Jim Shooter gets to the nitty and the gritty of working in the comic book industry by sharing Marvel Comics contracts from 2002. Never mind the interesting language to ensure that everyone knows that Marvel owns everything (“TALENT acknowledges that the Materials may be derivative of preexisting material including, without limitation, the names, pictorial and literary representations of fictional characters, companies, places and things… that MARVEL owns or otherwise has rights in the Preexisting Material; and TALENT would be unable to produce the Materials without the Preexisting Materials,” it says at one point), the truly surprising thing about one of the contracts is that it’s in Comic Sans. Of all the typefaces available, you’d think that a comic company would know better…
Equally interesting reading from the same post: A memo from DC Comics this past May changing its reprint royalty policy, essentially asking creators to take less money than was originally offered in a pre-trade paperback world.
September 20th, 2011 at 2:14 pm
On that DC document changing the royalty rates, I find it interested who gets what kind of royalties:
Periodical Format: 2.0% for writer, 1.5% for penciler, 1.0% for inker.
Archive Editions: 2.0% for writer, 1.2% for penciler, 0.8% for inker.
Book Format Collected Edition: 3.2% for writer, 2.4% for penciler, 1.6% for inkers.
Writers pump out like 80 comics a month, but an artist puts a lot more work into crafting a comic, and seems to get screwed.
September 20th, 2011 at 2:17 pm
Does anyone know what kind of royalties writers and artists used to get? Like what kind of royalty rate would Chris Claremont have gotten back in the 80′s on X-Men?
September 20th, 2011 at 6:39 pm
I remember stories of, “Draw an issue of Punisher, buy a car.”
September 20th, 2011 at 8:50 pm
I think one of the reason’s now that art is returned to the artist and inker’s is that they can sell that for cash maybe?
does seem unfair that penciler get’s less then te writer inker I kinda understand.
September 24th, 2011 at 11:26 pm
This would probably vary depending on the status of the creator, right? I would assume established named like Grant Morrison or Bryan Hitch would be getting a bigger slice of the pie compared to someone who’s just breaking into the big league.
September 25th, 2011 at 3:38 am
I’m shocked! They were actually using Comic Sans in official documents!