“You know, fuck it #ComicsBrokeMe trend time.”
38-year-old cartoonist Ian McGinty (adventure time, bee and kitten) on June 8, graphic novelist and designer Shivana Sookdeo taken to twitter Join the choir of comics industry professionals praising their beloved colleagues. However, as noted in his tweet, the conversation soon took a life of its own as industry novices and veterans alike began to grumble about the working conditions that colleagues estimate contributed to McGinty’s demise. Stories of long hours, frequent burnout, and chronic illness were filed under the hashtag. #ComicsBrokeMeilluminates for the wider public just how dangerous the comic book industry has become.
Indeed, when I asked Sookdeo why he created the hashtag, he said he did it to expose personal stories of labor exploitation by people in the industry. Still, this is not a new conversation. For those unfamiliar with the comics industry’s baseball, every few years a hashtag or a major exploitation story will emerge from the various networks of whispers and back channels among creators. In 2020, for example, writer LL McKinney created the hashtag #PublishingPaidMe to expose racial disparities in wages in the publishing industry. Sookdeo knew that the next conversation had to be about people themselves.
“Unlike #PublishingPaidMe, the focus was not just on the monetary cost of creating comics and comics, but also on the physical cost to our health,” he says. “The act of creating hundreds of well-illustrated pages takes a lot of time, significant physical exertion, and mental toughness. Many of us have suffered serious damage to our health while trying to make ends meet.”
Cartoonists have to be industrious out of sheer necessity. Projects rarely pay enough to meet their needs unless they undertake several projects at once, which has become an industry norm. According to Sookdeo, even ignoring the rare case of untimely death, countless people have suffered conditions such as permanent nerve damage, tendonitis, intense sleep deprivation and back injury to deliver their books on time.
“It was no secret that Ian was constantly overworked. He was always on a deadline, [and] she was under tremendous pressure to make ends meet,” says illustrator Katy Farina (Babysitters Little Sister). “The sheer output that came out of his hands was almost illogical. I believe his senseless loss is the intended result of an industry built on the continued devaluation of his labor and disregard for his workers.”
Farina has drawn nine books of more than 150 pages since 2018 and sees haunting similarities between her workload and that of the late McGinty. In five years—while working a full-time job—she says she’s done a whole career worth of work at the expense of her body, mind, and personal relationships. The torment crippled him; Farina had to stop working altogether in the foreseeable future to recover from surgeries to treat nerve damage in both of her arms.
“I knew from the very beginning it would be tough physically, but the stability of having a long-term job and an increasingly rare chance at making backend leftovers have tilted the scale,” he says. “I thought I chose to trade my time and effort, but eventually lost my personality for it.”
Why would I agree to work under such pressure and under such cruel conditions? The answer is that you usually have no other choice. A few of the professionals I spoke to noted that the industry uses youth and passion to thwart negotiations to adapt to better wages or timelines. There’s no room for compromise when discussing a company’s profitability, and book publishers’ content plans don’t take the well-being of their creators into account. Sookdeo noted that exploitation has been incorporated into the comics business on an international scale, and historically weaponizing media love for artists to force them to accept starvation wages against extremist programs. A culture of quiet pain is emerging, with high worker turnover rates and machine-like conditions as an industry standard.
“You think you’re lucky to be here, but if you don’t push too hard, you’ll lose your spot,” author Dave Scheidt says.Mayor Good Boy, Star Wars Adventures) explains. He says he contributed the hashtag #ComicsBrokeMe to support other creators’ stories and help others against the fear of being blacklisted for speaking out.
But the culture of exploitation doesn’t start with middle managers in broadcast companies. Unrealistic working standards are transmitted from the C-suite, which often uses editorial staff as messengers. Inside twitter series As of June 11, former DC editor-turned-writer Kwanza Osajyefo explained that while he was raising rates for high-profile writers to $10,000 per issue, he had to lie to creators to get them to work with below-average page rates. When asked this question, Osajyefo explained that he felt he had no choice as editorial salaries also remained stagnant.
“I was once told to lie to a well-known freelance author, another well-known freelance author in the book got a lower rate even though it was wrong,” he said. “This creator walked halfway through and I don’t blame them, but I was blamed.” He also affirmed that the practice of vile artists and writers comes from the top, and exorbitant rates for famous creators are taken from the salaries of the less well-known. However, even those lucky enough to get decent pay and work from a “Big Two” (Marvel and DC Comics) publisher are still working below minimum wage, with no healthcare, benefits, royalties, or rights to product, film, or TV adaptations. .
“To put it lavishly, we have a misunderstanding of publishers knowing what is physically possible from their artists and desperate to jump on a train. This has created a time constraint mixed with the desire to keep costs low as businesses usually want to, and publishers are not paying artists enough to meet the demands of their work,” says graphic writer Cathy G. Johnson. novelist, educator, and host of the comics-focused podcast Drawing a Dialogue. As people overcome pay inequalities and comics workers are beginning to understand their strength as a collective, the current moment in the industry, including #ComicsBrokeMe, acknowledges that it is a special one.
One of these collectives gaining momentum is the Cooperative of Cartoonists. Made up of more than 60 core members, the cooperative explores ways to address structural problems in the comics industry, from lack of living wages and health benefits to protecting cartoonists from exploitative contracts and neglected marketing campaigns. Yet their biggest challenge is the difficulty of forming a labor union. According to the National Labor Relations Act in the US, when comic book writers and artists are viewed as independent contractors, they cannot join unions.
“Unions are more popular than ever, but there are a lot of workers who are forbidden to form unions in the comics,” explains Joan Zahra Dark, an organizer of the cooperative.
The Cooperative of Cartoonists is just one organization, but part of a growing movement to legislate change in an industry cracking under a culture of exploitation, devaluation, chronic illness and injury. It shouldn’t take the death of a coworker to justify fair treatment for all workers who risk their physical and emotional health to tell stories. Making comics shouldn’t cost that much.