Reverse Engineering Comic Page Rates
Spreadsheet: Using maximum output to calculate full-time wages for comic creators.
I promised you spreadsheets. Let’s start with the one that is sure to make a few of you cringe. Let’s talk wages.
The attached spreadsheet, Reverse Engineering Comic Page Rates, started as a thought experiment.
If every member of a comic team…
worked full-time,
derived all of their income from just their comic work,
produced a sustainable, non-injury-inducing amount of work, and
made an average of $X dollars per hour (minimum wage is the default),
… what should their minimum page rate be?
Based on this, you can also derive what a 22-page comic should cost to produce and how many comics of that issue you would have to sell to make back that production cost.
Of course, a lot of the thinking behind this spreadsheet is flawed.
For example, it is highly unlikely that every member of a project would have identical yearly salary expectations. Philosophical discussions aside, our society tends to pay more or less based on education, experience, marketability, etc. Individuals in locations with a lower cost of living are also often paid less. Why do I feel like I just dropped the holy hand grenade? Ha! The likelihood of an Alex Ross and a new letterer just out of a 6-week/12-lesson course making the same annual salary is just not probable. But you can start with the base numbers and use them as lower limits, especially when plugging in the Federal minimum wage. (In the spreadsheet, the cells that are grey can be changed without messing up the calculations. Cell B2 is where to plug in an hourly wage.)
The other, most obvious flaw is the assumption that all the money made by a creator comes from creative work. Many in the comic industry have day jobs to supplement their annual wages. Even those 100% employed in the business supplement their comic creation with appearance fees, signatures, movie options, and similar. And, as an independent creator, if you are not diversified into products that can generate more revenue per sale than you’d get from a single issue in a comic shop, you will never live solely from comics.
The output numbers I’ve used may also prove to be controversial, so change them as you see fit. However, rest assured, I did a lot of asking around to get realistic numbers from creators. The one number I suspect will raise eyebrows is the pages per month that a writer can produce (66 or 2.14 per day; 3 per work day) vs a penciller (1 per day). It is my observation that comic writers don’t give themselves enough credit for how hard writing takes - that 2.14 pages a day is based on working on a licensed intellectual property in an established universe. If you are world-building and researching for a totally new IP, that pages per day average is way too high. Most writers I talk to have worked on their IP for at least a year before their first script ends up with an artist. No, it is not all time sitting at a keyboard, but in terms of “what can a creator produce in a year to earn a living,” you can’t ignore it.
So have fun with this spreadsheet and try not to get too depressed. If there is one takeaway I think we all need to internalize, it is that just employing our primary skill to make comics for comic shops is not enough to feed our families. We either have to find those add-ons ourselves or work for a company that does that for us. There is no shame in admitting this.