What should I charge for character designs?

[Wonderman Blaque]

Hello All,
A friend of mine has hooked me up with a possible gig doing character designs for a nationally distributed independent comic book. How much should I charge for the work? I have no idea as I am new to this any constructive advice is welcomed.


Wonderman Blaque

[barking_frog]

A lot probably depends on what exactly 'character design' means. If the writer has a very detailed picture of the character in his/her head and basically just needs you to read a page of character notes and render the visual, you can probably expect even less than a normal comics page rate (since you won't even be having to fill in backgrounds). In that case, maybe anywhere from $12 to $60?

But if you're basically creating a character from scratch and the only thing you're given is "make a visually interesting character", then you're doing actual development work, will probably go through many drafts, and might be charging a lot more than that.

And then of course there's the question of how in-demand your work is. You're looking at a lot of variables.

[Kara Zor El]

You need an agent.