On the Hero by Night Fiasco
by Joey Manley
Signing a Work for Hire contract for your own original creation is like getting a new credit card. It feels like easy money until it doesn’t.
Commercially developing your own creation without giving up ownership of it it is like opening up a savings account. It’s a slow, sometimes agonizing, process, and will probably never amount to much money at all. But it’s always there.
I’m not a comics creator, but I make websites, which are creations of a sort, and I’ve had the opportunity to do both of the above in the past few years. I’ve actually done something completely different — giving up some of my ownership to Josh, first, then collectively giving up a smaller amount of ownership to some investors, in hopes that, with all of those resources combined, we can accomplish more than any of us could alone. I am confident it will work out, but nothing is guaranteed.
The business of comics is hard. The business of anything is hard. Anybody who tells you that they have the perfect answer to making a living in comics, or in webcomics, is fooling themselves, or lying to you. Personally, I figure that most of the publishers who have gotten into trouble over the years are more in the “fooling themselves” camp than otherwise. You’ve got to assume that the most money-minded of the money-minded scumbags are less likely to get into the comics industry than they are to go into, say, the drug-dealing industry, or the oil industry, or whatever. Comics hasn’t been known for minting very many billionaires in the past few decades — so why would the sleaziest of the sleazy even bother? Anti-publisher rhetoric notwithstanding, almost anybody working in the comics industry in any capacity could probably be making a lot more money doing something else — anything else. For this reason, I tend to give everybody in comics the benefit of a doubt.
There are exceptions.
And that’s pretty much all I have to say about this.
