Posted in: Comics, Comics Publishers, Current News, DC Comics, Image, Marvel Comics | Tagged: Mark Millar, royalties

Mark Millar Suggests Royalty Rate Of 50% To Save The Comics Industry

There has been a lot of chatter recently about page rates for work-for-hire at Marvel and DC Comics. It's time to light the Mark Millar Signal

There has been a lot of chatter recently about page rates for work-for-hire comic books for writers and artists at Marvel and DC Comics, compared with rates for the past. And how they have not gone up, or even stayed the same, but have been sliding downwards for some time. So it's time to light the Mark Millar Signal.

Mark Millar is the writer of Marvel's best-selling graphic novel of all time, Civil War, as well as the co-creator of The Unfunnies, Kick-Ass, Hit Girl, Kingsman, Wanted, Jupiter's Legacy, Chosen, and much much more. Currently, he writes exclusively for Netflix/Image Comics, and has a plan he would like to suggest. He posts to TwitterX;

"don't have any skin in this game as I've worked elsewhere for a long time, but I've got a lot of pals at Marvel and DC & hate to see them struggling like this. I offer this advice in good faith in a bid to help super-charge both freelance deals & the corporations themselves… It's crass to talk money, but it's also shocking that the people writing and drawing the top books are earning a FRACTION of what my peers and I earned on those titles 15 years ago. I made $1,000 a page plus royalties, but I'm hearing from guys on $90 a page and that's criminal.

"Now the comic market has collapsed in the past 5 years and these companies have less money to pay staff and freelancers, but what I'm proposing is really simple economics and could massively help them both get in the black again. Are you ready?

"They don't have the money at the moment to jack up their page rates, but it would cost them literally zero if they revolutionised their royalty deals. For example, right now both companies typically pay around 2% royalty on all sales over, broadly speaking, 50,000 sales. Given that just a handful of Marvel and DC books sell over 50,000 copies a month this means almost no royalties are paid out. The number is almost abstract and as sales decline this seems to be a race to the bottom in terms of talent they can afford."

"My suggestion is that if ONE of these companies swaps that 2% royalty for a FIFTY-FIFTY split with the creative team on all sales over, say, 60,000 copies they will send a bolt of electricity through the industry and bring in the most commercial freelancers in the biz again. A creator can make decent money on even a modestly selling creator-owned book, but it would be absolutely dwarfed by a 50% split on X-Men or Spider-Man with sales taken into the stratosphere. They could make literally millions per year again for both company and talent. The beauty of this is that it would cost the Big 2 nothing as it's zero fiscal outlay upfront. The double-win is that they're getting 50% of a potentially HUGE number instead of a spiral to the depths where they are right now."

"Freelancers, of course, would be delighted as their earning potential would spike overnight and as the companies balance the books again they could start to invest in proper page rate and much-needed new talent. As is, I think the direct market is a couple of years away from complete collapse. American-made comics are 9% of the American market, which is insane. It needs radical surgery to fix it and this would cost nothing. All the indie companies are hurting because nobody's coming in for Marvel or DC books anymore. Every day we hear about more stores closing. Whoever does this first will have a talent migration like the industry has never seen. Who will get there first, Marvel or DC?"

Is Mark Millar right or is he wrong?

Now, Mark Millar is very wrong about the 9% figure, he takes some initial dodgy figures and gets them ever more wrong by ignoring the American-made middle-grade and YA comics from the likes of American publishers Scholastic, Random House and more, and also cuts out a swathe of the sales figures of DC and Marvel into the bargain.

He's also wrong about a complete collapse of the direct market. Comic stores do have new challenges, and we have reported on the closure of a number of prominent ones. But also the opening of new stores and the expansion of others. Indeed, it seems overall that as many stores open as close, just fewer people make a fuss about the opening of a store as they do the closure of a beloved institution.

And it's also untrue to say he has no skin in the game. Mark Millar is planning on returning to Marvel and/or DC Comics after his Netflix exclusivity deal is up, as Netflix appear to have no plans to renew it. So damning the market now, so he can return to it in glory with Superman in 2025, proclaiming himself as the saviour, is probably skin in the game. So if he returns under such a deal with a Superman book written by him and drawn by, say, Bryan Hitch who may be out of his Ghost Machine deal by then, they both could do very well indeed. That's skin.

But, taking into account all of that, he's not wrong. Lots of creators have left Marvel and DC over the decades to make more money elsewhere and to own their work. from Jack Kirby to Rob Liefeld, from Neal Adams to Jim Lee, from Steve Ditko to Todd McFarlane. Back then it was an uncommon path, now many do it, with the likes of Ed Brubaker, Bryan K Vaughan, James Tynion IV, Rick Remender, Sean Phillips and Scott Snyder leaving it all behind. Though they have come back for the odd project here and there, it is another market shift. The kind of deal that Mark Millar is suggesting would bring plenty of them back, if only for a little bit… maybe even Grant Morrison. Just don't tell Mark that.

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