Been thinking about what to say. Figured art would say it better. See you Star-man. Thanks for the music 

goddamn nerd

Sadly most of my fieldwork fails are not really funny (they’re all like “got dengue fever lol”) but I did get shat on by a howler monkey once.

And then in another instance I wound up covered in termites.

Hardest I have laughed in days.

why do i love this so much

that’s some Miyazaki shit right there

someone tell me if I got the kanji right cause I dunno

So a few people have pointed to Kieron’s excellent post on the economics of Image comic titles, in relation to us having to put UMBRAL on hiatus.

Some have mentioned Kieron’s point that even if WicDiv’s single issue sales were bad (which they most certainly aren’t), the sales of collections (aka “trades”) would more than make up for it, and asked why the same wasn’t true of UMBRAL.

Well, it was. And that was entirely the problem.

Not only were UMBRAL’s single issue sales low after the first year, but we didn’t sell enough trades to make up for it. I actually stated that in the post, but perhaps I didn’t make it clear enough. So, in Kieron’s spirit of openness, here are some numbers:

UMBRAL #1 sold 16,500. By issue #6, we were down to 6,300. That’s quite a drop, but in terms of percentages it’s actually entirely normal for comics. We even have an industry term for it: “standard attrition”. Any comic that actually increases its sales from month to month is rare and wondrous.

So 6k isn’t great, and nobody’s really making any money with those numbers. In fact, Chris and I were already working for free, at that point. After paying our colorist and letterer, there was nothing left for us.

But that was OK. We knew some people were “trade waiting” the book, and if trade sales were strong, they’d make up for it.

They weren’t. Despite buying ads, taking out sponsorships, and doing as much PR as humanly possible, UMBRAL vol 1 sold around 3,500 copies in its first month. A respectable number, but nowhere near enough to turn a profit and make up for low issue sales.

Maybe we should have thrown in the towel at that point. But we didn’t, because Chris and I were enjoying telling Rascal’s story, and having a great time just working together again. So we carried on, still hoping things might pick up, and maybe the release of vol 1 would give the single issues a boost.

Nope. Issue #7 sold 5,000.

Still we soldiered on, hoping good word of mouth would keep sales of Vol 1 turning over. Readers kept telling us how much they loved UMBRAL. Page 45, a single small store in England, sold 200+ copies of Vol 1 in the first two months. Surely, if we just kept going, we could turn things around.

But by issue #12, sales were down to 3,400. And then Vol 2 sold just 1,600 copies in its first month.

*sad trombone*

Three final things, make of them what you will:

1. Digital made no meaningful difference. Even #1, our best-selling digital issue, only sold a few hundred on Comixology.

2. We often heard from readers frustrated that their store wasn’t stocking issues of UMBRAL, and in some cases didn’t even fulfil pull list orders for them.

3. When we made the hiatus announcement, one anonymous message boarder said, “This makes me sad! UMBRAL was the first book I torrented every month!”

It’s absolutely true that single issue sales don’t matter as much for indie books, if you’re selling lots of trades. But it’s also true that you have to sell lots of trades. Sadly, UMBRAL did neither.

Once again, thank you to everyone who bought UMBRAL, whether in issues, digital, trades, whatever. Every sale made us feel we were doing something good. Alas, there just weren’t enough of you.

Onward and upward,

- Antony 22 Jun 2015

(I Feel I should add a quick coda, so people don’t make wrong assumptions: I’ve been making creator-owned comics for my entire career, more than 15 years. The above is normal, and expected. I’m just explaining things here for the benefit of readers who aren’t familiar with industry insider stuff like this.)

To save you clicking through, the answer is “No.” 

The slightly longer answer is “While I generally object to jumping on a singular writer when talking about a larger issue which I see all over industry commentary columns, if you think that you can look at  WicDiv’s sales and think they’re in any way in trouble, you have no business writing an industry commentary column. You simply don’t know enough to be doing this, and in doing so, you are hurting people’s perspective of the industry.”

Jamie and I eye-rolled when we saw the above article, but realised it may be a good opportunity to talk about this stuff, as it happens a lot, for a lot of books. I meant to write it back in may, but I got distracted by working myself to death. However, I appear to have a few minutes spare, and as there’s a lot of comics economics talk going around in the last few days, it strikes me as a good time to throw this into the mix.

In August 2006, the month that our first issue of Phonogram launched, the Walking Dead’s sales figures were estimated at 20,501.

I can tell you, this wasn’t a failure or a cause of concern. Every single creator envied Kirkman and Allard. 

In the same month, Invincible’s sales were estimated as 13,584. 

Maybe that was a cause for concern? It’s basically 2/3rds of Walking Dead. It’s well beneath the line Marvel would cancel a book.

No, it wasn’t a cause for concern. Almost every Image Creator would have also killed for those numbers.

Walking Dead then wasn’t what Walking Dead is now, but it was still the book which set the conversation in terms of what Indie books were capable of. That Kirkman had his name on two books with that level of success made him the go-to example of how to indie comics. 

No, I don’t mean “hey, you get to do your own thing and make some money.” I mean “you are doing financially better than you would by doing a WFH book for the big two.”

I’ll give you some really basic rule of thumbs for indie comic commentary:

Anything selling stably over 10k in single issues is a cause for celebration and joy. The creators are almost certainly extremely happy.

If you’re selling over (ooh) 12k, you’re probably making more than either of the big two would pay you, unless you’re one of the very biggest names.

If you’re selling anything near 20k, you probably have to buy drinks for your friends.

And in a real way, if Phonogram settled around 6k back in 2006, I suspect Jamie and I would have settled into doing it for another 40 or 50 issues.

There’s all manner of exceptions to the above, but if you look at the charts and bear that in mind, you’ll be closer to how the industry looks at those numbers.

None of the above includes digital sales. 

None of the above include trades. You throw trades in, and you change everything entirely. A cursory look at hit indie comic numbers reveals that their trades sell much more than Marvel/DC main universe trades, with a few exceptions (There’s a reason why Matt and David’s Hawkeye was such a big thing, and it wasn’t its monthly sales). Let’s bold another sentence.

You cannot do an industry commentary column on indie books without including  the impact of trades.

There are books that are selling well beneath 10k and are doing just fine.

All the three sentences I bolded in a block were about making  money from the single issues. They do not include any other revenue source, such as trades. If the single issues break even and you make your money in trades, that’s also fine. With a few exceptions, big two comics primarily make their money in single issues. That is one reason why their single issue sales matter so much more.

There’s other reasons why single issue sales need to be higher…

All those factors interacting are amongst the reasons why the bar is higher for a monthly audience at the big two.

Equally, it would be a mistake to confuse the audience of a book with its monthly sales. As said above, you would have to include a trades for that, and the trades are not a small thing. 

On a personal level, we’ve sold over 50,000 copies of the first WicDiv Trade. Last I looked at Amazon’s stats we were selling about 1000 a month via book shops alone (i.e. not including comic shops, which is usually more.) The orders for 12 were 22k. The initial orders of the second trade are up 33% on the first trade. Realistically, we were hoping to stabilise at around 13k, and we’d have been enormously happy with that, even if we weren’t selling trades. Which we are. WicDiv is a ludicrous success, by far the biggest thing in our entire career. And thanks to everyone’s support in achieving that. 

The idea that there’s articles being written which try and frame discussion of indie comics like this - and it’s an approach which is picked up by comment threads - is entirely counter to the reality of the comics industry. 

Skull Violin by Jeff Stratton 

Attn: directordanic

I will shelve my distaste for electric violins to play Danse Macabre on the Dia de los Muertos one.

Love this.

Waffles: i’m just reading about how this Egyptologist came across jars full of honey so naturally they started eating it

Me: haha science!

Waffles: then one of the party remarked on a hair in the honey he was dipping bread in they found more hair and pulled on it and ‘the body of a small child appeared, in good state of preservation, with all limbs intact and well dressed, with ornaments’

Me: GOOD LORD

Waffles: it is not recorded if any of the party ever ate anything ever again

Me: bluagh guahg so it was a child in a big jar of honey?  they were really going at it? not just tasting huh

Waffles: yeah they must have been really nomming it

Me: the messed up adventures of winnie the pooh

OH BOTHER

I AM SLAIN

when I was studying Greek I would get frustrated and annoyed because often, at the beginning of a sentence or clause – or just scattered haphazardly throughout – there would be three or four “particles” with no specific meaning. the literal translation might be “so thus and”, but of course you couldn’t put that down. they were just placeholder words, colloquial linguistic padding.

now, of course, I realize that I start sentences with “okay but like”.

you can sing the praises of the Greeks all you want, but the fact is, Plato wrote with all the elegance and grace of an off-the-cuff tumblr post.

my professor literally told us to think of all the “ἤ̂ δ᾽ ὅς”es in the Symposium as “so then he was like”

Day 25 Favorite Monster Girl. Nagas. Who knew they’d be so fun to draw? Especially with their colors. Also I really like doing the henna designs.

This is so cute and the pose is so deeply relatable that I immediately said, out loud, “They’re NOT FOR YOU, they’re for the PTA meeting!” and my husband nodded sagely and said “That stands for People That are Anacondas” and now I can’t stop laughing.

Who created Caitlin Snow on #TheFlash? According to @DCComics, nobody

Who created Caitlin Snow, the alter ego of Firestorm super-villain Killer Frost, who appears regularly on The Flash?

According to DC Entertainment, nobody.

That’s right. Caitlin Snow, the brilliant scientist working for Harrison Wells, fiancée of Ronnie Raymond and friend of Barry Allen, aka The Flash, sprang fully formed into existence without a creator or creators.

But that’s okay, because, by the logic employed by DC Entertainment, nobody created Barry Allen either.

Let me explain. See if you can follow me here.

As I’ve described elsewhere (http://comicsequity.blogspot.com), many years ago DC Comics established the first program to provide comic book creators with a share in the revenues generated by their creations in other media. This concept became known as “creator equity participation” and it was a small but significant step toward compensating creators for their work beyond a simple page rate. For me, personally, it’s been moderately lucrative (thank you, Bruce Timm, for putting Killer Croc in the animated Batman) but in recent years it’s also become an increasingly frustrating and, lately, infuriating process.

The reason, I believe, is the shift of corporate culture at DC Comics that occurred around the time Paul Levitz left his position as publisher.

As a comic book creator himself, Paul displayed a protective empathy for creators. Once the creator equity concept became policy, Paul applied it liberally and proactively– often notifying writers and artists their creations were due to receive equity participation when creators would otherwise have no idea. For thirty plus years, under Paul, creators were valued and supported as equity partners. (We can argue about the level of support, whether the percentage creators received was commensurate with their contributions, but we can’t deny that the support was there, and it was consistent.)

All of that changed when Paul left, and DC Comics became, officially, DC Entertainment, a fully subsumed cog in the Warners Entertainment wheel.

I first learned how this change would effect DC’s approach to creators equity when I received a letter from DC Entertainment’s new president, Diane Nelson, informing me I would no longer receive equity payments for Power Girl because she was now considered a “derivative” character. To soften the blow and show “appreciation” for my “contribution” she enclosed a check for $1000.

Thank you, Diane.

The next thing I learned about DC Entertainment’s new approach to their comic creators equity program was just as distressing, given how many characters I created for DC over the decade-plus I wrote for the company: if I wanted to receive an equity participation contract for a character I created, I had to request one, in writing, for each character, before that character appeared in another media, because DC would refuse to make equity payments retroactively.

By a rough guesstimate, I probably created over five hundred characters for DC between 1969 and 1985. Most of them were minor one-shot creations, and some of them, like Felicity Smoak (now a regular on Arrow) were minor supporting characters who’ve taken on a new life in other media. Unless I’m willing to commit a large chunk of my life to tracking down each character and filing a separate equity request in anticipation that somehow, some day, one of these characters might end up on a TV show, I risk being cut off from any share in the fruits DC enjoys from the product of my labor. A share which DC acknowledges I’m due– but which DC refuses to assist me in receiving.

Thank you, DC.

But now we come to the catch-22 of DC’s new approach to creator equity agreements. Assuming I perform my due diligence (which should really be DC’s due diligence) and dig up references to characters I’ve created that might soon be appearing in other media (maybe as a chess piece, or a Heroclix figure, or a recurring character on The Flash), and assuming I file the necessary request form in a timely fashion– DC can still decide, unilaterally, that my creation is “derivative” and they don’t owe me a dime.

What, exactly, is DC’s definition of a “derivative” character?

It’s a character that DC decides was “derived” from some other previously existing character.

For example, Power Girl– “derived” from Superman, because, like Supergirl, she’s a relative of Superman. Which means I can’t claim to be her co-creator because Superman is a pre-existing character. Fair enough, I suppose. The logic here is that Superman is the original creation, so Power Girl is derived from that original creation, so in effect, Power Girl is an extension of Superman, which means, by this tortured logic, that Power Girl was more or less created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster.

Uh, no.

This was the tortured logic National Periodical Publications tried to use back in the 1940s when Siegel and Shuster sued National for the rights to Superboy. National (the company that preceded DC) argued that Superman was the original creation, which Siegel and Shuster sold to National, and that Superboy was just a “derivative” creation. A court-appointed legal referee found that Superboy was in fact a unique creation and that National was guilty of copyright infringement. Sadly for Siegel and Shuster (and for creators everywhere), legal expenses forced the creators to sell National the rights to Superboy in a consent decree that obscured this fundamental finding. But the finding is pretty clear:

Characters “derived” from other characters are legally unique, and DC’s claim that “derivation” deprives creators of any equity participation rights in those characters is nothing more than an immoral, unethical, deceitful and despicable money grab.

Yet, it gets worse.

Let’s say DC agrees you created a character, like, for example, Killer Frost. In your original creation, Killer Frost had a secret identity named Crystal Frost. Later, a “new” Killer Frost is created for the New 52, and this new Killer Frost has a secret identity named Caitlin Snow.

You’ll be pleased to hear (I hope) that DC agrees I and Al Milgrom are the co-creators of all manifestations of “Killer Frost.” We are also considered the co-creators of Crystal Frost. And, of course, by the twisted logic that credits Power Girl as a derivation of Superman, Al and I must also be the creators of Killer Frost’s New 52 secret identity, Caitlin Snow.

Right?

No. We’re not. And DC insists we are not. And I agree with DC.

Caitlin Snow was created by Sterling Gates and Derlis Santacruz.

Except, according to DC Entertainment, she wasn’t. Because she was “derived” from the original creation of Killer Frost.

Which means Al Milgrom and I created her.

Except, according to DC Entertainment, we didn’t.

Nobody created her.

Or, rather, nobody gets credit and creator equity participation for creating her.

And that, my friends, is truly obnoxious and despicable.

DC Entertainment has created a marvelous catch-22 that allows them to cheat creators by using both sides of an argument to serve DC’s interests.

According to DC, Sterling Gates and Derlis Santacruz didn’t create Caitlin Snow. Don Newton and I didn’t create Jason Todd. Ric Estrada and I didn’t create Power Girl. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster didn’t create Superboy. Bob Kanigher and Carmine Infantino didn’t create Barry Allen.

These characters just appeared out of nowhere.

But the money for their exploitation goes directly into DC’s bank account.

I am having a day of reading about the industries associated with the art forms I love treating the creators of said art just fucking terribly.

Happy hump day, people.

To the writers...

I’ve got some bad news, writers.  In comics, the artist works harder than we do.  On a simple one to one basis, they just plain work harder.  A writer can easily write a script a week (or at least, should be able to.) An artist has to spend an entire month on the art.  That’s a 1:4 ratio.  That means that when there’s money to be had, the artist deserves to be paid first.  You, as a writer, can take other jobs.  You can have a day job and still do your job.  An artist, delivering on a monthly book, 99.9% of the time, can’t.  It might be ‘your idea’ and you might have spent ‘months researching it’ but, this is a collaborative art.  It’s a partnership.  You and your artist are married, but, as unequal partners.  You can sleep around with other artist, they’re stuck only with you.  

And. They. Should. Be. Paid. For. That. Loyalty.

I’ve heard a few stories from a few friends who are in situations where there’s an advance or a page rate and the writer takes 50% leaving the artist with their ‘fair’ share, which is not enough money to actually live on AND execute the project.  I was shocked BOTH times, but I suppose I shouldn’t be.  

Everyone THINKS they work hard.  Hell, I think I work hard. I’m writing 5 creator owned series, a work for hire comic series, plus working on a tv show and a cartoon series.  And y’know what? I still have more free time than any of my collaborators.  

Should everyone profit from the collaboration, absolutely, but, advances and page rates those are not profits. Those are costs.  Those are the hard costs of the sacrifice your partners are making in order to complete the project.  Do I wish I could get paid up front for my creator owned work? Absolutely.  But you know what I prefer?  My partners making a living wage that allows them to actually MAKE THE BOOKS. 

Caveat, obviously, every situation is different, and in full disclosure, on one of my books, there is no page rate, and the profits are minimal, and the artist and I split that money 50/50, but it’s by agreement, not by greed.  Y’see, we’ve always treated each other fairly, so when we saw what the financial outlook of the book is we had a conversation about it.  I didn’t just decide to take that money.  

Long story short. Don’t be an asshole. Appreciate that your partners are undoubtedly working as hard, more likely, harder than you are, and give them the support and love they deserve. 

This.

In every creator-owned series I’ve done, from THE LIBERTY PROJECT to THE AUTUMNLANDS, the artists get paid more up front (in THE LIBERTY PROJECT’s case, this meant splitting a $50 per-page advance between writer, penciler, inker and colorist (letterer was paid separately), I forget whether I got $9 or $7/page; in the case of SHOCKROCKETS and the first run of ASTRO CITY, everybody got a pro-level page rate but me, since I was paying out of my own pocket), and they get a larger share of publishing royalties. I try to make sure it’s proportionately commensurate with what we’d see at Marvel or DC (without the company raking off the lion’s share for itself, hopefully), because that’s the kind of deal I’m competing with.

It’s not hard to argue that the writing and art are equally important to the success of the project, but it’s undeniable that artists, in general, do more work. If you can draw a page a day, that’s good professional speed. If you only write a page a day, get outta town. There’s no way the two should pay the same.

[Also: Whenever I can manage it on a creator-owned book, letterers and colorists get a royalty share too. Everyone contributes, everyone benefits.]

amazing

look i have to bring this back because i want you all to take a moment to imagine being the guy who messed up his line so badly people are still laughing 2000 years in the future at your mistake

This.

What me teaching looks like to former student Ricardo Lima. With directordanic on keyboards. Yes, there was a sword.

There was indeed.

A comma splice walks into a bar, it has a drink and then leaves.

A question mark walks into a bar?

Two quotation marks “Walk into” a bar.

A gerund and an infinitive walk into a bar, drinking to drink.

The bar was walked into by a passive voice.

Three intransitive verbs walk into a bar. They sit. They drink. They leave.

THANKS FOR TEACHING ME THINGS THAT ENGLISH CLASS HAS FAILED TO ACKNOWLEDGE

More, please.

Korrasami is canon. You can celebrate it, embrace it, accept it, get over it, or whatever you feel the need to do, but there is no denying it. That is the official story. We received some wonderful press in the wake of the series finale at the end of last week, and just about every piece I read...

FUCK yes.

Creators, take note: if ever you are called upon to justify a creative decision you have made, this is *exactly* how you do it: with deference to the story and your fellow creators, with respect to the limitations imposed upon you, with clarity about your creative process and how you approached those limitations, and with acknowledgement of where you could still have done better. If you can do it with this kind of eloquence, courtesy and attentiveness to your fans, then you officially win at life.

I will be printing this out and taping it to my bathroom mirror.