The Business of Comics Podcast for June 15th 2026
Reader Questions:
Rights Recovery: If a company options, buys, develops, shelves, cancels, removes, or otherwise stops using a creator’s show, comic, or creative property for a set amount of time, what path does the creator have to reclaim the rights or at least request formal rights reversion?
This question focuses on the fourth aspect of any contract, which is recovery. Just to recap, most comic book contracts have four parts: the rights, where you determine what is happening with the comic IP, the revenue, where you establish how much the rights are worth and when the money comes in, the responsibility, where you lay out what each side has to do, and the recovery, where you figure out what happens when something goes wrong.
Depending on the type of deal you’re working with, there are several options for a creator to get their rights back.
In a collaboration deal, if one side leaves the project, the other side could have the option to retain all the IP they created.
In a creator-owned deal, there could be a time limit on how long the publisher has to publish the book, and an out-of-print clause that reverts the rights if the book is no longer being sold.
Even freelance creators can have kill fees placed into their contract to guarantee they get paid something if the project falls apart.
The keys to getting your rights back is understanding what the contract says and having the leverage to make sure the right clauses are in your contract.
To Trademark or Not To Trademark: Does it make sense to trademark your comic after you register the copyright?
Registering a copyright and applying for a trademark are related concepts, but they protect different aspects of your IP and need to be treated separately. You can register a copyright on your own, especially with the free guide that I offer to everyone who joins my newsletter, but a trademark requires more money, more effort and more long-term planning.
The basic question you have to ask yourself when you’re thinking about filing a trademark is “what do I plan to do with this story and how long do I plan to work with this title?” Every category of products is treated separately for trademarks, so if you plan to use your mark for comics and posters, and hats, and t-shirts, and toys, then you have to file trademarks for each one. In addition, when you apply for a trademark, you have to prove that every product that you are applying for is actually being sold. For example, you can’t apply for a trademark for your comic in video games and then never make a game. Finally, even if you are successful in registering the trademark, you have to prove that you are still using the mark every six years. So if you’re planning a long-running series like Spawn or Invincible, then it makes sense to register the trademark. If you’re a creator who moves from story to story like Smile and Baby Sitter’s Club, then a trademark makes less sense.
The Cost of Crowdfunding: “How much does it cost to crowdfund a comic?”
This is a good fundamental question. We talk a lot about the revenue opportunities for independent creators in crowdfunding, but it is important to remember that Kickstarter isn’t a magic button you press to get free money. There are three types of costs that a creator has to consider before launching a campaign, fixed costs, variable costs, and hidden costs.
The first and easiest cost to track is the amount you have to pay the crowdfunding platform and the payment processing company. Those are the fixed costs. For example, Kickstarter takes a flat 5% from the total revenue generated from a successful campaign, and the payment processor takes another 3-5%, so your fixed costs there are about ten percent, but that comes from the campaign revenue. You don’t have to pay that money up front.
The variable costs, which are determined by how much you decide to pay for the production of the backer rewards, the distribution costs, the marketing costs, and the labor costs of anyone you decide to pay to support the campaign, might be payable before the campaign launches, and you might have to pay some of those costs regardless of the success of the campaign.
Finally, there are hidden costs that don’t show up on your P&L. These include the time you spend before, during, and after the campaign to make things happen, and the opportunity costs of not using that time and money for something else. Crowdfunding can be a lucrative distribution channel for comic book creators, but it is not an easy business and it is possible to lose money, even if your campaign is successful.
Comic Industry News:
Diversified Career Numbers: BOOM!, DC, Image, and Marvel writer Stephanie Phillips posts a lot of great information for aspiring creators on her TikTok, and a recent post offered a practical breakdown of how to make a living as a comic book writer. We’ve talked on this show several times about how hard it is to make a living just on page rates, but Stephanie only uses that as a base. To that, she adds revenue from convention appearances, signings, revenue from creator-owned IP, and royalties from both freelance and creator-owned projects to round out her income. This diversified approach requires more marketing, more planning, more extroverted behavior, and more overall hustling than sitting in your studio creating comics, but unless page rates suddenly rise to match the cost of living (newsflash: they will not), pulling in revenue from several sides of the industry gives you the best chance to quit your day job.
The Perils of OPM: Comics Beat recently ran a story about the legal troubles Archie Comics is currently facing. The publisher of the classic IP took a loan from an investment company for forty million dollars and signed another IP development deal for eighty million dollars. Then, allegedly, the principals of Archie failed to pay back the loan and signed a conflicting development agreement with Universal. The case is still ongoing, but the lessons for independent comic creators is clear. First, if you take other people’s money for the development of your comics, you have to have a plan to pay than money back, even if your comics don’t sell. Second if you sign an exclusive deal for your IP, you can’t sign another deal for the same IP in the same category unless you want everything to blow up in your face.
The Movable Feast: Oni Press has decided to crowdfund the sixth and final volume of LySandra Vuong’s popular Webtoon Covenant, exclusively in print, despite the fact that the series has 738,000 followers and over 29 million reads on Webtoon. This is an interesting move because it is essentially migrating an audience from a low-revenue platform to a higher one just before the story ends. While the move is unusual, we have seen similar activity in other media recently. The end of the Netflix series Stranger Things, was released in theaters, even though millions of fans consumed all the other episodes on the streaming service. The difference between Stranger Things and Covenant is that the final episode of Stranger Things was available in theaters at the same time as the streaming service. Fans didn’t have to switch media to see the end of the story if they didn’t want to. Covenant fans won’t have that same choice, at least not during the Kickstarter campaign. While this might seem like a big gamble for Oni, it could still payoff, since even if only 1% of Covenant’s 738,000 fans back the campaign, the revenue could still be substantial. Having said that, comic publishers who want to maximize their audience might want to consider expanding the options for readers to get their story, instead of trying to migrate their audience all at once.
Comics Gets New Sales Charts: This week marks the release of new direct market sales charts. These charts are the result of a collaboration between my client Prana: Direct Market Solutions, Manage Comics, and Comic Shop Assistant, and are designed to replace the sales data Diamond provided prior to their bankruptcy. The charts are based on data from 80,000+ consumers and 600+ stores in various markets. The interesting thing here isn’t the results of the chart but the structure of it. Most historical charts pull their results from direct market and point of sales systems, but these new charts also try to incorporate data from comic book readers, not just the shops. Older charts focused on the shops because since direct market comics are non-returnable, the shops were the customers for financial purposes. These new charts have the potential to show not just what the shop owners decided to buy, but what the readers of comics decided to pay for. While this could paint a new picture for comic book sales, creators should keep in mind that it still only tracks trends in the direct market. Sales in bookstores, conventions, crowdfunding, and direct-to-consumer sales are not represented.
Growth of Independent Bookstores: The American Bookseller Association has reported that membership was up 19% in 2025, to 3783 member locations. This indicated a continuing reversal of the pattern of buying books on Amazon or at larger booksellers like Barnes & Noble. It appears that consumers are looking for real-world interaction with the communities that independent retailers create and the curated products that they sell, which mirrors the story we discussed a couple of months ago, where Gen Z expressed a need to interact with the real world, and Gen X and Millennial readers were more interested in physical books than digital copies. This trend might reveal an opportunity for comic creators to find and engage with potential readers more successfully, even if it is on a smaller scale.
The Variant Impact: ICV2 ran a story tracking the monetary impact of variant covers on single-issue sales. This data, which came from a single retailer over a six-month period and tracked over 6,000 different SKUs or stock tracking numbers, revealed that 35-40% of the revenue from new comics came from variant covers. While it’s not a majority of the single-issue revenue, the data suggests that for many titles, variant covers likely make the difference between profit and loss on a title. Now before you go off and commission fifteen variant covers for your comic, keep these things in mind:
First, variant covers are not about your story, they are about the appeal of the artist, your character, and the perceived collector’s market for your comic. These factors can drive up sales if Dave Nakayama or Mark Brooks are doing variants for Batman or X-Men, but it might not have the same impact on your up and coming comic.
Second, these numbers are for direct market sales for one retailer. The sales impact might not apply in the same way to your crowdfunding, conventions, or anywhere outside the direct market.
Finally, variant covers increase your production costs and the amount of copies you have to sell to break even. Before you sign multiple cover artists to your project, figure out the business impact of all that cool art.
Comics for Culture, Not Just Profit: Finally, we need to end this business-oriented show with a discussion of culture and politics. Marjane Satrapi, the author of the award-winning graphic novel Persepolis died earlier this month. That loss sparked renewed interest in the graphic novel, which was a milestone in comics, drawing new attention to the medium, and providing a point of comparison for the literary graphic novels that followed. It has also been one of the most banned and challenged books, especially in the United States. In an ironic twist, the fight against the ban of Persepolis became a graphic novel itself called Wake Now in the Fire. The social, political, and personal impact of Persepolis raises potential concerns for all types of comic creators. The stories you decide to tell in comics, the issues you decide to deal with, or avoid, can impact you and your life far beyond the sales of your comic. I have clients who write under pseudonyms, or form shell companies to protect their personal lives from the backlash created by their work. You don’t need to be an Iranian comic creator to come under fire for your comics. Many of the most banned books in America are comics, and comic creators face harassment and death threats from toxic fans, political extremists, and other opponents of ideas. As a comic creator, remember that you are in the business of art, and art is political, regardless of what simplistic perspectives try to present.
If you have a question, comment, criticism, or joke related to The Business of Comics, please leave a comment.
If you are working on a deal for your comic, or if you need ongoing legal support for your comic book business, please contact me for a free consultation.
Have fun.
Gamal
PLEASE NOTE: THIS BLOG POST IS NOT A SUBSTITUTE FOR LEGAL ADVICE. IF YOU HAVE A CONTENT, LICENSING OR INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY ISSUE, DISCUSS IT WITH YOUR LEGAL ADVISOR OR CONTACT C3 FOR A FREE CONSULTATION.
