I wanted to share with you something I received yesterday, something that if you were to act on it, say, today or later, that will absolutely not be a problem. It’s about the cost of comics.

Producing comics costs money, and it should be in all circumstances that the dominant cost is paying the creators. By a fluke of timing, yesterday also brought forth a damning bit of reporting into throwback practices of the bad old days from a huckster who should be avoided at all costs. If you’re thinking of getting into comics remember that the first rule is money flows to the creator(s).

For a hell of a contrast to Andrew Rev¹, consider that for years now, The Nib has been putting out comics five days a week, and paying the best rates seen since the heyday when every general-audience magazine ran cartoons and there were people making mortgage payments on homes with pools in Connecticut from making those cartoons. These days, it’s pretty much The New Yorker and The Nib. But unlike the heyday of general-audience magazines, anybody can read their stuff for free, no subscription required, and so there’s an appeal that was sent to everybody that’s signed up for their newsletter (which is free and separate from their Inkwell subscriber program). They’re asking people for a few bucks:

This week’s Nib comics cost $2,500. Will you help us cover it?
Each week at The Nib we publish thousands of dollars in comics — most of them original works we’ve commissioned from our artists. A short comic you read on the site costs $300, while our long form often goes over $1,000.

Producing comics isn’t cheap and we have no financial backing other than our monthly members. This is an entirely reader-funded publication.

So we’re setting modest goal of raising $2,500 in donations [14 October 2020] to cover our costs of publishing.

That’s it. If all our readers gave us $10, we’d fund our publishing efforts well into next year!

Ten bucks. If you read The Nib online, can you make a one-time donation of ten bucks? I’m a monthly subscriber and also buy all of the The Nib’s print collections, which comes to maybe six hundo over the lifetime of the site; Matt Bors isn’t asking for class money, he’s asking for ten bucks, once.

If you’ve thought about being a subscriber and this is a good time for US$4/month (or more — more is good) instead of ten bucks once, that’s also a great idea. If you don’t like the thought of an ongoing subscription and another account that needs to be updated the next time TJMaxx or whoever has a data breach and you get a new credit card, I get it … maybe take that US$48 that represents a one-year subscription and send it over all at once.

You can donate here. A few minutes, a few bucks. I’ve always figured my fair contribution to creators at about US$0.10/page (which is about the cost of a print collection), and The Nib does at least three short comics/day (with much longer ones interspersed), so that’s at least a buck and a half a week, or six bucks a month — that lowest level of subscription is a bargain, and a tenner will cover your moral obligation for most of two months.

Comics cost, and money flows to the creators. You’re here because you love comics. Take a few minutes, take the credit card equivalent of the change jar you have on the table by where you keep your keys, and join with others to keep the comics coming and the money flowing in the right direction.

And for the love of all that’s holy, if you’re a creator read that longer piece linked above and never work for Terrific Production.

Spam of the day:

Smart way that can do your ear clean within seconds

This is just that mind-control bug thing from Wrath Of Khan, isn’t it?

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¹ The most vile part of the contracts in that story, for me, wasn’t the We don’t have to pay you until COVID has been defeated to a mathematically impossible degree clause. It was the part that says you’re exclusively tied to Terrific as long as they aren’t more than 45 days late in paying you. Who the hell expects that a contract that says I can violate my obligations to you for a month and a half and it’s all good won’t immediately turn into permission to do exactly that, forever?