Posted in: Comics, Comics Publishers, Current News, Marvel Comics | Tagged: Jen Bartel, she-hulk

Why Jen Bartel Stopped Drawing She-Hulk Covers For Marvel Comics

Why Jen Bartel Stopped Drawing She-Hulk Covers For Marvel Comics... and what else is going down with artists and contracts right now.

Yesterday, Bleeding Cool picked up on a mini-Twitter storm regarding comic book artist Jen Bartel having an issue with her Marvel Comics work being sold digitally for premium internet bucks as a Marvel Snap card without any payment. Bartel has continued to speak out about this and related issues on social media.

Alek82 asked "Hi, you stopped doing covers for Sensational She-Hulk after issue 7. Is that perhaps somewhat related or not at all?" An unanswered question on Reddit asked the same five months ago. "Does anyone know what's going on with Jen Bartel? She's one of my favorite cover artists but recently she hasn't been putting out anything. Her Power Girl cover, which had an incomplete preview on my LCS's website, was cancelled. Her cover for Sensation She-Hulk #8 is not out and she's not doing the main cover on #9 despite doing all of them for both this and the adjectiveless series up until this point. I was just wondering if anyone had heard anything. I hope everything is okay."

Jen Bartel's work on the series is well regarded but did indeed suddenly come to a halt. She had won two Eisner Awards for best Cover Artist and was nominated for two more, including for her work on She-Hulk. She replied "The very few times I asked for even a small a pay raise over a 4 year period the answer was no. What would you do if your employer never gave you even a modest salary bump in nearly half a decade?"

Dave Rapoza, who has drawn covers for Spider-Man Noir, Spider-Verse and Secret Wars, added, "Same for me." Jen Bartel continued to provide more details, and some asked for them. Others criticized her for signing such a contract with Marvel and then complaining about it.

"Just FYI I signed the contract all artists are made to sign before I had ever done a single cover for a major publisher way back in 2015 and was never allowed to renegotiate the terms in any capacity. This is the standard, awards and recognition did not give me negotiating power.

"Trust me, regardless of how much or how little I got paid, I'm still very grateful for the opportunities I've had in my career. But I'm done towing this line publicly and pretending like I didn't have to accept an unfair level of exploitation just like every other working artist.

"We have to accept sh-tty deals knowing full well that they're bad, bc the alternative is no deal at all. That reflects a gross imbalance of power between corporations and workers; industry standards can only be changed by shining a light on this.

"pretty much all of the in-house employees at these kinds of companies, from editors to designers, are *also* criminally underpaid and overworked. (Not to mention under-appreciated and under-credited)

"It doesn't diminish my or anyone else's situation to acknowledge that corporate greed and regulatory cowardice keeps 99% of us under the same boot. Workers of the world unite

"I need ppl to understand that while many of us would love to unionize, we legally cannot bc we are classified as independent contractors (by design) by every major corporation that hires us. The best we could do is a guild, but we aren't localized to one state or even one country

"In contract terms, it's about usage rights and licensing fees on different product formats. Before I worked in comics, I was a product and packaging designer who handled licensed art. Some art we could use only on ceramics like plates and bowls, others on textiles like pillows. If we wanted to use a piece of art that we only had a textile license for on a new ceramic collection, we had to go back to the artist and negotiate new terms. There were also limits on usage timelines (usually 1, 2, and 5 year licenses). In physical goods, this is the standard. What's especially frustrating about current contracts is that many new media/digital use cases (such as popular mobile trading card games) is that those apps didn't even *exist* when a lot of us signed our original artist contracts and they were never allowed to be revisited."

She also noted "I'm sorry my Twitter has turned into a Libertarian Fighting Machine over the past 24 hours but man, they're just so incredibly stupid"

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