad bunch. So if you are a Lawyer, you could definitely get on the ground floor and protect the innocent (and not so innocent) in the already crippled court of law. So who do you want to be like? A tall, green and mean ,or maybe the blind yet insightful Murdock aka Daredevil, or maybe some sleaze mob connected hack of a lawyer tasked with getting some criminals off the meat hook? Whichever way you are leaning towards, just know if you don’t dispense justice in the right way, their probably be some rolling heads come nightfall. You decide if you want it to be some mob Hitman or a vigilante with nothing to lose.
Here are some dudes that got the ‘Matlock’ thing down pat:
• District Attorney Harvey Dent (“you may want to flip a coin to decide a plea bargain”)
• Jennifer “Jen” Walters (“Shulkie knows her law and is all about the green”)
• Cable (“graduated law school in 88. I’m sure the ‘eye’ thing was a result of some hazing / initiation gone wrong”)
• Ronan (“carries a big hammer and is pretty much just an attorney… of fricken space!”)
• Matt Murdock (“if he can’t get you in the courtroom, he’ll find you in the street as Daredevil, continuously punching his final year dissertation into your face like a typewriter and read your bumps and bruises like braille”).
• Kate Spencer aka Manhunter (“She got the case against Wonder Woman dropped. You know, when she broke Maxwell Lord’s neck… on live tv. Now that’s what we call Lawyer’d the fvck up”)
8.) Personal Bodyguard
The world is a dangerous place, where anything can happen at anytime. Kidnappers, murderers, Superman looking to haul your ass in to jail. Well, that’s were people like Mercy come in. Mercy is Lex Luthor’s chauffeur. Sure she looks superb in uniform, takes orders down to the T. But when it comes to protecting Luthor from nefarious attacks, my girl does not play for shit. She’s real protective like that. And indubitably you will have many high-profiled clients, good and bad, needing some protection. Who knows, you may have a Whitney Houston / Kevin Costner moment.
I have nothing, nothing, nothiiing-a / If I don’t have:
• Mercy Graves (“she got the Harley Quinn treatment- from animation to comic”)
• Christopher Chance (“part of the PI gig”)
• John Diggle (“Oliver Queen’s bishop”)
• Freight Train (“The one train you don’t want to catch; Simon Stagg’s bodyguard”)
7.) Private Investigator
Policing is hard work. So if your a fan of every noir film and comic ever, those who can’t cut it as police, or deal with all the corruption, orders and bullshit bureaucracy, then becoming a PI is probably the next suitable way to go. And as a private Investigator, proper police procedure is second to finding the truth, so you’ll likely be dancing on a very blurred moral line. A little B & E never hurt anyone. Jessica Jones can vouch for that.
You won’t be the best of friends with the police, as they see you as a lowly-bottom feeder or a bad guy who happens to punch in the clock to do his criminal deeds for the day. But hurray for you getting your Nancy Drew-sleuthing on despite all the flack you’re going to get.
You’ll love sulking in noir-styled lighting emanating from the ‘GIRLS GIRLS GIRL’S neon light outside your partially-pulled blinds of you tiny rat infested office, drinking 2 5 fingers of whiskey, smoking cancer sticks and waiting for a dame to enter your office requesting your help on a mysterious case. Or you could just end up taking snaps of a cheating husband going balls deep in his mistress.
Good thing too that you don’t have to be a British-sounding Sherlock Holmes-douche to be a good PI. Just be unrelenting and have a good nose for a mystery. A snoop stirring up trouble, basically.
For more tips on being a Punch-clock villain, see:
Jessica Jones (“failed super-heroine that’ll do pretty much any case for the right pay. My kinda gal”)
• Slam Bradley (“named as such obviously because he slams cases closed…”)
• Speed Saunders (“The Ace Investigator”)
• Batman (“Always wish to be the Batman”)
• Captain Mark Compass (“His middle name is either ‘moral’ or something goofy like Bradley James”)
• Steve Malone (“no crime family relations… I know, right!?”)
• Christopher Chance (“he keyed the word ‘hunch’… we’re most positively almost sure”)
• Heironymous “Hip” Flask (“a detective and a hippo. Your argument is invalid”)
• Dwight (the ‘P.I.’ in Sin City obviously stands for pussy-whipped idiot”)
6.) Soldier / Military
If killing is your business, then business will be booming over at an army base near you. Who else is going to keep our cities safe from aliens upon high with the powers of gods that see us as nothing but bags of meat?
For those of you up for a bout in future vigilantism or heroism, the army is a good place to get those fighter building blocks in place, a great foundation when you acquire some life-altering superpower or something like that. But for the rest a youse, well, be prepared to be called out at a moments notice to evacuate whole cities, create barricades, and fend of everything from gods, aliens, monsters, super villains, super heroes, zombies, crazies, madmen, and the occasion terrorist plot.
These guys are like Shaggy to the Royal Marines:
• Hal Jordan (“real genuine buzz-boy, though his neon-green uniform is not typical army issue”)
• James Rupert “Rhodey” Rhodes (“A one-man walking platoon on to himself”)
• Carol Danvers (“a pinup that could punch your face in and make you taste your teeth [mmm, iron-y mint]”)
5.) Reporter / Journalist
Extra Extra! Information is power. Or rather, the use of it. So if you are one of those people who love to have their finger on the pulse, and being in the know, well you definitely want to get into investigative journalism. You get to travel and meet new people, including powerful people and people with powers. Breaking and entering for that juicy story is all but tacit if you want to get front page worthy info. Which is what you want. Not some side column in the back pages beside a generic horoscope prediction.
But if you feel newspaper is dead, you can always have a gander at TV. We guess if you can be the ‘Breaking News’ guy or gal you’ll pretty much have a paycheque for life, because the super-powered villains of the world have no chill.
Whatever the platform, you’ll be a hard-nosed, no-bullshit hunter of the truth, who will not stop until they get the facts for their awesome hard-hitting stories and exposés. Like CNN, except… not.
Reporters who know a thing or two exposing truths, or at least peddling ink on paper:
• Lois Lane (“a bloodhound for a story… and trouble”)
• J Jonah Jamerson (“has a real hard-on for Spidey, and we suspect he smells like whiskey and cigar smoke”)
• Clark Kent (“oddly goes to use a phone booth when a news worthy event is taking place”)
4.) Tycoon / Business Magnate
If you thought making your first million was hard, you should try making your first billion. As a tycoon, you’ll be the leader of your industry, most like in tech / weaponry. You could of course be a tycoon manufacturing latex and nomex to keep other millionaire / billionaire superheroes suited and booted. Not to judge, but that wouldn’t sound cool on an embossed business card. But “Applied Sciences”, “Bio-technology” and “Mutagenics” all sound way cooler.
Welcome to the 1%, kid:
• Oliver Queen (“does not own a string of gay nightclubs”)
• Tony Stark (“ex-gunrunner turned philanthropist”)
• Ozymandias (“made millions, spent it on destroying the world… to save it”)
• Bruce Wayne (“how has he not gone bankrupt is beyond us”)
3.)Intelligence Agency
The clandestine nature of Intelligence can lead to a lot of misunderstanding. Black propaganda, White propaganda and knowing when to use either or both is lost on many, but alas when you get all spy-James Bond-y, rest assured you’ll be quite busy in comic world keeping watch over the many rogue agents who’ve gone awol, tracking stolen secrets some genius hacked out of you ‘secured’ network and keeping tabs on agents and super-powered freaks on the ground which you can use to execute your biddings.
We can neither confirm nor deny that these agencies exist:
• Project Cadmus (“Superman Cloning is just the tip of the Kryptonite”)
• S.H.I.E.L.D. (“Nick Fury’s club house of techno-supremacy”)
• S.W.O.R.D. [Sentient World Observation and Response Department] (“we take care of the real foreign terrorism, the outer-space kind”)
2.) Police
With all the deluded crazies, hyped-up criminals roaming the streets with metaphysical, nature-defying powers and tech weaponry, it is only fair that this be met with some good ol’ fashioned policing. The police are necessary in any society. Real policing, not the bullshit you see popping up on Worldstar or internet videos of fat, out-of-shape racists who will pull a gun when called to a jay-walking incident. Like Lester Freamon said in The Wire, we need ‘real po-lice’. And for the most part, the police are a reflection of society. The more corrupt the society, the more corrupt the police and vice versa. It’s why then Lieutenant Gordon back in Batman Year One had to do a major clean up of the GCPD which was steeped in corruption. These other coppers can attest to the same thing in one form or another.
But with all the crime and vigilantes flying, swinging and jumping from the rooftops and through alleyways, undoubtedly you’ll have enough investigations and open cases to keep you occupied to the ripe old age of retirement. For the most part you will be spending your time jumping between ‘normal’ serious crime (like a gang robbing a bank) and ‘serious’ serious crime (like a guy robbing a bank using a hand held teleportation device that causes intergalactic space rifts that could destroy the space-time fabric of this world and all known universes).
For more examples on hard-boiled cops that don’t use their guns to point out unarmed suspects (except maybe for Judge Dredd):
• Commissioner Gordon (“With a moustache that explains the reason why men have facial hair”)
• Jim Corrigan (“He’s a bit weird now, pale, green cloak, zipping off to some dimension or the other”)
• Christian Walker (“a gentlemanly neanderthal”).
• Dan Turpin (“Metropolis’ finest”)
• Judge Dredd (“I am the law”)
1.) Scientist / Engineer
Some of the greatest worlds mysteries have been made open to us through the pragmatic thinkers of our times. From developing serums that give them superhuman strength or power, or create multi-dimensional portals by the push of a button, you’ll be right at home in a lab surrounded by beakers, test tubes and other high-tech equipment that you can only afford because:
1. You are evil
2. Your financier is evil
Just remember to keep an incident report book handy, you never know when one of your abominable experiments or findings might break loose or you maybe have one of those happy accidents that plunges the world into turmoil.
Some people can punch holes in walls. Others can burn holes through objects by just staring at them. Sure all impressive. But can you MacGuyver a clean nuclear reactor to have it mounted in your chest, made from spare parts of what we assume is a spare parts from a German tank and a vending machine? Or can you retrograde damaged alien technology to create a weapon that will ultimately save the world? Of course you can.
Those jocks may have made fun of you in high school, but by god, you make a soldering gun look like the right hand of mighty Zeus. You’re creative, practical, and a problem-solver. And in a world of problems and discovery, you’ll be drawn into the weird and wonderful, lost in your gadget-y haven, building great tech that could save the world. Or destroy it. Whatevs.
For guys that see the hadron collider as equipment to create a portal to be used instead of an elevator:
• Barry West (“genius does strike twice”)
• Dr. Henry Jonathan “Hank” Pym (“size does matter”)
• Bruce Banner (“its been 0 days since the lab’s last accident”)
• Pamela Isley (“mixing botany with eco-terrorism”)
• Norman Osborne (“dude, is that conk in your hair? Or jerrycurls?”)
• Tony Stark (“The Kanye West of the Comic Engineers”)
• Reed Richards (“Gave his friends cool powers, wants to take it back”)
• Mister Terrific (“All work and fair play make Michael Holt a frekin’ genius”)
• Victor Stone (“Kid has a cannon for an arm. Literally.”)
• Querl Dox aka Brainiac (“The guy’s name is Brainiac. Any other explanation needed? Thought so.”)
If anyone clicked this post expecting to find their dream job actually working in comics as a writer, inker, colorist or the likes, we’re terribly sorry for the misleading title. But hey, on the other hand think how invigorated you feel to craft your own comic and the possibilities your character will have for employment. Am I right, huh?! Best case scenario we’ll both get famous and start having real protein with our meals.
“So how’s the job market looking. Any other common gigs in comic land you think you’d be a shoe-in for. let’s hear it in the comment section super-friends! #EntertainmentOnTAP”
Blogger, comic book and anime fan. FPS addict. All very convenient. Known to do storyboards and motion graphics when he's really busy.
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