What’s in a name?

A famous Shakespeare line that almost everyone has probably heard, and it’s a great question. When we are younger, most of us get “eeed”: Billy, Danny, Debbie, etc. As we move into our teens we usually rebel. Danny becomes Daniel, Debbie becomes Debra, Billy becomes William and we will immediately correct the person who uses our ‘younger’ name. Eventually we relax and except the fact the people will shorten our name till its Dan, Bill and Deb.

Now there are some exceptions to this of course. One of my publisher’s names is Jade and I don’t know of many variations of that. And if you’re a boy named Christopher you better hope that your parents don’t “eee” you. Worse of course is if you get stuck with a nickname growing up like Rocky, Mookie or Scooter… nicknames usually linger.

But when you make the jump into the entertainment industry you have a whole new name thing to worry about. Because your name is your brand; it’s the way everyone will identify your work. So you better take the time to pick which variation of your name you are going to use to find one you can live with for a very long time.

When I first started writing I used my full name: Daniel R. Wickline. It was pretentious enough to sound intelligent and the middle initial meant I was to be taken seriously. I clung to this moniker for quite some time until one day I decided to get a website in my own name. The idea of making people type danielrwickline.com was insane. Would you need the period after the ‘r’ or not? You want your website to be found easily. So I sat and contemplated for a while and decided that since everyone called me ‘Dan’, everyone in the industry knew me as ‘Dan’ and if I was a fan I would be more likely to want to have a beer with a ‘Dan’ over a ‘Daniel R’; I decided to make the change not only on my website but on my writing credits.

Now I’ve had the name conversation with a few people in the past… namely A. David Lewis and Joshua H. Fialkov… obviously I didn’t make a convincing argument. But there are so many things to consider when you choose your ‘professional name’ that it can be very difficult. I just did a mini-series with a very talented artist named Milx. Well, his name is Mahathir Buang but he is credited as Milx; so from the stand point of easy to pronounce, the Milx pseudonym is great… but how often will his name be written as ‘Milk’? I’ve seen it in one review already. Another artist I worked with in the past is named Mikel Whelan, a good strong name… the problem comes in is that there is a famous fantasy artist named Michael Whalen who is well known in the comic industry. So Mikel constantly has to follow his name with “no, not THE Michael Whalen”. Another buddy of mine wants to drop his first name and just go by his last… his name is Bobby Breed and I told him that not only would I refuse to call him ‘Breed’ but I was not going to call him any other verb either.

A couple good rules to follow when thinking about your professional name: 1) Make it easy to pronounce – “Get me the number for T… a Munga… Biaka… or forget it, get me Joe Kelly.” 2) Make it memorable and unique – “I’m going to google my favorite artist, Dave Smith” 3) Make sure it doesn’t have any existing baggage – “Hi, I’m a new penciler name Rob Lief… Hello? Hello?” 4) Make it one you won’t mind having in a few years – “Uhm, yeah… I’m Snooker McNasty” and 5) the most important one… make it something easy to sign. Think of the years of drawing we have lost to autographing by such great artists as David Mazzuchelli, and Bill Sienkiewicz.

So, if you are someone wanting to make a name for yourself in the industry… make sure it’s a good name.