When webcomics publisher Hiveworks announced they were no longer providing publishing services last year, I frankly expected a lot more social media chatter. Founded in 2011, over its 14 year history Hiveworks had become an influential mainstay in the webcomic world, hosting more than 100 webcomics – including the popular Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal – and supporting creators with a robust ad network that supposedly paid actual money. Throw in publishing services including running Kickstarters, handling an online merchandise store, the Hivemill, and a progressive mindset and it seemed like an ideal system, an independent alternative to corporate UGC platforms like Webtoon and Tapas.
When the shutdown was announced there seemed to be some awkward glances on social media, and a few people hinted at the whole thing ending in a mess, but there was no big explosion of disappointment, as you might have expected.
It turns out that Hiveworks creators were just keeping their powder dry: Yesterday, via the Cartoonist Cooperative, The Hiveworks Artists Guild, a collection of Hiveworks creators, released a statement…and suddenly it all became clear.
The statement alleges that Hiveworks owner Xelette Velamist and manager Isabelle Malançon were guilty of bad management, poor communication, non-payment and possibly even embezzlement – Velamist reportedly bought a car with Kickstarter funds. It’s not a pretty picture. The short version is that Isa and Xel (as they are known) ran Hiveworks in a highly abusive way, making unilateral decisions, acting as agents, treating creators with a lack of respect and overseeing a chaotic business plan that constantly over promised and under delivered. This culminated in Velamist leaving the Hiveworks discord and Melançon leaving Hiveworks all together in 2024. While creators tried to work with the remaining staff, it was soon revealed that the company was $340,000 in debt “from years of mismanagement of Kickstarters, failure to pay the company that hosts the Hivemill shop, and other smaller financial failings on behalf of Xel and Isa.”
One staff had also admitted in one of the company meetings between staff and artists, that around $15,000 was stolen from the company’s PayPal account in 2023, adding to the financial stress staff had only become aware of after Isa’s departure in 2024. We also learned that remaining staff were also owed $17,000 from the company, but had kindly decided to defer their own paychecks to help fund our departures from Hiveworks.
That departure includes the foundation of The Chimera Comics Collective, a new webring that helps promote member comics via social media and a jump bar.
The statement goes into depth about all the allegations, without calling out many specifics. I should stress that all the members of the Guild want to avoid speculation and misinformation while maintaining their privacy. I don’t want to paraphrase their words, when they clearly put so much effort into their statement. But I will call out some highlights of the examples of “unprofessionalism, lack of transparency and communication, incompetence, and a general lack of respect.”
- The Hiveworks discord was highly dysfunctional, including, gossip, excuses, inappropriate revelations of company business and Velamist suddenly appearing in DMs to “to share information about the company in a nonsensical fashion that was often inappropriate for her position.”
- Work on setting up websites and other technical matters were put into a “work queue” that was seemingly based on personal preferences and left some sites without updates for years.
- Ad revenue was inconsistent and that inconsistency was never explained.
- Creators were “kept in the dark” about outside publishing deals, including one with Seven Seas. Melançon and Velamist acted as agents “regardless of whether they had the qualifications or merit in doing so.”
- Perhaps most concerningly, crowdfunding campaigns were not run properly:
Crowdfunding campaigns would be left incomplete, or would be completed very late, and Hiveworks would start new ones to fund the older ones, creating an incredibly disorganized queue. Late fulfillment often resulted in backlash towards the artist, which Hiveworks did nothing to mitigate or take responsibility for. Isa was in charge of handling most, if not all, Kickstarters through the Hiveworks account, and would order massive quantities of books without the artist’s consent, cutting into the originally outlined budget of the campaign. Artists would be left with the burden to move thousands of books with little assistance from the company after campaigns were concluded, and would occasionally be billed for staffs’ labor that hadn’t been previously negotiated.
- Creators were treated with disrespect, given bad advice and steamrolled in creative decisions such as cover design, mostly by Isa, who took on almost all the administrative roles at the company, with disastrous results.
Before I go any further, a disclaimer: The Beat actually partnered with Hiveworks from 2016-2017 for hosting and ad revenue. I spoke with both Isa and Xel before signing up, and their seeming commitment to indie creators jelled well with my own goals, so it seemed like a good partnership. I was desperate for someone to help with the Beat’s finicky, complex backend, and Xel promised a robust ad network that would provide decent revenue. So at the time, it seemed like a good deal, and I always spoke about them publicly in very positive terms. Although there were a lot of behind the scenes problems, I got four years of paid webhosting out of it, so in the end, it turned out okay for me.
Yet, in all honesty, it wasn’t until I read this Guild statement that it dawned on me how much I was gaslit and misled during that whole time. Hiveworks wanted to host the Beat because I had a lot of traffic and installing the Hiveworks jump bar (a rotating carousel of links to various Hiveworks comics) would give the comics they published more exposure. In return, the Beat would be added to the jump bar and I would get more traffic. That’s how a webring works. Of course, I dutifully installed the jump bar right at the top of the site immediately, but as far as I can tell, The Beat was never actually added to the Hiveworks jump bar.
I was also promised a lot of marketing help, but that never, ever occurred and the person who was supposed to be in charge of it left the company in a haze of controversy.
Most annoyingly, the person who ran the backend detested WordPress, and every time there was a problem i had to endure a lecture about the evils of WordPress before anything could get fixed. Xel suggested I move to ComicControl, their own proprietary CMS, but even Xel had to admit it was set up for webcomics and not blogging and it would be a bad fit.
Aside, a wee piece of advice: NEVER MOVE YOUR WORK TO A PROPRIETARY CMS. They are like cd-roms or floppy disks….eventually they will be sunsetted and you’ll be stuck. Look what just happened with Typepad. WordPress has a lot of issues and is run by a questionable executive, but it’s open source, and it’s kind of the last best hope for CMS.
Anyway, the tech support from Hiveworks I got was adequate, in that if the Beat crashed, they brought it back online, but it never fixed any of the underlying problems with the site, so it was still always crashing and not loading properly.
Finally, there was the ad network. The Beat got booted from Google AdSense many years ago because someone complained that I was running adult content – which turned out to be a poster for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and a promo photo of Adrienne Palicki in her underwear. I’ve never reapplied because it just seemed like too much hassle for just a couple of hundred bucks a month. Hiveworks was signed up with an ad network that mostly ran on gaming platforms, and Xel was always boasting about how much money it made. In actuality, the revenue was negligible. I didn’t expect to live off it but for the time I was there I rarely made more than $100-200 a month from ads….and sometimes it was $5-7 a month. The Beat was getting 100ks of pageviews a month so this was ridiculous. Clearly there was something wrong with how things were coded on the site, but when I asked for tech help to fix it I got the runaround that is alluded to above.
In fact, I was always met with the “lack of respect” that was mentioned so many times. Whenever I had a problem Xel just said the site was at fault and I needed to fix it, never acknowledging that maybe that was part of the services they were supposed to be providing. I was basically made to feel like a dumbass for even asking for help, and a tech person who despised WordPress meant that help was a non-starter.
Anyway, I gave Xel and Isa the benefit of the doubt, ran all their press releases, and stayed in touch, even though I was always gaslit by being told that all the problems were mine, and being mostly segregated from other Hiveworks creators because I was press. Like I said, I came out of it okay, and reading about how many people were treated so much worse makes my blood boil, but all the patterns were there in my own relationship with Hiveworks.
The Hiveworks Artists Guild statement is careful not to go into specifics while outlining the general air of malfeasance. However, the BlueSky post about the statement has nearly 200 quote tweets and some of them spill serious tea. The main message is one of crushed dreams though: so many webcomics creators aspired to be on Hiveworks – it was seen as a real validation. That it ended up so badly for so many is painful to read.
Once again, I know that creators value their privacy so I won’t quote them directly but I will point to a few more detailed accounts.
General case studios of problems:
Post by @feathernotes.bsky.social
Post by @kxllhydra.bsky.social (this one is about Slipshine, the adult content sister site of Hiveworks, purchasing digital rights seemingly….in perpetuity?)
Not being paid for Kickstarter campaigns:
Finally, the webcartoonist Phooka has a lengthy Tumblr post about their Hiveworks experiences which I will quote a bit of:
Three years ago, I was approached by many artists at Hiveworks asking if their mistreatment was normal. That their feelings of horrible self worth within the company was really just a ‘them’ problem.
Turns out, it was unfortunately normal in that we ALL felt that way.
Stolen funds, reworked projects without permission, favouritism, opportunity sabotage- These were the common occruances over at Hive. Artists felt used, ignored, and walked all over to pay Hives bills and ego. People didn’t know what to do.
[…]
Hiveworks was supposed to be a beacon for webcomickers. It was supposed to be an indie opportunity to flourish in the small ways we can. But it became yet another example of a greedy publisher who saw an opportunity to take and take and take.
If anything, I feel like the response thus far has been mild, in public anyway. Hiveworks allegedly promised to run Kickstarter campaigns for many creators…..and then didn’t pay some of them. Reading the descriptions, it sounds like it developed into a Ponzi scheme of running one Kickstarter to pay for the previous one. The campaigns were also poorly run, as mentioned in the statement, with overly large print runs that were unasked for and are now stuck in a warehouse, along with merchandise. These are major problems that need to be addressed.
The one good thing about all of this (I hope?) is that Hiveworks didn’t seem to get into the rights game – from what has been written and posted it seems like most creators were able to get their work back, and ownership isn’t a question. But not being able to get printed books or merch back, or Kickstarter revenue…that’s not good at all. And neither is a $340,000 debt that will probably mean creators never see any restitution.
I’d like to think that Xel and Isa meant well at some point, and that Hiveworks was founded in the idealistic spirit that it was presented in. That’s certainly why I teamed up with them. Clearly, juggling so many different webcomics and creators was a task that far outstripped Hivework’s resources. But as with so many creative endeavors, meaning well at some point doesn’t mean that things are going to end well. When things spun out of control, they went down a path to alleged abuse and misconduct.
In conclusion, the final statement from The Guild suggests the best way to help is to support Hiveworks creators. While they aren’t all named, the new Chimera Comics Collective is a great place to start. They also ask that their statement on Cartoonist Co-Op remain the primary source for talking about these matters and to avoid speculation. While I’ve added to the story with my own experiences and thoughts, I hope I have respected that wish.
