#comicsbrokeme
A few days ago, it was reported that 38-year-old comics artist Ian McGinty had died. I am totally unfamiliar with McGinty and his work, although apparently he was well-loved and his death prompted some soul-searching among comics creators. On twitter, this period of reflection was attached to a hastag: #ComicsBrokeMe. Most of the complaints are about how hard the work is for so little pay, along with some first person accounts of being treated like shit by an exploitative industry.
Here are a few of the tweets:
Most of the complaints seem to be around overwork and underpay.
I’ve known David Lasky since I lived in Seattle, so at 30 years, even though I haven’t seen him face to face in a long time. The book is The Carter Family: Don’t Forget This Song, and his co-author was Frank Young (another co-worker at Fantagraphics Books back in the day).
Andrew Farago is a writer and curator of of San Francisco’s Cartoon Art Museum.
It was important for Tom Heintjes to pipe in, because in some ways this feels like a story about conditions now. But comics has always been terrible, even for well-established and successful creators like Denny O’Neil,
Choosing comics as a career is like breaking into Aushwitz.
There are comics fans so loyal to their corporate overlords that they will defend AT&T (owner of DC Comics) and Disney (owner of Marvel Comics) when they screw artists and writers. Even Marvel and DC’s greatest creators were royally screwed. I gave a talk called Comixploitation! at Alabama Song about how Jack Kirby (who created most of the Marvel universe) and Joe Schuster and Jerry Siegel (the creators of Superman) were utterly screwed.
I include Anya Davidson’s post because it points to a possible solution. In Houston, I know a lot of artists who keep themselves clothed and fed based on the local universities and community colleges. In a way, that’s the difference between comics and say, fine arts or classical music—even though for most of the artists working in those two fields, there is now way to make a living from your work. But because these are, as Will Self described them in his book Why Read, “conservatory forms” they have a penumbra of ways to support practitioners—schools that may hire them to teach, grants (public and private), and the noblesse oblige that guarantees their art is supported by the rich and powerful. Comics, being a gutter art form, doesn’t have this.
And as a medium highly dependant on sales, comics has been declining since World War II. Before then, literally millions of Americans read comics every single day.
Evan Dorkin wrote some sympathetic #comicsbrokeme tweets, even though he has been relatively successful. Included was this piece of art.
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