These Things Are True

And Truth is Better Then a Pretty Lie

People go into publishing, flounder for years,  and wonder why they're not rich and famous.

That's because most people in publishing aren't rich and famous. 

Most people who get their work published never make above poverty wage. I spent at least half of my career below the poverty line. I’d go a few years and do very well only to tank again.

It took me a long time to hit good, steady income. Not just because my work didn’t sell, because it did from the beginning. But because I got ripped off a lot in the beginning.

Then I sold some books. Then I didn’t sell some books. Worked on a hit book. Worked on a dud book.

Material success isn’t a straight line chart.

Working with a superstar creator will not make you a superstar. Working on a superstar character will not make you a superstar. Some people click with the audience, some people don't.

Being a first mover doesn't mean jack. Being the first to come up with an idea, a style, a concept, or an approach just means the next person to come along can build on what you built, learn from your mistakes, and capitalize on everything you did while erasing you from history. 

No one is going to boo-hoo for you because few care whose work was first influenced by manga, or drawn on a tablet, or drawn on the moon.

Most people will never, ever make decent money in comics. Period.

Few comics these days sell well enough to make royalties, and almost none sell well enough to make royalties that matter.

If you manage to get a legacy book that stays in print - an "evergreen" - then you can count on royalties for decades. But some comics publishers are changing their royalty structures so that it is even harder to get royalties, or the royalty offer isn't on the table at all anymore.

Of the major trade publishers now getting into comics, few have a clue how to handle artists and how to edit art. They expect entire graphic novels to be produced in only a few months, and the up front pay is often quite poor.

Popularity is often the only way to make money. If it’s just a matter of money, it doesn't matter if you are good. It doesn't matter if you are working with someone famous. Or in the same room with someone famous. Or at the party.

If you are popular on Instagram, or a politician with the right supporters at a publisher, you can even get a huge advance and walk away with massive dough even though your book will sell midlist numbers (at best) after it’s published and your six figure advance never earns out. 

The rest of us whose books routinely sell a lot more than yours did and who don’t get anything like your advances will give you the side eye for years to come.

Because most people realize you can’t get the dough without the popularity, they cling like ticks to famous people.

But fame doesn't rub off. 

And (I only realized how dirty this sounded on the third edit,) you can’t suck it off either, tick.

I know a lot of people who think they can suck up other people’s fame, but they are very unhappy and very deluded. I have worked on one celebrity project after another and they often pay even less than other gigs because "You should be thrilled to work with this celebrity," and /or the attention goes to the celebrity and not you. 

Many, many creators worked on your favorite comics. Only a handful get remembered by the industry.

The frustration of seeing stardust sprinkle on some creators who work with famous people and not on you - another artist who worked with the famous person - has caused more envy and roiling resentment between creators than anything I have ever seen in all my years of working in publishing.

Why not you?

Heck if I know. If anyone knew, they'd just duplicate the formula.

If you’re fame-adjacent like me, the people who can’t get close enough to real fame will cling like ticks to you too because you’re an easier target. When they don’t get what they want out of you - access to all the fame and money they hope you will bring to them like the bridge they walk all over - they will hate you with the fiery hate of a thousand suns because they can’t afford to hate the big fame people, you Evil Gatekeeper, you.

Many creators who work on famous superhero comics have piles of original art that isn't worth very much money. Artists have changed their storytelling style to add more flashy splash pages because those pages get more dosh. They refuse to draw talking heads scenes, office scenes, daily life scenes, because those pages are hard to sell.

They’re also harder to draw.

You won't have trouble finding original art from famous comics for well under $100.

If the stardust doesn't rub off on you, creator, your art will never be worth much. It took me years of working in this business to see my art values start to go up.

Art I sold for $25 is now worth $20,000.

While some artists pop out the gate and get famous right away, most artists will never have that. If you can't make your career last past the "respected creator legacy" hump, your value will flatline.

At the Society of Illustrators museum, there's this back room where they had art for sale. Illustrators who once made a living doing cartoons and drawings of refrigerators - boxes and boxes of art, all for $15, $20, $25. The legacies of one hard working, solid-as-a-rock draughtsman after another whose families had donated their work to a museum, and the art was going for rock-bottom bargains.

This is the fate of most artists. If, in fact, a museum will accept your art at all.

Value is about context.

You can draw a stunning refrigerator, but the skill that went into that illustration is meaningless outside its original purpose and cultural context. Without meaning from context, the drawing has little value.

If they found a bad drawing of a dog in the ruins of Pompeii, that bad drawing would be worth a fortune.

Context.

This is a pop culture business and the primary way you make money in comics is with a sales track record - you know, the thing you get by being popular. You won’t get popular until you produce something that publishers think they can make money on, and lots of newbies get in this gig expecting the same page rates as veterans.

Good luck with that.

But even if you are popular - bad news person with 100,000 likes on Tumblr or 1 million followers on Instagram - fame also guarantees nothing except that people know who you are. It doesn't mean they throw money. It may even mean they throw money at the person next to you and not you.

There’s more than one kind of fame, and publishers dumb enough to throw loads of cash at people on social media thinking that will translate into book sales deserve what they get.

If you don’t get popular, your work won’t sell. If you do get popular, your work may not sell.

You work on projects because you have faith in them, want them, love them. There is always the hope the project will take off. The public will love it, too.

But for every hit, there are many misses. 

While I was working on one K.I.A. project, waiting on script, to keep my deck clear and not be a deadline problem, I turned down a gig with a very famous writer, a gig that ended up being made into a blockbuster movie that earned hundreds of millions of dollars.

And got a sequel.

Ouch.

I've worked on projects that have brought in evergreen money from art sales and royalties, and I am grateful for them. A DISTANT SOIL is one of them, and yet, in some years, it has earned nothing or even lost money. But without A DISTANT SOIL, there would be no Patreon. Or a Substack. I learned how to finance my work in alternative ways because of that book.

All of the work I’ve done over the last decade has done very well. Like bestseller multiple printings well.

Almost all of the work I did in the prior decade did - not so well.

Most people will never, ever have a project that earns decent royalties. Ever.

This is the reality. It's not pretty, but it's true.

Popularity may sell art, but popularity doesn’t make art.

Social media use/public participation is often both ineffective and an energy drain.

You’ll be pushed to discuss difficult things in public spaces, but when you go out on a limb there will be someone behind you sawing it off.

Hard done by narratives are common. Narratives of being ripped off, narratives of being abused, narratives of being overlooked.

Some people can make that narrative pay. Most people can’t.

Why?

Because EVERYONE has a hard done by narrative.

If you reveal anything personally or professionally painful in a public space, the worst thing that ever happened to you will never be more than an anecdote to many who read of it.

Once your narrative is out there, anyone - and I mean anyone - can exploit it in whatever way they see fit.

Combating a false narrative about you is not simply a matter of getting a lawyer and suing.

You have no idea how hard that really is.

People will claim they care about you when all they want to do is exploit your narrative for their own ends.

If you’re the sort of person who just loves attention, well, go for it. You can get attention easily. Some people crave attention more than they crave money. More than they crave being good at something.

Social currency is currency.

But it’s not money.

The attention economy is about making money for tech companies, not you. And if you’re willing to feed it for that attention fix, enjoy your cornucopia of memememe.

But if you want to make good art, know that most public performance return on attention is not good attention.

Public performance eats art.

True. 

Fame doesn't rub off.

Also True.

Fame doesn’t always pay the bills.

Too True.

This industry doesn't owe you a living, and it doesn't pay you to dwell on the past.

Very True.

Most of the people in this industry are garage bands wondering why they're not the Rolling Stones.

So Very Very True.

Don’t get into comics to get rich. Don’t get into comics for fame. Don’t get into comics for any reason except to make comics.

Fame and money are never a guarantee in the arts, no matter who you are or what you create.

Making your comic is about the truth of your love for the art.

Not about fame. Not about money.

If the audience comes, then yay.

If the audience doesn’t come, you made a comic.

And that’s the hard truth that makes you stronger.