Thread by @mrmarkmillar

I don't have any skin in this game as I've worked elsewhere for a long time, but I've got a lot of pals at Marvel and DC & hate to see them struggling like this. I offer this advice in good faith in a bid to help super-charge both freelance deals & the corporations themselves...

It's crass to talk money, but it's also shocking that the people writing and drawing the top books are earning a FRACTION of what my peers and I earned on those titles 15 years ago. I made $1,000 a page plus royalties, but I'm hearing from guys on $90 a page and that's criminal.

Now the comic market has collapsed in the past 5 years and these companies have less money to pay staff and freelancers, but what I'm proposing is really simple economics and could massively help them both get in the black again. Are you ready?

They don't have the money at the moment to jack up their page rates, but it would cost them literally zero if they revolutionised their royalty deals. For example, right now both companies typically pay around 2% royalty on all sales over, broadly speaking, 50,000 sales.

Given that just a handful of Marvel and DC books sell over 50,000 copies a month this means almost no royalties are paid out. The number is almost abstract and as sales decline this seems to be a race to the bottom in terms of talent they can afford.

My suggestion is that if ONE of these companies swaps that 2% royalty for a FIFTY-FIFTY split with the creative team on all sales over, say, 60,000 copies they will send a bolt of electricity through the industry and bring in the most commercial freelancers in the biz again.

A creator can make decent money on even a modestly selling creator owned book, but it would be absolutely dwarfed by a 50% split on X-Men or Spider-Man with sales taken into the stratosphere. They could make literally millions per year again for both both company and talent.

The beauty of this is that it would cost the Big 2 nothing as it's zero fiscal outlay upfront. The double-win is that they're getting 50% of a potentially HUGE number instead of a spiral to the depths where they are right now.

Freelancers, of course, would be delighted as their earning potential would spike overnight and as the companies balance the books again they could start to invest in proper page rate and much-needed new talent.

As is, I think the direct market is a couple of years away from complete collapse. American-made comics are 9% of the American market, which is insane. It needs radical surgery to fix it and this would cost nothing.

All the indie companies are hurting because nobody's coming in for Marvel or DC books anymore. Every day we hear about more stores closing. Whoever does this first will have a talent migration like the industry has never seen. Who will get there first, Marvel or DC?