In the Company of Crazy Rich People

Lest anyone think being a cartoonist is all free convention tables and $20 per autograph

TRIGGER WARNING: Flashing Gifs and sarcasm.

This was originally written - and experienced - some years ago, but I’ve had to wait long enough for the trail to go cold before making this public (it was behind a paywall on my Patreon for awhile) because I do not want to be sued or murdered.

I’m kinda not joking.

The lawsuits mentioned below went nowhere. But who wants to poke the bear.

So, being a creator who is Rich People Adjacent, I find myself rubbing elbows with some lofty types who occasionally buy me dinner and occasionally pick my pocket.

Occasionally, they also throw jobs and money my way.

I never know what I'm going to get: fairy money or real money.

But on this adventure, alas, I got a pile of something polite people don't put into print in the language I'd like to use right now.

I've waited awhile to tell this story because I didn't want the breadcrumbs to be too easy to trace. Major trouble could result for people if all the guilty parties were made public, and there was a lawsuit (though I declined to be a party to it).

Billionaires be crazy.

They're even worse when the billionaire is from a billionaire family and didn't do anything to earn his money.

Until this encounter, I never quite realized just how epically out of touch the super rich and privileged are, because while I do know some rich creative people, they are all self made and all had to work for success. They touched dirt and know what grime feels like, even if some of them are pretty hard nosed about helping people they don't think are as deserving as they are.

"God helps those who help themselves, and so do I," is the motto.

I-Didn't-Earn-It-Rich-People tend to think that famous - or at least Creative-People-We-Have-Heard-Of-People - are rich too, and are vaguely disappointed when they find out people like me are not.

A super-rich maven I met in Europe at one of the moneyed people enclaves - and we got along spectacularly, BTW - friended me on my private Facebook page then unfriended me shortly after I made a post about how I was struggling financially.

I've always suspected it was because she decided I wasn't in The Rich People Club.

That could just be my insecurity. Dunno.

Whatever, it is very weird to be hanging out with a Countess, and people getting knighted and stuff, and then going home and not being quite sure you are going to have enough dosh to make the health insurance payment.

The more I read about the lives of artists however, the more I realize how common this is.

I'm not super broke now like I was then, so don't cry for me too much.

At least until you get to the end of this saga.

Then cry for me some and if you send money, I’m not going to turn it away.

On with the story.

Let's talk about...the Prince.

I'm not kidding. He's a Prince.

A minor royal from a major family that has more money than God.

Prince Whatever is a pop culture fan, and a major collector. He owns a big shop, one of the few in his region, and pretty much has a lock on business there. There is a huge convention in the area his family rules that is famous as a money-making opportunity for big time creatives and geek culture people, and the tales of the hospitality one may receive while there are legend.

After many years of mildly envying everyone who got invited, I finally got invited, and boy, howdy, I could not wait to go.

I don’t mean envy in a resentment kind of way. Maybe I mean covet.

Whatever.

Anyway, they dole out five star hotels, high end flights, lavish meals, meet and greets with famous types, and they were going to pay for my family to accompany me to boot. I would also be one the the few international artist guests, and could possibly make enough money to live on for a year in one weekend.

You bet I wanted to go.

I hadn't been anywhere in a long while too, so was really looking forward to seeing dear friends, as well as fans I'd likely never meet anywhere else.

My agent made all of the arrangements, got me the contract, and I cleared my schedule, made all the usual investments in prints, shipping arrangements, and a new cell phone as my old one could no longer be updated and I needed to be sure I had tech to process payments and call Uber. Having a decent way to take pictures would be a plus, too. It was all a not inconsiderable out of pocket investment for what promised to be a major return.

On signing the agreement, I was to receive a modest appearance fee which should have covered my out of pocket before the show.

But I knew something was up when, after the contract was submitted, the convention decided to cut my appearance fee.

By almost 2/3.

And things went downhill from there.

Here's a view from the slope.

In prior years this major venue had been run by a large company that specializes in trade shows. They pretty much rule the international Big Event market.

They make deals with local governments/businesses etc to do the organization labor while the investor/local clients take their cut.

The investor client for this particular venue was Prince.

In previous years, the convention ran smoothly and developed its great reputation as a top venue for guests. But according to Prince, the company had cooked the books and ripped him off in prior years. He decided he was going to run the show himself from now on.

I was told they needed to cut costs, so my fee would be among these cost cutting measures, even though we had a deal already. Air travel is expensive, they said!

They neglected to mention the royal family owns the airline. They also own the hotel we were supposed to be staying in.

More annoying still, I later found out one of the guests (a famous actor) was getting - hold on to yourselves - a $500,000 appearance fee.

I'm not kidding.

Needless to say that was a hell of a lot more than what I was getting which ended up being negotiated down to the cost of one month's health insurance and a phone bill.

Not what you'd call lavish. And after being cut, my appearance fee would no longer cover my out of pocket.

Normally, I'd walk and just go home and get my work done because it's not like I go to a lot of conventions anyway, and I have plenty to do, and when someone breaks a promise early, trust that sign.

But by this time, I'd promised my family the vacation of a lifetime, and I didn't want to let them down. I swallowed my pride and accepted the lower fee (and at that time, I didn't yet know how much some other people were getting - if I had, I might have had some spicy words with these people).

My agent told me Prince was sad to cut my fee (and again, at that time I didn't know what others were being paid,) but there would be many perks to make up for it, and I was sure to make a lot at the show. I would get to meet famous people, and the royal family wanted meet and greets with all the creators. I would be introducing my parents to the King and Queen!

Now, coming from my background and reaching these lofty heights...gee. I just wanted that for my folks. They'd be so proud of me, too.

The trip of a lifetime, all expenses paid, right?

So I sucked it up, and made all the final arrangements.

And the weeks went on.

And the weeks turned into months.

And still...I had no fee.

I was supposed to be paid on signing. But...no money and I was in the hole for my expenses now, including some of my family's advance expenses.

The website had no info about me.

The social media had no info about me.

And still NO MONEY.

What was going on?

A creator with whom I am friends was very close with Prince. Prince had become this artist's patron, promising him a home and a secure future ( all artists dream of this). He would never have to worry about money again! The creator was leaving his USA home to travel to the new locale where he would enjoy life in his all-expenses-paid condo in this land of promise. All his possessions were now in boxes waiting to be shipped overseas! Creator assured everyone that Prince was a good guy, nothing to worry about, just working out the kinks in his new business venture.

Mollified, I decided to wait. Finally the show added me to their website and social media and I figured, yay, a little late, but everything is on.

Still no money though.

What's to worry about, the guy's a BILLIONAIRE, my fee is pocket money to him! My agent told me the price Prince had paid for guests at a fancy restaurant event, basically what I live on in a year. There was no problem! Prince is loaded!

But there was a rising terrorist threat in Prince's country we had to know about and ran off to the State Department website to catch up on (great,) and oh, security measures now, we had to go through some funky background checks to meet the royal family. This was all done very last minute: it's the sort of thing that should take months. But we weren't informed until a few weeks prior.

I still had no hotel info, no flight info, no idea where to ship my stuff, and I was getting pretty nervous.

And the days passed.

And I became even more nervous.

Rumors circulated that Prince and his newly hired staff had waited too long to make all our travel arrangements and were now competing with a major international event for hotel rooms and plane tickets. Even though the royal family owned pretty much everything, there was nothing left for guests of this convention.

My agent has a special Fedex shipping account that would assure a very cheap international overnight price to the other side of the world, but as of two weeks before the show I still didn't know where to send stuff. No clue about ANYTHING.

And I still had no plane tickets.

WTF?

And now, the horror.

A big BIG MEGA BIG reason I simply felt I had to make the Crazy Rich People Big Event in The Foreign Land of Gold and Honey was because I had just lost a bundle to a Crazy Rich People deal, and I had the thrill of sitting in on a video conference call bankruptcy hearing, the final death knell in yet another adventure with Crazy Rich People.

On my Patreon, I alluded to an incident some years back which had me putting time and effort and energy into a project that went up in smoke, as the deadline for the announcement of same came and went without that big release for which they even had a countdown clock on the website, and I was all, WTF?

I figured it was done, the hit wasn't too bad, I'll get over it, and one of my Patrons even sent me a nice donation (thanks Erik) and I bought a lot of coffee with it, and licked my wounds and moved on.

But because I'm stupid and always hoping I'll get that brass ring, they roped me back in again.

Then they hung me with it.

There is not only the money I ultimately didn't get paid, there is the time and energy and my own personal investment and my general naivete about how the super rich will super rip you off in a minute and they won't even feel it because you're a peon and they'll forget about you tomorrow.

I mean, I'm used to (upper) middle class schmucks doing it, and distant corporate pigs I never actually speak to will wipe you from the board because you're dust, not even a pawn - hey, I've worked in comics all my life - but like I wrote last time, a part of me always thought the rich must have earned their money.

Sure.

So nearly two years of bouncing back and forth to "Greatest Thing since Avatar!" and "Metaverse" and "TransMedia Empire", "Forward movement financing approved!" and getting carrots dangled in front of me at well-timed intervals, and looking at my equity pile which was just a few pennies per share from being in the green on this whole deal, so no matter what happened I could just sell my equity and get out with the money I was supposed to get (or at least 95% of it,) I woke up one day to see my investment frozen due to "impending corporate action" which showed up about 2 hours later as a bankruptcy filing.

Hilarious.

In a bankruptcy filing, a stock is immediately removed from reputable trading platforms and heads straight for the pink sheets where it can be traded until final filing, which usually (but not always) means all value will be wiped out. In the event it isn't, traders swing it and get bargains and sometimes end up making a lot of money. And because a bankruptcy filing can always be refused by the court, or the company will pull out of distress, there is always that possibility that you can buy low and later sell very high (see Hertz).

Except this stock didn't do any of that. Because the company didn’t return to the markets after bankruptcy: it went private. No more stocks at all. And no more public examination of company records, which by all accounts are fraud, fraud and more fraud, and there was an SEC investigation I’m told, which appeared to go nowhere.

I did not see bankruptcy coming, partly because the CEO kept saying "no bankruptcy" any concerns were "just noise", and six weeks before bankruptcy, he and the entire Board of Directors took multi-million dollar bonuses that equaled over half the market cap of the company.

Kid you not.

And then they filed bankruptcy.

The whole time they were saying all concerns were "just noise" and they were having "constructive" forward moves on financing, etc, they were 100% lying about it, because they posted a website with the bankruptcy and reorganization info, and the website was purchased months before they filed the bankruptcy, a rumor they dismissed as "just noise" even though they had been planning to file it for months.

So while they were encouraging all of us to move forward and double down, they were selling us out.

Super not fun.

The head honcho banked over $14,000,000 (not a typo) and the accountant got over $250,000 a month to lie to the people they owed money to.

Yeah.

I was completely wiped out unless I could sell my equity. When I saw what happened, I immediately put in orders with my broker, which I was not sure would fill, because the stock could not be openly traded on the market. It goes to what is called the Expert Market, and the retail trader cannot buy or sell there. But as luck would have it, there must have been some standing orders in the queue that I got past, and about 1/3 of my holding sold immediately at about 1/3 the previous day's market price.

A loss, but I'll take it.

The other 2/3 was a disaster, completely frozen. I had to call in to a broker to sell it all. I was weirdly gleeful while doing so, relieved the nightmare was finally coming to an end, and I had the broker in stitches with my jokes. I am sure he has never had so much fun with someone who was losing their shirt.

I lost over 90% on those shares, because in the minutes it took me to get through and make the sale, the price had almost hit rock bottom.

It was even lower a few hours after that.

In the end, I was able to pull out a few thousand bucks for tens and tens of thousands of dollars worth of work and investment.

Did I mention that if you get paid in stock, you pay taxes on the stock value at the time you got it, so I was also out a considerable wad out of pocket in taxes on stock values I’ll never realize.

The corporate heads got millions, the peons got crumbs, and I was pretty depressed.

So when I got this offer to goeth unto the Golden Land of Money, where I would be hanging about and having dinner with A-list movie stars, royalty, a major museum curator would be there to go through my work for their collection, a rich Prince with bottomless pockets was so wealthy he was buying condos for artists, and the average person was driving a car worth more than I make in a year, all I could see was glory and a way to dig myself out of this hole.

And I hung on way, way too long after all the signs pointed to danger.

Again.

It's probably a character flaw I need to think about.

I became a nervous wreck and took on more work than I probably should, and dropped the ball on commissions.

I'm really sorry about that.

And this is also why, instead of doing my work, I got to sit on zoom and use valuable rural internet data - dial up speed at times, oh joy - to listen to some judge just go down the list and nobly "save the company" for the remaining employees and the Board of Directors, by rubber stamping the bankruptcy filings while all the little people they all owed money to got burned.

There were still lawsuits in abundance for some time after from which I got precisely nothing, but since I keep calling these people horrible names whenever I speak, I figure I better watch who and what I name here as NDA’s abound, and I don’t want to waste time in court.

And all of this is a friendly reminder, that a good part of being a professional artist means you have to be a businessperson.

More in our next exciting installment.