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Great insights. Last night on my commute home, the guy in front of me was reading Hellboy via ComiXology , the guy next to me had a JLA HC collection/GN, and I had was reading a digital comic but had a floppy with me too.

As one of the old time commentators, I think you are absolutely right about the sustainability of the old, accepted notion of a comic (especially those outdated attempts to recapture the old X-men or Teen Titans heydays with teams of youthful superheroes)

However, I don’t fret for the medium. As we are seeing with people like Noelle Stephenson, there are markets outside standard comics that seem to be doing just fine.

Instead of dollar amounts, I wish the first chart was physical units. As cover prices have gone up, that will increase dollar amount even if the units shipped is stagnant.

I’m also not surprised that TPB appear to be stagnant. Most Diamond accounts are DM stores. Most DM stores sell singles. Only a small subset of customers will buy a trade if they have the singles, and others will get it if they can’t get back issues. Most TPB prices are no cheaper than buying all the back issues which can often be found on the shelf at my local shop. If I want a TPB, it’s also cheaper to them online from Indigo, Amazon etc instead of paying full cover price (or marked up US as many Canadian shops are doing now) at my local shop. I am also guaranteed to get a new copy and not one that has been thumbed through by customers.

Meanwhile, the Walking Dead has relaunched how many times? Oh right, none.

Imagine that – if you put out consistently good material, sales will remain consistent as well.

Make mine Image.

I think one of the reasons paper comics still sell is because people spend so much time staring a computer screen. They do it for work, they do it with their phones to distract themselves. etc..

At some point you (and your eyes) want a break and physical book is a good way to do it.

The job of lettering has changed pretty profoundly since 1978, become less time-and-labor intensive than it once was (in a way that that writing, penciling, and inking have not) so it isn’t surprising that it’s been devalued.

Here’s the deal, and basic economics, say you raise the rates of these creators (and believe me, I have a lot of sympathy, as I’m a creator, too), you have to raise the price of the material compensate for that, and when prices rise, buyers cut back, you lose sales. The end. It’s a terrible catch-22 with no fix. There will always be us grunts who will suffer for our art.

Personally I find myself hustling non stop to make a living as an artist. Small press children’s book here, small press comic book there, commissions, print sales at conventions, and my own comic book… which just about breaks even but only because I can do all of it myself. Once I start hiring out parts of it, the story changes.

But – there seem to be a LOT more people now cranking out GOOD QUALITY STUFF than what I remember, growing up in the 80s and 90s. So dollars are spread around a bigger pool of comics. Which is great for the comics fan…. doesn’t bode well for the moneymaking aspects of the indie cartoonist but, honestly, how many of us are in it for the money??

This isn’t necessarily true:
Basic economics… say[s] you raise the rates of these creators (and believe me, I have a lot of sympathy, as I’m a creator, too), you have to raise the price of the material compensate for that…
Creators are one paycheck of many in comics. You could pay creators more if you paid company executives, editors and other non-creatives less. Or maybe if you paid creators more you’d get a better product, which could perhaps sell more?

Trans? You decided to force Transgender into the article about if comic artists make enough money? Maybe when you ask why you are not making enough money as a writer, Heidi, you will realize it’s because you get too distracted to stay on topic.

A lot of factors to consider here regarding the relatively low wages, such as supply and demand (i.e., the number of people wishing to break in versus the number of available spots, let alone how much money publishers make), historical lack of union representation/advocacy, etc. And how does this compare with other arts-related fields? For example, one always hears how little money most actors make, except for the top tier of stars. And they DO have union representation in many cases.

Perhaps you’re too distracted to understand the topic, Rich.

If there was any truth to the whole “rising rates means rising the produt’s price” angle, then serious publishers of both books and magazines would be paying a lot less than they actually do… but they don’t.
The problem is, in comics you got a bunch of small companies pretending their business and readership is bigger than it really is, demanding top level results, but not really able to pay top dollar for it; so instead they become meat grinders for young men and women who don’t know any better, or those who like to think a person should invest his/her time/life for the enjoyment comics alone bring.
This isn’t new by any chance, but the law of the land in comics world.

Who are the people making the money in comic books? Note to Rich: Stop being so mean. Transgender is pervasive. Welcome to the Twenty-First Century!

As for the supply and demand aspect Randy mentions, the sad truth is in an industry fueled by fans and geared towards them as their main audience, no publisher would risk alienating all the fans who want to turn pro by telling them that the number of people wishing to break is far greater than the number of available work spots… it is far mor convenient to keep them hopeful and standing in line at comic-conventions portfolio reviews, so they’ll keep buying.

There are always more people who want to make comics than there are available opportunities. So, the pay is low. It’s that way in much of the arts. And that’s terrible, of course. We are people who are so passionate about our creative work that we’ll do it 20 hours a day for very little pay. You don’t see bridge engineers sending a cash deposit to apply for an apprenticeship, or interning for free. But again, that’s the Arts.

As a reality check on those 1978 “recommended rates” by the (never actually formed?) “Comic Book Creators Guild”, we know by his 1977 contract (made public through being involved in a lawsuit) that Steve Gerber’s rate at Marvel at the time was $26.50 per page, and when he signed that contract Gerber was as hot a name as a writer in comics at the time could be, so I’m sure getting close to the top rate offered. So that $100 per page that the “Guild” recommended was 4x what was realistic, and the other rates are probably similarly inflated (never mind that a 25% of original rate for foreign rights was compared to the 0% that most publishers at the time offered, and the 50% of original rate for reprints was probably closer to 10% for those few publishers that paid anything for reprints).

@Doug — when you look at some of the actual numbers behind publishing projects, though, you see that there’s almost never that one to one relationship between the creative costs and the net loss/gain, especially with page rates. A million dollar advance, sure, that could kill a profit margin, but paying an artist an extra $1,000 for their work won’t make a dent in a serious publisher’s bottom line (but it would mean the end of poverty for some artists).

The main reason creators get paid so little is because publishers don’t value their contribution as highly as the marketing and sales and other home office staff. That doesn’t mean they’re evil, it just means they see the other stuff as more necessary, maybe higher skilled, less easy to replace. You can easily build a spreadsheet around a fair wage for creators — heck, maybe even a salary — because those costs are small compared to your more dramatic cost savings from reducing page count or changing printers or selling more books (which few comics publishers actually try to do).

Just wondering if the income for creators is any better at companies like Image where the creators have a better deal with their creator-owned material?

“You don’t see bridge engineers sending a cash deposit to apply for an apprenticeship, or interning for free.”

I don’t know about engineers in particular, but in the current job market there are a lot of non-BFA college grads who resort to interning for free.

“Before we get into the bad, let’s look at the good. Marvel and DC continue to be the backbone of the industry.”

OK, I get what he was trying to say (that Disney’s and Warner’s comics divisions are still keeping the primary distribution-and-sales channels commercially viable, and it would pretty much suck if they didn’t) but the fact that it does rely on those two publishers is kind of the opposite of “good”.

“In an industry that’s worth $50 million on average, DC and Marvel account for two thirds of that revenue. ”

http://comicsbeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/2014-10-08-13.08.47.jpg
Comic books @ comics shops: $340 Million
GNs @ comics shops: $170 Million
GNs @ book trade: $245 Million
Digital: $90 Million
Newsstand: $25 Million

My concern for DC: they have Vertigo 2.0 (with the new contract, which seems to have helped Image) and superheroes. Can a business survive with little experimentation or innovation?
My concern for Marvel: they have forgotten how to do licensed comics for kids. Where are the beginning reader comics for K-4? Where are the Disney XD comics? There should have been a Star Wars Rebels comic shipping the same month that Disney premiered the series. Where’s Phineas and Ferb (who HAVE co-starred with the Avengers on TV)? Gravity Falls? The Muppets? Frozen?

What happens if Marvel and DC suddenly stopped printing monthly comics? (Let’s say they go completely digital…)
Yeah, a lot of stores would be hurting. But I think some readers would be willing to try something else. I did that when my pull list exceeded my budget; I dropped almost all Marvel titles.
Would the industry collapse? No. Go look at what mainstream book publishers are printing every month. Go look at the titles showing up on the New York Times bestseller list.

@ Torsten,
If Marvel and DC suddenly stopped printing monthly comics? Yes, the industry would collapse because comic shops would collapse. There would be no more hobby market. The only outlet for those sales would be conventions and a few toys on a side aisle at Target. And Disney already looks like they’re experimenting with this in the form of Big Hero 6. They are doing their best to distance themselves from the original comic for a lot of reasons but one of the lessons they will learn is that they don’t need a printed comic to make a successful superhero film.

@Jason – I agree. It’s definitely the opposite of good. I interviewed Eric Stephenson a while back, and he had a line in the interview that perfectly encapsulates my thoughts on it, and I’m sure your thoughts.

“If I expanded on it there it’d have been a bit clearer, but having a Big Two is not a sign of a healthy industry. Any industry that is dominated by like two businesses – whether you’re talking about comics or anything – that means if one of those businesses goes down, you’re fucked.”

The rest of the piece I walked through how other publishers are raising the sales floor and making the whole current level more sustainable, and hopefully they bring it to the point where there’s more balance across publishers. That will take a while though.

@PRM – Thanks for answering Torsten in a far better fashion than I likely would!

You missed Identity Crisis.

@Chris – I actually intentionally didn’t include it. I decided to make the charts everything within the 2005-2014 10 year block. Arbitrary, sure, but I couldn’t include EVERY event, so that seemed like a reasonable cutoff point.

The events are losing sales because, where they used to happen once a year, they now happen back-to-back and will likely soon start to overlap. They are essentially a line-wide team-up book whose title and numbering change every 6-12 months and the buyers are starting to understand that.

I also doubt regular comic publishing will disappear anytime soon for major characters like Spider-man, Batman, Superman, the Avengers, etc. The reason I say this is because comic writers and artists fall outside the guild/union standards and rules for the film industry, and so the Big Two get big ideas cheaply from the comics every month without having to shell out a dumptruck full of money to a Hollywood ideaman, scriptwriter, or storyboard artist.

“[T]his is not the chart you ever expected to see in the biggest sales month ever, with the Harley Quinn annual selling ealy 100,000 copies, Scott Snyder and Jock’s Wytches debuting at #18, and the new, Doc Marten’d Batgirl at #19. More teling to me—Skottie Young’s Rocket Raccoon is still selling 57,000 copies at issues #4″

Okay, some of that is definitely new. But Image titles of hot Big Two creators have sold as good or better before. Remember titles like The Darkness or BattleChasers: when hot Big Two creators do non-superhero stuff at Image, they have sold before, and to be honest I was expecting Wytches to hit higher than #18. And Batgirl at #19? Look no further than a couple of years ago, when Gail Simone made the title a top 20 hit month after month during the first year or so of the New 52.

Image has had a higher marketshare than this before, also. Again, look to the ’90s. I definitely agree that the company is putting out better comics than ever before, with a more diverse lineup as well. But sometimes I think people forget just how big Image (and Valiant, for that matter) were in the ’90s. This is hardly the first time another company has made significant inroads on Big Two territory. There were months in the ’90s when Image had a better marketshare than DC!

That’s not to shortchange the take-away messages of this article. There absolutely is something new going on, more than there has been in years. Yes. But not all of this stuff is so unprecedented.

Also, why you continue to ignore Deadpool is beyond me. His sales are spread over more titles, but he is obviously Marvel’s version of Harley Quinn and sells more merchandise than pretty much any other character created in the last 49 years.

>>>>Okay, some of that is definitely new. But Image titles of hot Big Two creators have sold as good or better before. Remember titles like The Darkness or BattleChasers: when hot Big Two creators do non-superhero stuff at Image, they have sold before, and to be honest I was expecting Wytches to hit higher than #18. And Batgirl at #19? Look no further than a couple of years ago, when Gail Simone made the title a top 20 hit month after month during the first year or so of the New 52.

Are YOU ACTUALLY trying to say that the comics market is the same now as it was in 1996 when The Darkness launched and 1998 when Battlechasers launched?

Look I wish it was the 80s again too so I could watch SNL when it was good too, but that doesn’t change the fact that times change.