Working for a Living

If you were watching Ryan Secreast's rockin' New Year's Eve last night you saw Mariah Carey's incredible lip sync fail. I don't know what was more uncomfortable, watching Carey prance around in what had...

Last year an anonymously sourced webpage called Fair Page Rates made some waves by assembling a survey of 60 professionals on who paid what and which publishers were the hardest to work for. The...

Newsletters have made a BIG comeback, in that pendulum swinging way. I guess people are so exhausted from surfing the web and checking out snapchats that they want everything to come in their mailbox. Ed Brubaker has an infrequently mailed out one, which you can subscribe to here. A new one went out yesterday, chock full of news and chatter and a preview of issue #2 of Kill or Be Killed, his latest team-up with Sean Phillips.

A few months ago Ted McKeever, who has a resume as long as my arm and two legs put together, announced he was moving away from comics. But not before releasing a blistering roman...

Phil Hester is the artist on Shipwreck, the upcoming book written by Warren Ellis about a very strange shipwreck, so he seems to be doing jsut fine in the comics world, especially with a...

Comics creator process posts are the BEST posts. Jeff Lemire seems to have taken over Charles Soule's mantle as Busiest Person in Comics– writing 7-8 monthly books - and he reveals how he does...

On Tumblr, artist Ronald Wimberly wrote a very cogent post on why artists should get paid to do sample pages: A quick preface: Yesterday a friend of mine told me the story of how she was...

Maia Kobabe is a very talented up and coming cartoonist as the above page from her Tom O'Bedlam adaptation shows. (disclosure: she is also a reviewer for me at Publishers Weekly.) Recently she wrote...

I'm late in commenting on the industry rates survey posted by Fair Page Rates an anonymous industry watchdog. But along with the sales softening I was writing about earlier, it's part of an industry...

Welcome to MATT CHATS, a weekly interview series that goes live every Tuesday conducted between myself and a creator and/or player in the comic book industry, diving into subjects not broached by other comic news outlets. One...

Happy New Year, faithful Beat readers. Hoping it's a happy and healthy one for all. 2015 was a challenging year for many of us with many changes blowing through the world of comics, but,...

For the past few days there has been a kerfuffle in the extremely high profile, glamourous and profitable world of comics journalism. Rather than comment on this hot mess, I'm going to talk about why it happened. And what we an do to improve things.