Insight | The comics business
or maybe two if they’re working all hours.
Yet the writer might walk away with many
times what the artist has earned.
HUMAN RESOURCES
Disney has owned Marvel Comics since
2009, and some fear that comic artists
could soon be like animators: faceless
workstation fodder, toiling away, low paid
and unknown to the audience.
“I hope eventually the idea that characters
are all that matter in this genre will fall by the
wayside and publishers will realise it’s the
people that make these funny books that
count and who are the backbone of any
creative company. A resource to be grown
and nurtured, not exploited,” says Dennis.
With all the reboots we’ve seen from
Marvel and DC, and with indie comics
thriving one minute and diving the next, it’s
hard to tell whether comic industry bosses
really know what’s going on. Online and
print publishing models continue to shift.
Yet huge amounts of money are coming
in from superhero films at the moment.
Let’s hope more of it will be wisely invested- in the comic artists who give life to the
superheroes in the first place.
Tim Gibson took a
year out from his
usual freelancing to
create Moth City, the
online comic.Dennis Calero helped Marvel reinvent the
X-Men as a group of sociopaths hunted by
detectives, in X-Men Noir: Mark of Cain.Below: Dennis Calero
drew four chapters of
the free online comic
Devil Inside, written by
actor Todd Stashwick.Above and left:
Paul Dialynas used
shifts in colour palettes
to help pace the
storytelling in The
Woods from
Boom! Studios.