The Daily Cross Hatch kicks off a multi-part interview with Evan Dorkin, who talks about his animation work and how the pay compares to working in comics:
It depends on who you are and what you’re doing. We definitely don’t make as much in animation as Jim Lee or Frank Miller make in comics or Dan Clowes or a certain amount of people who have a following in small press. To be honest, the most money I’d probably be making is if I was getting more regular work at Mad. That’s where you get the highest return, if you want to look at it that way. Again, we don’t have anybody representing us in any of our work. You don’t need it in comics.
I get work at places like Mad and Nickelodeon. I get calls from people who must’ve read my stuff when I was prolific, doing a lot of issues of Milk & Cheese and Dork, and doing a lot of stuff in anthologies, back when they were more…I guess “mainstream” alternative anthologies that I was involved in. Now it’s usually a collective of people and they’re all friends, and kind of exclusionary, kind of like Mome—or however you pronounce it. I’m not qualified to be in those kinds of things.
There are a few things I’d like to do, but I tend to go where the wind blows me in my career, which has not been working so great recently. With a child you have certain responsibilities, and now we have to buy our own health insurance, for the first time—well, before we didn’t have insurance. So it’s tough to do fun comics that make $142.
