A guide to comics part 4 (Creator owned comics)

Last time, in part 3, I talked about company owned comics. Today I'll talk about creator owned comics. Then in part 5, in a slight change from my plan, I'll talk about licensed comics then in part 6 there'll be a general glossary of terms that you will probably run across but aren't necessarily familiar with.


Creator owned comics are, exactly as the name suggests, comics owned by the people who create them. I mentioned last time that almost all the comics Marvel & DC publish are company owned but there are some creator owned exceptions. Let's deal with these first.

Marvel have an imprint called Icon. They use this for their bigger creators to publish their creator owned comics without having to go to another publisher. Icon is pretty rarely used now and it isn't uncommon to see Marvel's bigger name creators have creator owned books published elsewhere.

DC are different. I don't think it's too contriversial to say that in the competition between Marvel & DC Marvel can be seen to be 'winning' in most regards. This certainly isn't true of their creator owned imprints. DC's imprint is called Vertigo. Vertigo was created to publish stories that were too controversial to be published under the main DC brand (at the time comics in the US were subject to an archaic censorship systems called the Comics Code Authority. To protect the children, of course). Vertigo was the place books that wouldn't get Comics Code Authority approval. Many of these early stories were still owned by DC but from the start Vertigo also published creator owned comics. Over the years Vertigo has become solely a home for creator owned comics and although the quality & number of the books published by Vertigo has waxed & waned over the years it is still going strong.

FBP: Federal Bureau of Physics cover by Robbi Rodriguez, published by Vertigo.

Almost all of the comics that I get are creator owned. I get 2 each month from DC & the same from Marvel, the rest are all creator owned books. In the last post I went through some of the problems of company owned comics, I don't intend to ignore the problems of creator owned comics even though I prefer them.

The problems stem in the main from the lack of copies these comics sell. There's no giant corporation backing these comics and so there's no guarantee of a survivable income from these books. A writer could be contracted to write 36 comics for Marvel in a year. As long as they produce 36 comics they'll be paid for them. If the comic they are writing is cancelled due to poor sales they'll be given another comic to write. (Of course there are other comic types, this is just an example). A creator owned comic offers none of that security. Of course, if a creator owned comic sells well then the creators can make more money than at MArvel or DC. The truth is however, most creator owned books don't sell that well. The Walking Dead sells well and regularly is a top-10 selling book. Saga is another book that sells very well.

Sage cover by Fiona Staples.

For the vast majority of creator owned books, even those at bigger independent publishers like Image, the sales aren't that big. Here's a quote from Kieron Gillen, co-creator and writer of Phonogram that I think sums the situation up well:

We've been doing "Phonogram" for over 4 years, not including the years before the first series came out. Imagine if we could have just done the comic and not had to deal with any of the shit we've had to. We'd have been up to issue 44 now. Instead, we have 13 issues.

I feel frustrated. Enormously lucky, sure, but frustrated. We've done this wonderful thing we're crazy-proud about. But if the whole economic system was just a couple of degrees to the left, everything would have been different. I mean, just to give you an idea about narrow the margins are between what we are and what we could be, if we were selling 6K instead of 4K, we could have done those 44 issues. The difference between breaking even and actually being able to do it in comics is insane. It's like being kept under ice, clawing. I feel like a bonsai plant.

 The above quote comes from an explanation about why a third series of Phonogram wouldn't be forthcoming and comes from 2010. He also mentions that the artist and co-creator Jamie McKelvie was often only earning "a couple of hundred bucks" an issue. That's not exactly a livable monthly amount. (There's a happy end to this story though. Since the end of 2010 people have figured out that  Kieron Gillen & Jamie McKelvie are great comic creators and their stock in the industry has risen. So much so that a third and final series of Phonogram will come out.)

One final word on Phonogram, I know I'm wildly off topic here but bear with me. If you consider that you don't like comics and you only for my music posts and just happen to read this post then believe me, Phonogram is the perfect comic for you. You owe it to yourself to check it out, it'll be well worth your time.

Phongram by Jamie McKelvie

The lack of sales, and therefore money, can lead to series being cancelled and never finished. Or the conclusion to a story being rushed and compressed into fewer issues than originally planned. It can also lead to the publishing schedule being erratic. Instead of an issue coming out every month there can be large and unexpected gaps between issues as the creators have to take on other jobs to pay the bills and work on the creator owned book when they can. An extreme example of the delayed release schedule is Age of Bronze. While most comics are published monthly Age of Bronze, a critically loved & award winning comic, has published 33 issues since it began in 1998. That's right, an average of two comics a year. The last issue was published in July 2013. It's still ongoing and, hopefully, will be finished eventually. There may only be 33 issues so far, but they are 33 great issues.

And really, that's the thing I love about creator owned comics. Age of Bronze tells the story of the Trojan War. Phonogram is about music and culture and growing up. FBP is about a world in which physics has stopped working properly and has lead to the creation of a fourth emergency service. Sage is most often described as Romeo & Juliet crossed with Star Wars. That sounds brilliant but Saga is orders of magnitude better than that.

Creator owned comics show a huge variety of stories and art styles that just don't exist in company owned comics. Characters live and die, they grow old and change. The stories are created by the people who want to tell them, not run through various levels of corporate editorial checking first. Saga is just the story Brian Vaughan & Fiona Staples want to tell, not a story that has to fit in with 50 other stories being put out by the publisher. (50 isn't an exaggeration by the way, DC & Marvel put out a tonne of books every month that are all inter-connected to one degree or another). Even when the comic book is part of a wider universe it's still under the creator's control.

Hellboy might be the best example of this. First there was just Hellboy. Then other books from the universe created with Hellboy started to be published. BPRD, Lobster Johnson & Abe Sapien among others. All these books under the control of Hellboy creator Mike Mignola, although he doesn't write them all. And all really good. Hellboy  and the associated books may be my favourite creator owned comics ever. I'm not alone in that opinion of course, they're well loved by thousands of people. I do believe there's a comic for everybody and in most cases, especially people who don't consider themselves comic fans, it's a creator-owned comic.