More Royalties

The Digital Edition

You’re looking at a royalty statement. This is a few years old, and I will not reveal the client. As you can see, the income on a lot of this stuff is pretty meager, less than $1 per book.

On the plus side, these are 30+ year old comics, in some cases. In almost every case, none of these comics produced a royalty payment when first published. I never thought I’d see anything on them, ever. The internet didn’t exist, and digital comics weren’t even on the radar.

So, even these tiny payments, which I never expected in the first place, are welcome. The middle number is the number of sales per book.

These are digital sales, of course. And every quarter, I get a statement like this one. There are other sales, most of them GN’s, producing more income than this.

I won’t say no one is getting rich on this stuff. I mean, I’m not getting rich BUT...

Back in the day, comics contracts - again before internet, the rise of graphic novels, big budget films - were a bit better than they are now, and a few lucky creators got those deals. If you got a creator percentage on a title that is getting a movie or a tv show now, you are making some serious bank each quarter. I know several creators who are making a million a year.

Alas, not me.

But I am pretty happy for those creators who are able to retire comfortably and not worry about the future. The starving old artist is a common story, and a few of my favorite people in the world will not be left in the cold.

Anyway, I get somewhere between $100 and $300 a year on old, individual comic sale royalties. I can look at that as a dinner out with the family, or a tip into the old nest egg, or some art supplies. Regardless, it averages out to about $2000 over ten years. That’s pretty small, but money is money. It would take me twenty years to earn a decent month’s income!

No individual artist is going to make much money on the little sales like this, but imagine how much the companies are probably pulling in on digital. There are thousands of comics being sold online. On the low end, about fifty sales per title per year of some of this old stuff (remember, you’re not looking at trade sales here, you’re looking at some comics some of you probably never even heard of or knew I drew,) and I am only getting pennies per book. But the publisher is likely getting a dollar a book or thereabouts.

I’m constantly seeing people rave about how mainstream comics is dying, blah blah, but mainstream comics has a freaking huge backlist of zero-cost-to-produce sales. All someone has to do is make some scans and post. What is that, two hours of labor?

And after that...endless income.

While the frontlist may never reach the glory days of 1948, the backlist will forever produce more than it ever could before. There was simply no economical way to publish these comics again at a sale rate of only 100 or so a year. But in one year, the scanned comic has paid for the cost of scanning and uploading it, and after that, it’s all gravy.

Imagine if those were all old issues of the X-Men up there. What do you think they’re moving?

How much money do you think DC and Marvel are making on digital backlist when even my measly contributions are selling 50-100 copies per year per issue?

Just to add, some years ago, our printer ditched the entire archive of negatives of A Distant Soil (all pre-digital) during a bankruptcy, which they had no right to do. Our negatives were my property, some were actually produced by another printing company, and I was paying my printer to archive them. It cost a small fortune to rescan and restore alot of that art. I had no intention of producing cheap, bad reprints or only making my work available in digital.

The same printer that wiped out my negatives is the same printer MOST OF THE ENTIRE MAINSTREAM COMIC INDUSTRY WAS USING. No shit.

Negatives for some major projects from all major companies were wiped out.

In the case of one legendary, huge selling and evergreen project, negatives from a Spanish edition were recovered, then the art had to be digitally restored and re-lettered back into English. I can’t tell you what the book was, but I can tell you there is a reason for so much comic art restoration going on, and it’s not all because of old comics.

And if you look at reprints on some recent editions of painted books, note the graininess of the art: the negatives are gone, and they are printing from scans of the books.

My restoration specialist is Allan Harvey, and you can find his very interesting and useful Patreon here. He is the best in the business.

I also thought I’d point out that comic book creators get more money for ancient comics than some actors do for streaming royalties from their TV shows.