Marvel & DC are ‘breaking’ comics creators, but some are fighting back

In a landscape where movies based on comic books rake in billions of dollars, there’s an assumption that anyone in the comic book business is making tons of money. In reality, American comics have been built since its inception on exploitation.

Some of these stories are now well-known. DC Comics bought the rights to Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s Superman for $130 in 1938, leading to decades of legal battles. Legends like Jack Kirby and Spider-Man co-creator Steve Ditko struggled until their deaths for credit and appropriate payment for their creations, which built Marvel’s multimedia empire.

By 2023, these fights are not limited to comic books. From mainstream publishing to independent creators, the entire industry is going through a huge change. After the death at 38 of Ian McGinty, comics artist, the conversation was brought to the forefront. In an obituary soon afterward, McGinty’s family said he died “of natural causes,” but his passing had already sparked a discussion of overwork. The cartoon was created by Shivana Sookdeo. #ComicsBrokeMeTag is a platform that allows people to tell their stories of heartbreaking situations in the workplace, including poor wages and treatment.

As a member of the comics and publishing community, Sookdeo told Polygon that the volume of responses didn’t surprise her. “I knew it was kind of just under the water like an iceberg. I don’t think anyone can be prepared for something to go that far, but I suspected.”

Struggling creators, however, are very aware that they can’t rely on the industry to fix itself. “At the end of the day, we’re dealing with corporations who only care about maximizing profits,” cartoonist Sloane Leong told Polygon over email. “Human dignity isn’t a factor for them.”

Polygon interviewed many comic creators for this piece, and they all agreed that taking matters into your own hands is the only way forward.

“From the outside, I imagine that comics appears to be a lucrative field to be in,” cartoonist Zach Hazard Vaupen tells Polygon. “It’s become the basis for a lot of our media. They’re everywhere! But the reality is that it’s one of the most difficult creative fields to make a living in.”

Polygon’s research bears that out, in some informal polling of fans standing in comic book signing lines at San Diego Comic-Con 2023. We spoke with many fans who assumed comics writers were paid salaries, including full benefits. Asking how much these creators would make in one year, most fans said between $75,000 to $100,000. And those fans even thought that “wasn’t very much” for Big Two creators who write and draw characters like Batman and Superman.

Many creators have signed off their rights to intellectual property for minimal payments years before Marvel or DC films ever hit the big screen. But Hollywood corporations — Marvel has been a part of Disney since 2009, and DC has been affiliated with Warner Bros. since 1969 — have made it possible to expand on the advantages of those contracts by orders of magnitude greater than what was possible for Marvel or DC alone.

The clash of corporations and comics creator titans over comic book rights contracts is often traced to 1978, when the release of Richard Donner’s film SupermanJerry Robinson, Neal Adams and others fought publicly for the writers Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster in order to receive fair compensation for their work on Man of Steel. Adams and Robinson were both integral to the fight for comic creators. Adams was the force behind the early attempts at unionizing comics by the Comics Creators Guild in the 1970s.

Marvel Comics created new contracts with more details asking for the creators’ consent to signing away their rights. The change in U.S. Copyright Law was the inspiration behind this effort. Adams was horrified, and organized a meeting in which some of comics’ biggest names — including himself, Steve Ditko, Jim Starlin, Archie Goodwin, Chris Claremont, Walt Simonson, Frank Miller, and Paul Levitz — came together to work out a way forward, leading them to suggest minimum page rates and guidelines for the industry.

Mike Sekowsky/DC Comics

Many reasons led to the Comics Creators Guild not being fully established, or even recognized as a labor union. Stan Lee was one of those who refused to become a member until after the Comics Creators Guild had been established. Despite that, comics creators still share the guild’s proposed rates today as proof of what people should be making — and in many cases still aren’t, even in 2023.

“Pay is the most pressing issue,” Leong says. “The average advance for a graphic novel [around $30,000]The situation needs to improve dramatically. Publishers are currently offering advances in exchange for royalties. This is the same deal as with prose. It is the difference that prose writers bring their finished manuscripts to publishers, while graphic novels must be developed from conception to completion. This process takes on average 2 years. 30k over 2 years is 15k a year which is the federal poverty level.”

As Joan Zahra Dark, an artist, explains, unionizing comics is a long-standing conversation within the industry. However, it’s been difficult to make happen for one main reason. “When comic writers and artists are considered independent contractors, they’re also considered ineligible to join unions, at least according to the National Labor Relations Act here in the US,” they say. “And those challenges to organizing, in no small part, lead to further issues of pay disparity, racial and gender inequality, and lack of benefits that are crucial to a better industry for everyone in it.”

Although there have been some attempts, comics workers still try to come together. In recent years, full-time production workers — such as editors, office workers, and graphic designers — at both Image Comics and Seven Seas Entertainment have organized to form unions within their companies. But, as Dark points out, “they’re opposed at every step.”

The issue of pay is more than just financial stability. Pay should also reflect the actual physical cost involved in producing monthly comics. “We’re seeing cartoonists dropping dead or getting very ill from overwork,” Dark says.

Zach Hazard Vaupen’s answer to this urgency, as it was for Jerry Robinson and Neal Adams decades earlier, is solidarity. Vaupen, along with Nero Villagallos O’Reilly, Reimena Yee, Joan Zahra Dark, and Aaron Losty, founded the Cartoonists Cooperative in 2023. The organization’s aim is “to form a type of union that gives us some power in changing this industry to be more friendly to the people actually making the comics,” Vaupen says. “We want to be able to influence the way that publishers interact with their artists and maybe even act like we actually matter in the equation of comics! With the co-op, we’re at least making sure that creators don’t have to look out for themselves for the foreseeable future — we’re looking out for each other.”

The Cartoonist Cooperative’s long-term goals include “establishing industry-wide rates that meet the costs-of-living for all comics workers, having a team that handles grievances on behalf of our members, and regularly supporting our marginalized cartoonists,” according to Vaupen.

He adds, “We also want to establish an organization that allows for an exchange of skills, industry information, and other resources between cartoonists and comics-makers.” The group’s leaders have begun doing just that via a private Discord and invite-only forums, where they have 700 members. “Of course, a platform alone doesn’t make a community,” Leong says. “That only exists when we have stakes in each other’s well-being.”

Jim McLauchlin, who co-founded Hero Initiative in 2000, has invested in the work of other artists. McLauchlin was inspired by Major League Baseball’s Baseball Assistance Team, a program that supports people involved with the sport. After McLauchlin made the move from baseball journalism into the comics industry, he wondered aloud on the lack of unions in the industry before someone finally told him, “You fucking do it!” So he did, creating the Hero Initiative, which offers financial assistance to comic book creators both active and retired, for anything from car repairs to medical bills.

The Hero Initiative’s existence is directly connected to the industry’s lack of a safety net. As comic book writers and artists are freelance contract workers, they don’t get benefits such as health insurance or pension plans. So when Bill Mantlo — the co-creator of Rocket Racoon, star of the billion-dollar Guardians of the Galaxy franchise — was severely injured in a hit-and-run accident in 1992, his family and later the Hero Initiative worked to pay for his care. Marvel Studios was forced to settle with Mantlo in 2017, after a public uproar. The settlement covered many of Mantlo’s expenses. That reality is relatively unknown to the fans who watch the films, but it’s a day-to-day truth for people within the industry, making surviving an illness or injury as a comics creator incredibly challenging.

To McLauchlin, though, the Hero Initiative isn’t just representative of problems in the comics industry, but instead is a symptom of the wider issues that our society creates. “People need people. People need to help people,” McLauchlin tells Polygon. “Life can be nasty. In short, capitalism is a sharp, edgy instrument and it doesn’t come with many guard rails. This is why I think the Hero Initiative will be needed. Here is the human race. What we do is human. This is what we should do.”

This people-first mindset is behind the move from traditional publishers to a model which pays creators fairly, respects their time and crafts. Jamila Rowser, the founder of Black Josei Press founded it in 2018. She wanted to create an environment that celebrated comics created by and for marginalized people from different genders and sexualities. Within five years the company became a model for how comics should be published, offering inclusive titles and fair payment.

“My goal with Black Josei Press was to keep it out of the red and make it sustainable and pay for the next comic,” Rowser says. This meant that she would have to pay for the advance herself. She says that she was “lucky enough” to have a well-paying job at the time that allowed her to do just that. Rowser paid Robyn Smith an advance for the pair’s award-winning minicomic, Wash DayThe story was expanded to a comic book. Wash Day Diaries, The book won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in 2023 and also an Ignatz Award. Rowser has a simple yet radical rule for the artists that she hires: “Don’t put your pen to anything until you have money in your account.”

Even an independent publishing house rarely gives out advances. For comparison’s sake, the most well-known American publisher that allows creators to keep ownership of their stories and IP, Image Comics, generally doesn’t give advances. Instead, creators earn money after a comic has broken even — meaning that they are essentially making the comic and doing the labor for free. Even when working on licensed comics the artists and writers often do not get paid until their first drafts are delivered.

Rowser was determined to end these exploitative and outdated traditions. “One of the beauties of owning your own press is you can run it however you want,” she says. “So I’m very anti-capitalist. I want to make sure that these people are paid their fair rate and if I can’t afford it then I work with somebody else.”

All the comic creators that we talked to aim for a system that is able to take full advantage of capitalism. McLauchlin’s support of certain creators has changed since he became inspired by programs for guaranteed income in Stockton (California) and St. Paul (Minnesota). Tom Zuko, a prominent DC colorist in the 1980s and ’90s who “has literally colored everything from Scooby-Doo to Hellblazer,” says McLauchlin, was one person greatly affected by this new approach.

“Tom has some blood and circulatory issues, and they can be very hard on him and knock him flat on his ass for 30 or 60 or 90 days at a time,” McLauchlin says. “Every now and then something would pop up with Tom and there would be an emergency, and we’d effectively have to put a $5,000 bandaid on Tom.”

After thinking about the success of Stockton’s program and how he could introduce that idea into the Hero Initiative, McLauchlin worked out that Zuko needed, on average, around $800 a month to take care of himself. So McLauchlin went to the group’s disbursement committee and put forward a radical idea: putting Tom on a monthly stipend, rather than waiting for his life to implode.

McLauchlin recognized the importance of guaranteed incomes. “It removed so much stress from [Tom’s] life,” he says. “That made him happier, that made him more productive, that led to other benefits in his life. His health has improved, although I would like to say that it’s 100%. It removes daily stress from his life and once you start addressing some of those concerns, be they mental well-being, be they financial — and those two can be very closely related — it really had legitimate physical wellness benefits for him.”

Rowser also agrees with the idea that an universal basic salary would change comic book creators’ lives. She was preparing for the Medicare system and losing her health insurance when we first spoke with her. “I’m concerned because I have medication that I can’t just not take, I have to taper off of it or I get seizures and scary symptoms. So there’s that fear of like, Okay, I have to make sure I transition to this new insurance in a way that won’t affect my health and the medication I take, let alone the doctors. Am I able to get this prescription? Can I afford them if I don’t have insurance? No, I’m sure I can’t.”

Comics creators face new existential challenges. “We’re seeing in real time how companies will take every chance they can get to replace their creative talent with AI,” Dark says, referencing the recent WGA and SAG-AFTRA contract negotiations that, among many things, have focused on regulating the use of artificial intelligence in the creation of new works. Leong agrees, saying, “We need to protect ourselves from Large Language Model transformers like ChatGPT and other image generators which is just another way to underpay workers.”

How can artists protect themselves against the many exploitative and old practices? “I believe the only way to change this is by collectively pressuring publishers by withholding our labor to raise their rates on both the creative and editorial side and force them to be transparent in their business practices,” Leong says.

In the face of almost a century of mistreatment and exploitation, comics creators are still fighting to make art that they love in a way that’s sustainable and maybe even one day equitable. Whether reimagining publishing, creating a safety net from nothing, or building a community that will serve artists both new and old, there’s hope for the industry. But it doesn’t come from the work-for-hire system, intellectual property rights, or the corporations that uphold them; it comes from the creators themselves.