Hey, kids/teens/adults, ya'll wanna break into comics? You wanna get paid by a big company to make some comic-books? Do you want a livable wage? Well, it is kind of an either-or situation quite often, friend! No, come back!
In all seriousness, the field of comics remains one that has some incredibly successful big names and a lot of folks just hanging on for dear life as they attempt to scape by a living doing something they love deeply but which pays horrendously. Heidi MacDonald over at The ComicsBeat has a new post discussing how this keeps coming up with little done to fix that page rates (what you get paid per page of comic-book) have stagnated for decades in relation to inflation, costs of living, etc. If we don't pay the people making our comics decent money, they may very well call it quits. You could argue, "There will always be someone else ready to take less money," and that could be true, but I don't like the idea of immense talents giving up on comics for someone with worse drawing skills than even me to get a gig because they'll work for peanuts.
When we're talking about billion-dollar properties at DC and Marvel, you would think the people who are making the new stories that the companies will turn to for their movies and shows (as the older content dries up) could get paid a bit more. Even indie-level publishers have struggled to pay anything near what they did in the 1980s or so, when you adjust for inflation and such, but it makes a bit more sense as those very companies are themselves sometimes labors of love barely able to keep the lights on and put out a comic or two.
The history of comic-books is a story built on the labor of countless underrecognized or outright unrecognized talents who deserved more respect and money than they received. It is saddening to think that legacy continues all the way into the current day in many respects. Pay comic creators what they're worth, in other words, or there could eventually be no creators.
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