Digital Comic Museum
General Category => Comic Related Discussion => Topic started by: INCspot613 on February 21, 2013, 11:53:42 AM
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I have two quick questions as research for a story I'm working on, and I'm hoping you guys can help me out:
1) How much did the average comic book artist make? (Someone who worked on a book like The Black Terror, Daredevil, or The Shield, as opposed to Superman or Batman).
2) Are there any reprints of letters written to comic book artists and writers out there? Do any of the comics on this site have reprints of them?
Thanks!
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Reportedly Siegel and Shuster got $130 for the original 13 page Superman story. That's total -- not each.
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Thanks. What about after that? Were they paid for subsequent stories by the page or by the story? (Or both?)
I'm looking for an average monthly or annual salary, if that helps clarify. (I'm trying to figure out how much a particular character, who's a comic book artist, would be making. Obviously not big bucks, but decent living wage? Just enough to scrape by?)
Thanks!
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I have no hard data, but I've read that with the exception of EC (see below) cartooning was nearly a starvation job. There's the tale of one creator who physically dangled his publisher out an open skyscraper window until he was paid. Good artists also worked as advertising illustrators. Exceptional guys like Jack Davis made a good living supplementing their comics work with magazine covers and film posters, etc. But 'success' for cartoonists often meant getting a newspaper-strip syndication deal.
Ah, EC -- I've read that Bill Gaines had a policy of paying writers and artists quite well. (Only a few of them had to drink themselves to death.) But of course he kept possession of their work, and made a fortune repackaging and reselling it. All those MAD paperbacks? Pure gold! And since Al Feldstein had an ownership stake in the extremely profitable ED/MAD line, he was the world's richest editor. Yes, it was much better to work for Gaines than to slave-away in one of the cartoon factories.
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A quick web search sort of confirmed it, but not solidly enough that I'd present the link, but I remember reading that Siegel and Shuster got the top page rate at DC, so ten bucks per complete page would be the target. No such thing as a salary, as far as I know. Did anybody have an actual full-time comic-creation job?
As Chaard points out, comic work was "slumming," hustling for a few bucks until the "real" work in advertising was available. With a glut of out of work artists on Madison Avenue, though, that wasn't a particularly good bet, either.
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This topic is covered by different artists in many issues of Alter-Ego but I couldn't point to specifics, sorry.
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Page rate is mentioned in this excerpt from the Great Comic Book Heroes by Jules Feiffer:
http://forbushman.blogspot.ca/2012/07/part-3-all-comics-are-junk-great-comic.html
"Artists sat lumped in crowded rooms, knocking it out for the page rate. Penciling, inking, lettering in the balloons for $10 a page, sometime less; working from yellow type scripts which on the left described the action, on the right gave the dialogue."
a bit later on, Jim Aparo was being paid:
http://twomorrows.com/comicbookartist/articles/09aparo.html
CBA: Do you remember what you got paid when you started at Charlton?
Jim: I don't remember. I think it was about $15 a page for everything. I could be wrong. I might have been $20 or $25, but that was a lot of work for little money. But don't forget: Money was worth more back in the '60s.
http://www.wtv-zone.com/silverager/interviews/giordano.shtml
Prof: You brought some talent with you to DC from Charlton. Was it difficult to persuade Jim Aparo, for example?
DG: Why would it be? Jim's DC page rate would be more than double his Charlton page rate. He would be working for the biggest and arguably the best publisher in the business and working on iconic characters, of which Charlton had none. His working routine would not change...he could still work at home and send the work in by mail and he would be paid weekly. This was also true of everyone who came with me, to one degree or another.
However, in this interview, the rates appear a bit different:
http://www.bizarrowuxtry.com/2012_01_01_archive.html
It occurred to me that, while Mr. Aparo sadly can no longer be reached for comment without resort to a Ouija board, I might be able to inquire of the still-very-much-with-us Mr. Stiles, and he very graciously responded thusly:
Lemme tell yuh, doing that piece was indeed a lot of fun writing-wise, and it did get published -- in an issue of a black-and-white Charlton publication entitled Teen Tunes and Pin-Ups! What rights had to be secured and whether they actually were or not I have no idea, but the story was part of a contest! I had to hide the names of various Monkees songs in the dialogue of the story and the readers as contestants had to count those up and send in the number of them, whereupon there would be a drawing from those who got the number right so that some sort of prize could be awarded! It wasn't exactly easy hiding all those song titles in there, yet as I recall I got paid the usual Charlton writer's page rate of four bucks a page; in other words, eight dollars for the whole deal!! Hey, I was young and innocent, and didn't mind that at all!
That's all the Google machine spit out, but try your own combinations of "comic page rate", etc.
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This is all excellent info. Thanks, everyone!
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A comic book costs around 30 times as much now as then. So a comparable page rate might be considered at 3-4hundred a page today. What does an average artist make per page now? Compared to minimum wage of around a dollar an hour in the sixties they could make a workers wage at one page a day. They did not have benefits but medical care was also far less back then.
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Interestingly enough some of the guys drawing Black Terror in the early 1940s were on salary, and worked a regular 8 hour day in the office, as did most of those that worked at the studio-shops, and most famously Timely-Atlas up to 1950.
As to how good an income, I figure it like this folks like Dan Gordon, Otto Feuer, and Graham Place left being animation directors and animators in circa 1945/6 to become fulltime comic book artists, returning to the animation field in circa 1954-1956 (Gordon moved elsewhere much earlier). this suggets that comics' pay wasn't that far off the animation payfield.
the best rates were at the early days at Ziff-Davis, or at least that's why many of the contributors say they started working there.
Mad in the 1960s - 1970s was the best rates of the silver age.
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Taling about 1950s' Atlas Comics:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_Comics_(1950s)
Don Heck, who worked as at Atlas staff artist from 1954 until the company's retrenchment in 1957 before returning the following year. recalled that the 1958 page rate "was around $20 per page to pencil and ink, I think [rival comic-book publisher] DC's average was $38. It didn't pick up until 1964-65, and even then it didn't go up all that much — a couple of bucks a page."
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C.C. Beck told Will Eisner in an interview in Will Eisners Quarterly that he stopped working on the Captain marvel revival i the 70's because he got quite a lot less per page than he did at Fawcett doing the same caracter.
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I've always understood that Beck walked away because of dissatisfaction with DC's handling of the character. I have a friend who corresponded with Beck. I'm sure he still has the letters but he just moved to Florida so I don't know how easily accessible they are.
Not that I doubt the Eisner article but I suspect that both factors were at work. I have a hard time believing that Beck actually got less per page in 1973 than in 1953.
He was art director at Fawcett and run a studio that produced most of the artwork on the Marvel books, and commercial art as well. (Captain Tootsie, anyone.) When talking about his pay he might be, without even realizing, be comparing the multiple sources of income from Fawcett with his page rate only at DC.
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I won't claim to know DC's payment policy when I was busy being a fetus, but given that the SHAZAM! title probably wasn't a huge seller and had licensing fees to cover, and the jump in inflation over those twenty years wasn't huge...I could at least imagine it being close.
As a random point of comparison, when I started teaching (as an adjunct) in the late '90s out of school, I was told that the adjunct rate hadn't increased in at least five years (when our IT guy, who was a PhD student and taught a few years prior), and it was ten years before I got an increase. That period has roughly the same inflation.
So, thinking analogously and adding costs (and a need to watch quarterly profits for the Warner Communications mothership), I could see it being a (small) pay cut.
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(are you angling for a pay raise here John?)
Ok, we will double your salary starting on our Anniversary - March 28.
But you have to start bringing in donuts for the staff meetings. Deal?
;) ;D
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I considered a "but I'm not bitter" aside, actually.
For years, though, people didn't understand what I meant by "if I was teaching for the money, I'd be in deep trouble." But the change in overseers doubled the rate a few years back, so it's vaguely plausible. Or would be, if they weren't closing the campus.
(Yes. While the rest of the world is trying to pressure kids to go into science and engineering, we're actively reducing capacity. Genius!)
I do like donuts, though...
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My first published comic book scripting in 1986 I got $25 a page. Recently did two entire series for $30 and right now I'm doing a pair of stories for $35 so I'm not exactly keeping up with inflation. (Of course, I'm not exactly working at DC or Marvel.)
It's certainly possible that Beck was making pretty damn close to his Fawcett rates of 20 years earlier. And when you take away the perks of his position at Fawcett...and add his dislike for DC's take on the character...
Honestly, having read some letters by CC...I think he would have done Cap practically for free if he was happy with the stories.
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I have looked up the intreview I was talking about, it is "Shop Talk" in Kitchen Sink's Will Eisner's Spirit Magazine no. 41, not Will Eisner Quarterly.
Acording to Beck, he got $50 per page from when he started on his own in 1940, and at DC he got $65 per page in 72/73 that included pencils, inks, and lettering.
The issue is from 1983, and according to Beck he had been contacted the week before, about getting back into comics, and he had demanded $500 per page, and full control of the scripts, and that scared them away.
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$50 a page in 1940? Wow...that sounds really high for 1940 comics rates, especially since Captain Marvel wouldn't have really caught fire yet. Of course CC would know better what he was paid than I would. The $65 in 1973 sounds about right.
Of course, rates didn't climb steadily over the years. For much of the 1950s rates were lower than they had been several years earlier. I don't think rates at Marvel reached rough parity with DC till the 1970s, and if I'm not mistaken DC rates are still a bit better than Marvel.
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This article was just linked to in the CGC Forum; I have not read it yet but supposedly it is a correspondence between creators and their boss and payments are discussed
http://thecomicsdetective.blogspot.ca/2013/01/sincerely-yours-busy.html
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Not that I doubt the Eisner article but I suspect that both factors were at work.
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Let's go beyond what a creator was paid. What were the economics of Golden Age comics? What was a typical total cost of producing a comic? And, how many issues would a publisher need to sell to avoid going broke? "Total cost" includes office and staff costs, staff or freelance creators, printing, distribution, returns, the whole enchilada. Revenues include subscriptions, sales, ads, etc. Break-even would obviously differ amongst publishers, but some patterns should emerge. Does anyone here know of any studies of comics economics?
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Although geared towards modern comics, there might be something buried in this page:
http://www.comicsalliance.com/2011/08/26/minimum-wage-price-of-comics/
I vaguely recall recently reading a DC comic talking about their then price change to 30 cents (!), and I think they said they get about a third of the cover price.
There's also this:
http://www.comichron.com/
Let's go beyond what a creator was paid. What were the economics of Golden Age comics? What was a typical total cost of producing a comic? And, how many issues would a publisher need to sell to avoid going broke? "Total cost" includes office and staff costs, staff or freelance creators, printing, distribution, returns, the whole enchilada. Revenues include subscriptions, sales, ads, etc. Break-even would obviously differ amongst publishers, but some patterns should emerge. Does anyone here know of any studies of comics economics?
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@Roy: Thanks! That ComicsAlliance article is MOST fascinating, and yes, I could probably dig out some of the economic info I asked about. The Comichron site looks a bit harder to deal with, and doesn't seem to relate to Golden Age at all, but maybe I just haven't looking deeply enough.
Anyway, the ComicsAlliance article makes a telling argument: comics sales are 'way down because prices are 'way high, compared to minimum wage. Maybe prices are high due to production costs of boutique products. But producers can't grow markets with high prices. Nor with gimmicks like the new JLA #1 having 50 DIFFERENT COVERS! Me mind boggles.
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I was flipping through my copy of Superhero Comics of the Golden Age: The Illustrated History by Mike Benton and came across some info related to this thread.
Fox Publishing
"Kirby was paid a "fifteen-dollar-a-week salary".
Editor-in-chief Joe Simon got "eighty-five dollars per week".
Binder Studio
Paid artists between "75 cents and $1.25 per page". However this was an assembly line process with different artists handling different aspects of the production process: "roughs, pencils (background, secondary figures, and main figures), inking (background, secondary figures, and main figures), and lettering." for "a cost of eight dollars a page."
Writer Otto Binder got "two dollars a page in 1939. By 1941, he was up to three dollars a page".
Fawcett
Before they started publishing comics CC Beck land an illustrator job "He was paid a salary of fifty-five dollars every two weeks to do the jobs of two artists he replaced".
Funnies, Incorporated
Writer Mickey Spillane was paid "almost as much money as the artists". (I couldn't see a rate for the artists, though.)
General
Writer Otto Binder recalled page rates shooting up through the war to a standard "ten dollars a page." ("The Golden Rut". ;) )
Writer William Woolfolk was the highest paid writer in the 1940s "I made $15,000 a year when people were making $1,000." Of course he liked to work for four different publishers at any given time.
Woolfolk also recalled that right before the war ended comics "were selling 102 percent; that is, they were selling beyond the spoilage rate."
Newsweek estimated that in 1943 comic sales "added up close to $30,000,000."
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Thanks for the info SS!
:)
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Found some more information, same book.
Pre-Superman, Major Nicholson-wheeler paid Siegel and Shuster "$5 a page".
Siegel recalls Famous Funnies was paying "something like $5 a page".
Before Batman, Bob Kane "was making between thirty and fifty dollars a week".
Writer Frank Gruber "wrote western comic scripts for Chesler at $1.50 per page".
Lou Fine "joined the Eisner-Iger comic shop at a starting salary of ten dollars per week" and later Busy Arnold hired Fine for "three times his current salary."
(Whether that was still $10 a week, or more, wasn't specified.)
The Eisner-Iger shop "were selling pages at five and seven dollars each (with a net profit of $1.50)".
Which leaves the expenses for each page at $3.50 to $5.50 a page (hmm, paper, pencils, pens, writers, artists, letterers... yikes!)
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Really interesting thread