Working for a Living

Not only are these tiny Yotsuba&! figures from Kotobukiya adorable as the dickens, they got me thinking about the place of merchandising in a creator's business plan.

After yesterday's gloom parade over the economics of comics, and the small number of people who seem to be making a good wage from making them, writer Kieron Gillen delivered another set of metrics...

  Being in comics is great, it's a golden era, new readers, yadda yadda. But this golden era is mostly the product of people slaving away at drawing boards and computers for long hours and...

With all the comic cons and comic arts festivals going on, creators and exhibitors are becoming increasingly picky about what shows they go to. A lot of it is scheduling, but more and more what makes a good show is whether it's profitable or not. You may recall the the Devastator and The Beat did a survey to get an idea of how and how much money people are making at shows. And of course there have been various arguments over whether cosplay, celebrities or hot dogs on a stick have more effect on poor sales at shows.

On the questionably damp morning of the last day of ECCC '15, I caught up with Image creator Nate Simpson in a small breakfast place called The Crumpet Shop in Downtown Seattle's world famous Pike Place market to talk about the second issue of Nonplayer, close enough to taste. The conversation spans his interest in narrative art, AI, and a discussion on creating comics in an rapidly gestating environment. Simpson is known for his work on Nonplayer, the first issue of which came out a few years ago. He lives in Seattle with his wife and young child and while he's not working on game art, he wakes up at 3AM daily to turn out comics pages.

Welcome to MATT CHATS, a weekly interview series in which I talk to a creator, consumer or seller of comics. This week I spoke with Gabriel “Gabo” Bautista, who is working on several projects...

For some reason, this post from two years ago, Creator says creator-owned comics pay as little as $31.25 a page—if you’re lucky went mildly viral on FB over the last few days. It refers...

On his Tumblr, Brian Micheal Bendis was asked about why he's stayed with Marvel when so many others have gone 100% creator owned. Seems like most of the guys from your generation (Fraction, Brubaker,...

Update: Just to clarify, this book is published by Udon Entertainment under license from Capcom. I'm told that they've done four other books under this model, all of them successful, and that the prints...

Some rambling thoughts on various aspects of making comics and making money. I alluded earlier to the sudden announcement that Nonplayer #2 by Nate Simpson was finished and would be presumably be coming out later this year. Simpson has written a much longer piece complete with a FAQ confirming that the issue will be in the May solicitations from Image; he's contacted Image about reprinting issue #1 but no response yet, and Warners—which had optioned the comic—has let their rights lapse, so it's there for the taking. And then he gets to why it took 3 1/2 years to draw the comic. It's a long answer but I'll lift a graph:

Web serialization of a comic intended for print is one of the standard models of comics production now (Although it still isn';t profitable but that's a whole other post) and here's avery insightful post by Ben Towle on the conclusion of his webcomic, Oyster War. I've been enjoying his account of local skirmishes between 19th century Chesapeake Bay oyster farmers since he started it in 2008, and much has changed in how he put the comics out in that period, including the rise of Tumblr and yet more social media. Towle offers some VERY practical advice including how running it on GoComics affected the comics, mistakes in character design and URLS (get a separate URL for your comic) and also preparing for print:

Cartoonist/multi media artist Matthew Thurber has a provocative piece called Letter to a Young Cartoonist about the use of the internet as a career approach, and he offers an idea that I had never really engaged with before but now that I've heard it, I can't forget it. The internet is "pay to play" for so many of us, even given the free tools available.