There is a feeling that the big two are just a holding pen for their movie properties. So why should they care about the quality of comics which might make them chump change as compared to the movies?

I don't think Diamond and the retailers take as much as 75% of the gross income.  Mark Waid said about 5 years ago that a non-premier publisher takes 40-45% of the cover price and the biggest publishers probably take more.  Maybe Marvel and DC's profit per copy is about your $1 per copy after the cost of printing is deducted.
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I think a lot of the artists of yesteryear that were top draftsman would be able to adapt if you plucked them at the height of their powers and dropped them in today's world with their skillset. Here is Neal Adams' work on Batman Odyssey from a few years ago. I think Neal has lost some magic with time, but this still looks better than 90% of what I've seen on the market myself.



I guess it depends on what you like, but I was always a fan of guys like Buscema, Adams, Garcia-Lopez, and others who were top draftsman with clear influences from other aspects of art that weren't just comic books. Maybe that is why I'm not the biggest Kirby fan (but he does have a great imagination). I like the idealized anatomy on heroes, and well-constructed backgrounds, even if they were minimal back in the day. I think a lot of today's artists are still cut from the same cloth. David Finch, Jim Lee, Jason Fabok, Ivan Reis, and Steve Epting all know how to find that perfect balance between idealization for superhero comics. Their stuff looks real, while still being within that heightened reality of dynamism.

Most shops pay half cover for the book. Diamond pays quarter cover. The price doubles at each level. Bigger retailers such as TFAW, Midtown, Lonestar, with huge accounts, might bet a better deal form Diamond, but your typical shop is paying half cover plus shipping for the books.So the break down is that your retailer pays $2 for the $3.99 title that Diamond bought for $1. I did the ordering and inventory tracking for a small shop from 2012 to 2014 and had to be aware of how many unsold copies of each issue we ordered we had because of the low margins. The margins are less on trades, t-shirts, toys & games (in the area of costing average retailers 60-70% of msrp, again bigger accounts buying larger volumes because they have national mail order outlets get larger discounts-and preferential treatment on reorders and books that are allocated or shorted). Digital obviously has different breakdowns because they don't have the monopoly of Diamond being the middle man the way print does. But Diamond always gets its money because of the non-returnable status and they charge half of cover to most shops. And Diamond is not going to take anything less than doubling their money, so their not paying publishers more than $1 if they are only getting $2 on a $3.99 book.

-M

Depends..more are sold via the book trade outside Diamond than through Diamond. Book Scan tracks some of the sales in the book trade, not all, and there is no standard deal for book distributors as there is through Diamond. When I was ordering for the shop, I could buy trades for myself off Amazon for less than the store paid Diamond for the same book, so there was no way the comic shop could even come close to competing with Amazon prices, as deals for volume affected per unit prices, and it's very hard to figure out what percentages the publishers are getting of msrp on trades unless you know the specifics of each deal with a different distributor.

But for Marvel and DC, the writers and artists are probably seeing very little of the revenue, as creator costs are paid out of floppy sales and very few sell well enough in floppies to activate royalty incentives which traditionally are based on achieving certain sales levels before they kick in. Sales of trades of creator owned material is going to differ in percentages to publishers than corporate owned properties. Vertigo contracts that carry creator participation agreements will be different than either. For Marvel and DC, they get more of the revenue of trade sales than floppy sales because very little, if any of that revenue is going to the creators.

-M

Credit to MRP and for everything said above.

RE the economics of comics, this topic is broader than merely how it applies to ‘the Big 4’. Before the 1990’s Boom-then-Bust, if a penciller or inker was earning less than “KFC minimum wage money’ on the page rate, the royalties could over-compensate for that. Moreover, other ‘significant deal structures’, such as Dringenberg had set-in-place for him by Gaiman, where Dringenberg would get a piece of the pie for issues featuring characters he co-designed with Neil even if he didn’t draw/ink the issues himself, meant that Dringenberg basically was able to kick-back after 1995 or so. The actual page rates meant nothing to him, in the long-and-short of it all.

But after ’The Bust’, for the most part, the royalties which could pay your rent, cover hospital bills, in conjunction with juicy deal-structures RE co-creatorship evaporated.

All an artist could rely upon was the page rate. But then people, mainly wannabe writers, often with some pokey-arse media degree, couldn’t be bothered to realise nor accept this reality, after the advent of blogging and instagram and the advent of the Narcissism Economy, and couldn’t get their frontal lobes in gear enough to realise that aside from the page rate offered by the Big 3 - Marvel, DC and Dark Horse - there is no reason for an artist to go ‘all in’ , ala the Poker Term, for any reason.

Aside from Creative freedoms. Which were, to artists, a true and PALPABLE incentive.

This often applied to folks working at Warren, in the Warren salad-days. Many freelancers have said that Warren paid peanuts, but they also stated that, as artists, they enjoyed far greater creative freedoms and licenses to experiment, no matter what the writer said (and it’s yet to be established how many wonderful Warren stories were ‘Marvel Method’ or “DC Scripted down to minutia’ method).

The money may have been less, but they didn’t have someone like Shooter, taking a visionary artist like Esteban Maroto, and forcing him to do ##@!!!!-arse ‘storyboards’ with no finesse.

When royalties, or a high page rate against royalties, are on the table, the artist has an incentive to eschew that creativity, to ‘dumb it down’ for the Shooters. Without the high page rates or royalties, you have no incentive, and no reason for any artist to provide marketable/competitive work for a jumped up Napoleon. Shooter was not a Napoleon because he PAID, and paid well.

Yet, ‘publishers’ on many sites, trawling for artists for their so-called ‘new’ projects, turn out to be hacks with greater control issues than Shooter, without the writing-credentials of Shooter, demanding more of the artists than Shooter, offering $20 per PENCILLED AND INKED PAGE, from ‘OCD” scripts, which aren’t even original. Grrrrrrrr! Which didn’t change until they had their a$$es handed to them, and now they begrudgingly offer $50 per page or more (still far to little for pages which will need 9-16 man-hours to complete). Worse-yet, offering no clear definitions of royalties or back-end monies. And as stated above, royalties these days are a non-concern for most artists starting out, for reasons respected and salient CCB members have already stated.

And here’s the ‘comics in today’s market’ point:

these pathetic wannabes, and even boutique publishers, have NO excuse for offering less $ to an artist than an artist would get for selling burgers or video-games or earphones or used cars.

Because of crowd funding.

They can ask for what money is required to get a high class/top-shelf comic at any second of any minute of any hour of any day of the week.

But they almost never bother too, because ‘Wahhhhh, that takes an hour out of my day to set up that crowd funding account and campaign, wahhhhhhhhhhhhh’.

While these dips - - ts refuse to even acknowledge that ONE PAGE of art which can make their ‘so called dream come true’ takes over ten times as long.

So those dips - - ts can get $$@@$!!’d. Which they HAVE been. by reality.

Since less than 5% of these dips - - ts , over the course of more than a decade, have any gotten anywhere by asking the artists to carry the weight for them, without offering the artists anything but poverty, while the respectful people, crowd funding responsibly and asking for the minimum an artist needs, have been wildly successful.

As said by others above, you get what you pay for.

And in todays market, especially after the Image guys ruined the game by forcing Diamond to demand 4 or more issues ready-to-be-printed, 4x24 pages plus cover is a BIG commitment, in terms of time and physical labour, which the Silver Age guys could do, IF fiduciary incentive was offered, but most Gen Y’s can’t (or won’t) do that many pages per day.

It makes the Manga recompense-for-the-artist-system look great by comparison. Which was ‘Image’ before ‘Image existed’, as I learned in ’89 when I was invited to ‘go Manga for Nippon’ and leave Western Comics.

But the guarantees weren’t there, so I declined.

Now Manga has more guarantees than Western Comics.

Ha Ha Ha. Ho Ho Ho. Hee Hee Hee. To quote the Harlequin of Crime.

THanks Wild, there's no way the creators are making any money at those Prices.