How do comic book artists make a living?

Cafe Society
1

Are they paid a salary or a commission + bonus arrangement, or some kind of piecework … how does it work for a comic artist to put bread on the table?

As a side question, in going to a few artists web sites, I notice some seem to do a lot of commercial illustration in addition to their comic book work, and a few seem to be advertising that they will draw any character you want, doing what you want for a fee. Is this a big business for some? Does this private, one off, type work violate any character copyright issues or is it not really a concern given that most of this art will not see the light of day again commercially after the customer receives it?

2

Each company has a standard page rate. A very popular artist commands a higher rate, although sometimes a prestigious artist with so-so sales also gets a premium rate (In the early 70s, DC used to alternate Neal Adams Detective issues with issues drawn by Irv Novick, and they sold about the same according to the distributor. According to Adams, a lot of his issues ‘disappeared’ from the warehouse and so didn’t show up on sales reports).

Most companies pay upon publication, so you draw a story, it’s easily 4-6 months before you get paid. Smaller publishes are notorious for never paying, going out of business owing artists money, etc. This is one of the hardest-working and lowest-paying gigs in commercial art (The comic book artists who reliablt pull down more than 80Ka year would fit comfortably in a Humvee, and the millionaires would fit comfortably in a Miata), and fan adulation is pretty much restricted to–well, let’s just say that shapely college girls don’t go for comic book artists. Any way I can talk you out of this career choice?

3

As for artists drawing any character you want doing anything you want… It’s a big source of income for artist who used to be popular, and copyrights are only a concern if it’s for publication. One artist, who had a small-but-intense fan base in the 70s but hasn’t been published in nearly 20 years, pays the rent with embarrasing hard-nipple drawings of the female Marvel characters he used to draw. His technique is as good as it ever was, it’s just sad to see how the mighty have fallen. I think he did animation work for a while in the 90s. Lots of the old-timers interviewed in Comic Book Artist include an ad offering to draw your favorite characters for a few bucks.

And the page rate for a moderately popular artist at Marvel/DC hovers between $120-180/page, last I heard. Bonuses are given to breakout titles that sell unexpectedly well–but sales figures are a closely-guarded secret and the publishers are notoriously less than forthcoming.

4

Just to clarify a bit about the artists doing sketches of characters on the side and unapproved by the publisher, even if unpublished: It’s illegal. The characters are property of their respective companies and no one can make a profit off of them without their owners’ permission. Don’t belive me? Find a business, anywhere, that does sketches of copyrighted characters for money.

However, the publishers generally don’t raise a fuss when individuals do such sketches for a number of reasons: the market for these sketches is relatively small and unorganized, so it’s not like they’re losing a lot of money on it; it’s a pain to go after the individuals who do this; it’s another way to spread and increase the popularity of a given character or characters; and finally they’d look like complete dicks to sue people who are doing this on the side so they can feed themselves or out of a love for a character. Go on eBay and do a search on just about any character and you can find sketches of them for sale and you know that if Marvel or DC said something they’d pull those listings down in a heartbeat.

As to how much money comic artists make, Krokodil gave a pretty good breakdown, although I think he was a bit conservative about how many artists break 80K. It’s not a lot, but I think you could fit the ones who do on a school bus as opposed to a humvee.

Also, a lot of artists make money on the side by picking up work outside of comics but in related fields, sometimes in places where you wouldn’t expect. Geof Darrow, for example is a creator who has worked on a number of characters you may or may not have ever heard of (he co-created Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot with Frank Miller which was later made into a cartoon), but he also did many of the design and brainstorming sketches for The Matrix. Bernie Wrightson is known for doing dark, moody artwork in comics, most notably on Swamp Thing, but he also is the artist who did the paintings in Stephen King’s Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla.

5

Asylum-- doing original sketches of copyrighted characters isn’t illegal at all. It’s COPYright, so if you do an original painting or illustration and sell it to someone and never copy it, no law has been broken. You could do a whole gallery show of copyrighted characters, and as long as you don’t sell prints of those paintings or illustrations, or a book of reproductions, you’re in the clear. And the reason there aren’t businesses that do it-- well, it’s difficult, repetitive, and there’s not much of a market out there in the real world. Go to a comic convention, however, and you’ll see every artist there doing it, some for money, some not. When I’m sitting at the DC booth I don’t charge for sketches, but mostly because that would be tacky, not because DC would have any legal complaint.

Another major source of income for comic artists is selling original art. If you did work on a popular series, pages can sell for pretty decent rates, particularly if you had the foresight to put popular characters, a lot of different characters, characters using their powers, or characters with no clothes on on the page. Depending on the comic, the page may sell for more or less if the word balloons are actually printed on the page (like, for instance if the comic was written by Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, or Garth Ennis it would sell for more, and if it was written by Todd McFarlane, less).

Small publishers generally pay a percentage of the future sales of a comic. If you created the comic entirely, a publisher will put up the money to print and distribute it and then after they break even, split the profit 60/40 in your favor. Some larger small publishers (if you follow me) will pay a small page rate upon receiving the art as an advance on that royalty payment.

Other artists make a fairly decent but entirely anonymous living doing storyboards for animated movies, TV shows and commercials. The money is excellent, but no one but art directors ever sees their work, and the deadlines are grueling.

And, Astro, as you may know, in the last 4-5 years, a Florida-based comic company called CrossGen created a system in which artists and writers were salaried, given a set workload, made to relocate to Tampa, and did a passable job of making a comic company into a cubicle farm. It worked okay to not so great, depending on which former employee you speak with. I believe they’re still in business, and some people like their comics… more power to 'em.

Anyway, my 2 cents…

Zander

6

I was also under the impression that, for a while, there, comic artists were also given royalties that were directly tied to sales… as well as reprint royalties.

The idea was to stimulate them to do their best, most innovative work, in order that sales might go through the roof, as opposed to simply cranking away for page rate.

7

Most major publishers give royalties for any sales above a predetermined level, and any reprints, including trade paperbacks, which sell quite well, particularly in the last 10 years.

8

Last month’s Comics Journal detailed how Crossgen has strayed from the original vision, farmed lots of work outside of Tampa and begun stiffing freelancers. That’s a really bad sign for their future viability; they ran similar stories about Comico, Kitchen Sink and Eclipse right before those companies disappeared.

9

Sorry, but wrong, wrong, wrong, and wrong.

  1. The copyright holder not only holds the copyright to the character, he also holds copyright to “derivitive works,” defined as “a work based upon one or more preexisting works.” Drawing a superhero image is definitely based on a preexisting work and requires permission from the copyright holder. Otherwise, what would prevent DC from throwing Marvel characters (or vice versa) into their books without permission?

  2. Whether you sell the paintings or prints of them is irrelevant. Making a copy or derivative work is a copyright violation, whether you proft from it or not. This is the single most misunderstood aspect of copyright.

  3. In any case, the comic book publishers have also trademarked their characters, so you can’t even argue copyright as an issue. They have the right to license their trademarked characters, and you can’t use them without their permission.

Now a copyright holder can choose not to sue over the trademark and copyright violations, primarily by looking the other way. But if someone discovered they were deliberately letting someone use their trademarked characters, it would mean they were not defending their trademarks, and could possibly lose them. The last thing Marvel wants if for anyone to have the use of Spider-Man.

I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if the comic book companies have sent out stern letters from their lawyers as a pro forma practice. That would allow them to show they were defending their trademarks in court, and, at the same time, allow them to look the other way if an artist wanted to sell some of the drawings.

10

Well, yeah, but “derivative works” can get pretty sticky when it comes to comic book legal precedent.

Then again, when this happens, it generally comes down to a matter of “who is willing to keep paying his lawyer the longest”…

11

They do it on a very selective basis. Once in a while, Marvel and DC do things that make them look very bad to fans and freelancers, whose goodwill they have a vested financial stake in maintaining.

For example, during their bankruptcy proceedings a couple years back, Marvel decided they’d paid too much in bonuses and sent letters to their freelancers asking for the bonus money back. Steve Gerber released a copy of that letter to the comics press, Marvel was universally derided, and they let the matter drop quietly.

In the long run, they find it a lot cheaper to look the other way–unless someone gets really greedy at their expense.

12

Two of my favorite alt.comics cartoonists, Dan Clowes and Joe Sacco, have said that they get by on starvation wages.

Clowes: “I’d make more if I worked at McDonalds.”

Sacco: “I have yet to break $10,000 a year. Insurance is still a far-off dream, and in my line of work, it’d come in pretty handy!”

On a happy note, Clowes did make some bucks off of Ghost World, an unusually successful independant film based on his comics, and is on deck to have another one, Art School Confidential, produced real soon. And Sacco’s stuff is starting to pop up in Newsweek and The New Yorker. Hang in there and maybe there’s a payoff.

Or, we could discuss the hundreds of comics artists who died broke and alone…

13

My best friend from elementary and high school, Dawn Best, was doing pencil work for Archie’s Sonic The Hedghog series for awhile, but eventually she gave it up because there was just not enough money in it and no future. I believe now she’s in training to be a phlebotomist.

14

I have an unbelievable number of friends majoring or that majored in art, with the intention of doing either comics or animation.

Judging from my friends, comic book artists make a living mostly through secretarial work or their parents. :smiley: I have so many artist friends without jobs that nowadays when I meet new art majors, I feel like screaming and shaking them. “Noo! Don’t do it…! You still have a chance!”

Of 9 art major to-be-comic-artist friends remembered off the top of my head, only one currently seems to have a bright future, and that’s in animation for Disney. And she’s unbelievably fantastically talented. The others aren’t not talented, but it’s a lot of competition. I’m not sure how the market could handle just my group of friends, much less all the other wannabe artists I know must be out there.

15

I’m not a copyright lawyer, and for all I know, you may be, but…

Well, in that situation, because they would be making many many COPIES of those illustrations and selling them, which would be a violation of copyright.

As far as preparing derivative works goes, well, I guess it might be illegal (the wording’s pretty vague), but I have never heard of any company suing an artist for drawing original one-off illustrations of their characters for a profit, and about sixty million of them get drawn at every comic convention I’ve been to.

Zander

16

Sketches and commissioned drawings are clearly derivative works (not to mention the trademark issue). I don’t think that they’re illegal, though. I would argue that there is an implied license by the comics publishers as these illustrations are an integral part of the comics economy and, if they were not permitted, there would be no artists who could afford to draw the actual comics. One might also argue that such sketches and drawings fall under fair use. But either way, the existence of this possibly-grey market is well known by the rightsholders who typically are unconcerned with it – indeed, Marvel, DC, et al., frequently sponsor convention appearances by their talent where such drawings are made.

–Cliffy