Work for Hire, again

[bartl]

It takes a bunch of capital to publish and distribute a comic. A creator working on a work for hire basis essentially (assuming an honest and solvent publisher) gets a guaranteed check for their work, no matter how well or poorly the comic does, and the publisher assumes the financial risk in return. After that, it's what the market will bear. As long as there is plenty of talent in the works ready to take work for hire contracts, the publishers will not change.

If creative personnel unionized, they might get somewhere. The problem with unions, especially breaking in, is the initial members pay a price which they may never recoup; it's more of a "next generation" sort of thing. In communities where everybody works for the same company over multiple generations, you will find that there are people who will more readily make the sacrifice. I'm not sure that this is the case in comics.

Now, there is a question of whether comics can be published profitably by any other system. Or if they can be published profitably at all....

[Charles RB]

There is currently a new comic out in the UK called The DFC which actually does do creator-ownership contracts and, apparently, is making money and slowly increasing sales.

They deliberately went with a subscriptions-only format to cut costs though.

[Lord Destiny]

As long as there is plenty of talent in the works ready to take work for hire contracts, the publishers will not change.

Absolutely.

I wonder why comics is the one industry in America where its artists have no passion to create their own art...?

It's like the 80s were a dream, and then abandoned. I really enjoyed all those indy knock-offs of classic concepts. Rather than be a slave to a trademark owner, you'd think comic artists would want to be free to create, express, imagine... Nope, just plug'em into the machine and they'll be happy.

[Brenz]

We do, but a lot of retailers have tremendous trouble moving that kind of product.