Making It As A Comic Artist For Marvel/DC Feels Impossible

With Marvel and DC now making up roughly 70% of all entertainment, it might seem like the best possible time to become a comic book artist and help yourself to some of the spoils of the comic book boom. Who knows, with some talent, hard work, and luck, you might make it big enough that one day Chris Evans will play a butt you drew.

Marvel Comics

“How hard can it be? Some of these guys don’t even know how to draw feet.”

Comic book artists know: In their industry, you’d have an easier time becoming Spider-Man than making a living off drawing him. Despite comic books supporting several multi-billion dollar industries these days, almost none of that money goes back to the artists putting the ink on paper. Industry rates haven’t risen by a single cent in the past 20 years — and it was already crap to begin with on every level. This has made comic book artists the most underpaid artists by a wide margin, their talents being vastly more appreciated in other commercially artistic fields like advertising, animation, or crouching in an alley spray-painting howling wolves on the side of panel vans.

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Sure, but making comics has to be so much more fun, right? Wrong. Because you’re so underpaid, artists have to work themselves to death (sometimes literally) to make ends meet. According to veteran Brian Churilla, the expected yearly output just to be able to call yourself a professional is 12 issues, 264 pages, and 4 covers. Making a living drawing spandex boils down to roughly a 50-60 hour workweek every single week of the year, with the closest you’ll get to a vacation is drawing Colossus in daisy dukes for a beach issue. 

Marvel Comics

Excelsi-ulcer!

As such, comic artists often have to self-inflict crunch at AAA game studio levels of toxicity, causing many to work in a constant state of isolation and burnout. Speaking of toxicity, despite having to huddle behind a massive drawing board or tablet every waking hour, comic book artists are also forced to be public figures to promote their work. This leaves these minimum wage workers incredibly vulnerable to mass harassment by some of the shittiest fan bases on the internet (who don’t know how to make fancams). And since you’re a forever freelancer, corporate overlord Marvel won’t blink to replace you with another cheap body if you stir up any kind of controversy by, for example, having a personality.

Not that you’ll have time to develop one of those, anyway.