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Total To Creator: My First Royalty Report For My First SLG Comic (4/21/1989, Pirate Corp$! Special #1) (Patreon)

Published:
2022-03-20 06:14:17
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

Content

Read it and weep! Just a little bit. It isn't as terrible as it looks. Well, it is pretty lousy, but most folks did far worse back in the heady days of the post-Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles black and white indy comics boom and bust. Most folks didn't make a dime. Hell, many folks lost thousands of dollars and dropped out of the industry saddled with debt (many of them urged on by that idiot Dave Sim). I never self-published. I knew my limitations. And like many creative types, business matters, numbers and dealing with people are some of my limitations.

Anyway. So, yeah, I only got $440.91 for writing, penciling, and inking 28 pages of comics. I think this was the most successful of the SLG PC$!/Hectic Planet run. I dunno, this is the only old document of this kind that I could turn up.

Oh...I just realized. I also paid Kurt Hathaway to letter the issue, keeping him on from the Eternity run. So, I made a bunch less than $440.91. I forgot about that (and that's the origin story of my starting to letter my own work. Pure pragmatism).

Enjoy an inside look at indy comics economics back in the old days of that sort of thing. 

Print ads! Distributors -- plural! Better single issue sales than my stuff gets nowadays (true, different business these days, still)! Aaaaagggh!

Sorry posting stalled out for a while. Lots of busy days and dumb shit to deal with. More soon later asap.

Files

Comments

Evan Dorkin

They come in all shapes, sizes and formats. SLG was super informal, most of the time Dan and I just went over numbers on the phone or e-mail. I'd send convention sales and our take would come off the royalties owed, etc. I never signed another contract with Dan post-PC$!, everything was a handshake and understanding, from Milk & Cheese to whatever the last comic was. Dork #11, I assume. It worked for a long time, but as you can see, without anything up front, it became untenable when book sales became more important than single issue indy comic sales.

Ray Cornwall

Have you ever played the game in your head figuring out what you'd do if you won the lottery? One of my items would have been to set up a comics publisher and publish books I liked, regardless of profit. I'd pay the creators competitive wages, let them keep the IP, and maybe take a tiny piece of the backend. In other words, something that I could afford to do with my lottery winnings and so forth. But in my head, the voice that argues against ideas like these, even though the idea itself is just for fun, would state, "How dare you think of such things! You'd probably harm the Artists, who are CLEARLY making professional wages without YOUR interference! You'd probably starve them to death!" Boy, that voice in my head is clearly so wrong sometimes.

Evan Dorkin

Belated reply, sorry - oh, yeah, of course I do. I'm only human and a nerd human, so outside the usual "take care of family" and debt stuff, I tend to daydream about a personal library in the new home, and backing the shit out of publishing and other projects. Hand WFMU a bunch of money, etc. The idea of owning a comic shop and running a publishing outfit has always been a stupid dream, both would lose enough money with my mishandling to need a very large lottery payoff. I'd also fund my own crap.

Mike P

Did you guys ever read that Kevin Eastman interview in CBJ from back in the day? Where he goes into the details behind Tundra? Eastman actually lived that lottery daydream with his turtles money. Wild story, you can check it out online if you haven't already, it's archived.

Ray Cornwall

That issue is one of the best Comics Journals.