Posted in: Comics | Tagged: bd, civil war, Comics, enertainment, france, Kick Ass, Mark Millar, royalties

The Importance Of Factoring In Foreign Sales When Doing The Creator Owned Sums

Published Fri, 24 Oct 2014 12:00:08 -0500

Mark Millar has been trying to work out the biggest comics market outside of the US and Japan (it's France). But he did give us a breakdown of his foreign sales on Kick Ass.

US and UK comic creators often discount how many sales we have in Europe. DC pay a very small percentage of what comes in and Marvel don't pay foreign at all. The DC royalties were so minute, even on an evergreen, that you never really paid them much attention, but just to put into perspective… my foreign money on the first 8 issues of Kick-Ass is several times what I got paid in total for Civil War, which was the biggest pay-day for 7 consecutive issues anyone's had at Marvel or DC in the last decade or so. Foreign on Nemesis and Superior likewise more than my American money on Civil War. So it's very interesting and when I heard Ultimates, for example, did over 100K copies in Spain back in 04 or whenever it was published it's something I was curious about.

I remember one creator in the nineties discovered that his comic sold more in Spain than in the US, but saw no royalties. And so stopped working for the publisher for a decade…

But when creators are working out their sums as to whether or not they can afford to do that Image comic or not, this might be helpful.

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