Not a Trick! Not an Imaginary Tale! The History of Comic Book Payments

Abstract

"Not a Trick! Not an Imaginary Tale! The History of Comic Book Payments" tells the story of the American comic book's development in regards to payment of creative artists and writers. Reading a wide base of comics, as well as interviews and scholarly studies of the comic book medium, the conclusion reached is the comic book industry is in a sort of feedback loop. Creators are not taken seriously, so their work is devalued. The work is devalued, and so creators are devalued. The origin of this can be found in how comics creators are paid even now. Starting from the publication of Superman to the founding in Image Comics over 50 years later, the source of revenue of comics evolved, and today takes two forms: freelance work where creators owned nothing to a situation similar to self-publishing, where the creators own everything. The conclusion is that there must be more acknowledgement of creators in a freelance system, alongside more payment in both systems. While the future of the industry, and its ability to reform, does not appear to have a strong movement, the case for creators to be paid differently and better is worth pursuing from a political, artistic, and moral standpoint.