Go, Look: The Village Voice On Comics Moneymaking

There's an article here that's from the Village Voice comics issue on the amount of money that people make in comics. It's a really fun piece because it's so dogged, and a lot of people 'fess up as to the actual money they take home. The article is also spot on in pointing out that different aspects of cartooning have always been a struggle, including Jules Feiffer's argument he's made a number of times in past pieces that the difference between his generation and that of his children is that it was a lot easier to live on the cheap while building a career. You should read it.

There are cartoonists that make money, of course. (Here's a Facebook thread featuring a couple of successful ones launching that complaint.) I also think a longer piece on the issue might have made more clear the necessary distinction (and perhaps made a stronger point overall in doing so) that while things have always been tough in certain segments, there are good careers in comics that just aren't there anymore or have been greatly diminished in very straight-forward ways: holding pay rates to a certain point while all the other human costs go up, making decisions based on company market share that reduce opportunities for individual artists, keeping financial arrangements going according to yesterday's standards as opposed to today's when it comes to sales forces and institutional costs. And so on. There have long been people doing Xeroxed mini-comics with no expectation for pay; the person doing a nationally syndicated comic strip as a stepping stone rather than a final destination, that's the new thing. It also occurs to me that a newer, well-paying career in comics is to be a lawyer that sits on the board of a company that pays dividends according to the profits from ancillary products and movie deals. They always seem to be able to find money for those people.

The article is brave enough to admit that many of the contributors to the issue in which the article appears aren't being paid anything, but fails to question the number of complicated economic ideas involved with the fact that the cartoonists have agreed to do it for "exposure." It's not as straight-forward as that declaration suggests. After all, it's possible to be exposed and garner a big, fat paycheck, and no one would choose exposure a la carte given an option. If such an issue is worth doing, isn't it worth paying for? The truth is that all the structural impediments and cultural developments that make it that much harder for many types of cartoonists to make a living at what they do than it was for them a generation or two ago should make us that much more ruthlessly question every avenue in which comics appear where people seem to be garnering contributions to their living except the cartoonists involved. And if it's simply not possible for creative people to be paid, maybe we should reconsider asking them to do stuff for us.
 
posted 8:00 am PST | Permalink
 

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