Comics and The Big Lie

This is a long one. You might want to get a hot beverage and get comfy. 

In August of 2024, one of the most informative articles about the state of the comics industry was published on the internet, to little comment. It was written by comics author Rob Williams and it was called How to Get Your Comic Optioned For Film Or TV (And What That Really Means…). 

With so much comics publishing these days aimed at the ultimate goal of media adaptation, it seems odd that more people haven’t examined this business model. As business models go, it’s pretty risky. Putting out comic books is a fairly expensive proposition on a per page rate basis. Paying a writer, artist, colorist and letterer for a single page of a comic/graphic novel is a lot more expensive than paying a single writer for a novel or nonfiction book. 

But it’s still a LOT cheaper than making a movie or TV show, and so…here we are. Almost every day it seems someone is launching a new comics publisher or imprint, promising that “the stories come first” – but a look at the talent and loglines shows that getting media money out of the deal is a major goal of the venture – or at least a VERY prominent slide in the pitch deck.  

I’ve come to call this “The Big Lie” of comics publishing, because the truth is that it’s more profitable LONG TERM to publish a very good comic that keeps selling than to roll the dice on a hit movie or TV show. If the movie or TV show is hit you just hit the reprint button and make money. It’s the model traditional publishers use, and the backlist – the inventory of sturdy perennial sellers – is the key to stability for publishers. Sure, hitting the ultimate jackpot of, say, a billion dollar movie that leads to toys, video games and underwear is great but it’s very rare indeed. And most importantly, the main way for a publisher to cash in on that jackpot is still the same old unglamourous method: selling comic books. 

To be sure, adapting comics into the current media format goes all the way back to Superman – within a few years of his debut he had already been adapted into a comic strip (then a VERY lucrative format), a radio serial and an animated movie serial. The 1948 live action movie serial was “the most profitable serial in film history” according to Wikipedia.  Since then there have been many ups and downs in the comics to media pipeline, but it’s safe to say that the MCU/Walking Dead combo has lodged it in the “up” column for a very long time. 

Calling something a lie is a bit harsh, I admit, so maybe it’s more like a big con or a big dream. I don’t blame anyone for going after investor/VC money by saying publishing comics is a surefire way to make money in Hollywood. I guess if I could convince someone that blog posts could be turned into streaming series, I’d do it, too. And IP still has immense value. The streaming flood has slowed down, but there is still a need for new material everywhere. That’s why publishers want to control the media rights to the IP they publish. That’s why they hang on to those rights past any point of common sense. 

This week I was on David Harper’s Off Panel podcast talking about “The Big Lie” but I always knew I wanted to write a companion piece, so here it is. People who prefer to listen can jump to the link. Those who prefer information in written format can keep on reading. 

William’s piece about Hollywood is a charming, informative look at the process of going from lines on paper to “Suggested for you” on your Netflix home screen, focusing on the option money that goes to creators. The myriad sprawl of differing business models and contracts is worthy of its own in depth study, but here’s a very simplified breakdown of how it works, financially. 

There are (roughly) two stages: the option and the production. Anyone can option anything for any amount of money. Say I write four issues of Sponge Man and then Tissue Films comes to me and offers an option: they will pay me a certain amount of money in exchange for the rights to develop the property for media adaptation. Sounds like a plan. Bear in mind, some people offer $0 for the option. DON’T DO THAT. It’s generally not a sound business move. 

But even when there’s money it might not be that much after all. Four figures is common. Low five figures is pretty good. Williams writes:

What’s an ‘Option’? It means a Producer or Production Company will pay you a fee to have exclusive rights to develop your comic for Film/TV for a period. Sometimes 18 months. Sometimes 12. This can usually range from £1k to £35k. But if you’ve never had a TV show or Film derived from your work before, you can expect the offer to be on the low side. If the Production Company want to keep the rights, they pay you another cheque once the option is up. And so on and so forth until they eventually make the Film or TV show. Or they don’t want to keep the rights to your comic after a point and will let the Option ‘lapse’. In which case you get the rights back.

As Williams notes ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS get a reversion clause – more on that below. 

So far so good, I guess. If you’re a comics creator reading this, you have almost certainly had something optioned and you know the game. Where does the publisher come into the picture? Well, almost all of these “comics to film” joints want to have exclusive rights to shop a film around – that’s the IP that they want to control. As mentioned, there are many, many different kinds of contracts, but a common one is that the publisher SPLITS the option money. So that’s half of £35,000….about $22K. A nice amount to have wired into your bank account but hardly life changing money. Option money never is. Williams again: 

OLD HAUNTS was recently optioned for Film by AWA Studios. It’s a ‘Ghost Story for Gangsters’ creator-owned book I did a few years ago with Ollie Masters, Laurence Campbell, Lee Loughridge and Sal Cipriano. The deal we did with AWA was similar to ones done by other companies such as Boom, Mad Cave, IDW etc. AWA paid us a page rate while making the book, in return they alone could shop it or try and set it up in Film/TV and they get 50% of the money from any such deal they set up. That’s the shorthand version, anyway. In such a case, it’s all out of your hands. You don’t have to put any work into shopping your comic via agents or personally. The publisher doesn’t want you and your agent out there muddying the waters for them. So: feet up and hope for the best. Low maintenance. But you also have handed over your agency on the project.

This much is pretty simple. Now comes the complicated part. The property is developed and shopped around for months, or years….or decades sometimes. If a studio decides to make it and say hires a screenwriter to write the screenplay, you might get more money. When it goes into production, you might get more….and when it hits the screen, large or small, you get a bit more. Again, shared with the publisher. How much is “more” in this case? 

Let’s go back to Sponge Man, published by Snotty Comics. I split media rights with Snotty, and Snotty Publisher Stan Fandango gets an executive producer credit on the Sponge Man movie – but that’s a contractual thing and not necessarily a big money deal. I’ve talked to various folks who shop media rights for a living about this several times over the years, and this isn’t necessarily millions of dollars. Six figures is more common. Maybe I split $250,000 with Snotty when the Sponge Man movie came out. Of course I shared that with my artist, Dale Coral-Gardens, so I ended up with $62,500, and Snotty Comics got $125,000. Again, a nice piece of change but not enough to keep a comic book company running. 

I reached out to a few comics creators who have had actual movies/tv shows made from their work and none said the money was life changing. They were certainly happy to get it, but almost everyone had a different approach and result. As I said, a topic worthy of deeper study. 

Of course, this is all very simplified, and there are always exceptions, the biggest being The Walking Dead. Robert Kirkman managed to turn writing the comic into becoming a media mogul himself. But as I like pointing out, he and Charlie Adlard were millionaires just based on the comics sales alone. 

But let’s go back to that Sponge Man comic again. How much did it cost to make? Going by the low end of Fair Page Rates, it’s $80/page for the script, and $300 a page for art, colors and lettering. Let’s say it was four issues, 22 pages each. That comes out to $33,440. Throw in some money for covers and let’s call it $35,000, again, LOW END. So Snotty Comics made $90,000 from the property becoming a movie. Nice, but you’re a publisher so you had overhead, editors and production people and a marketing person and so on. 

You see what I’m getting at. Snotty had to publish 9 other comics so that Sponge Man could become a movie. Maybe there was option money on all of those. Nice to have, and it helped pay the bills. 

But you know what really paid the bills month in and month out? Selling comics. 

Maybe my numbers are off and Snotty made $2,500,000 from Sponge Man becoming a movie. Maybe they sold video game rights and a toy license. The toys were a big hit and everyone got royalties. Or maybe it all flopped horribly. It’s rolling the dice. All the ancillary rights fees add up, but it’s still not a business model. It’s PART of a business model, but to be a successful comics publisher you have to get the first part of your business right: you have to sell comics, and ultimately that will be what keeps the money flowing. 

My understanding of The Big Lie really came home to me when Random House bought Boom! Studios. Everyone thought it was because PRH wanted all that IP. I’m sure they like having it, but as I’ve pointed out many, many times, big publishers don’t base their business model around movie rights. Of course they love movies based on their books, because they sell a ton of books when a big movie is successful. It’s a profitable virtuous circle – how many times have you seen that blurb on a book cover “Now a major motion picture!” 

Let’s take Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, published by Crown, an imprint of PRH. The book came out in 2012, stormed the zeitgiest and sold two million copies. While I don’t have Fynn’s contract in front of me, standard publishing industry procedures are that the author keeps the media rights. It’s likely that PRH didn’t get anything from the $1.5 million that Fox paid for the movie rights. (Flynn’s agent did though.) Now THAT was a windfall. The movie adaptation, directed by David Fincher and starring Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike, came out in 2016. The book sold 15 million copies that year, with PRH happily raking in the profits and Flynn getting some amazing royalty checks. 

PRH’s business model is selling books by successful authors, as with the other big consumer publishers I wrote about the other day. Gone Girl was a singular phenomenon but it showed the system working at its peak.

Word novels are still more popular than graphic novels, and it’s hard to imagine any comics creator getting a $1.5 million rights deal, so this part of the business model doesn’t really track to comics. And, it must be noted, PRH and HarperCollins and other publishing houses are getting more interested in the rights game. Boom Studios will be part of Random House Worlds which happens to be their licensed publishing imprint. So yes, more publishers are going to be controlling media rights, especially, it seems, for comics. Everyone is getting into this space race. 

How did this dice game all begin? It’s important to remember that despite the success of Superman and Batman back in the 40s, the 50s comic book scare pretty much killed interest in the format for a long time, with a few exceptions like the Batman TV show and the first Superman movie. But these were very much considered exceptions, and people were shocked that good entertainment could be made from mere comic book characters. You just have to look at all the dodgy LOW BUDGET Marvel and DC movies that were made in the 80s and 90s to see how little respect comic book IP had for a long time. 

Then a few things happened. The first was The Mask. The movie came out in 1994, catapulting Jim Carrey to stardom, and was based on a Dark Horse comic book created by publisher Mike Richardson and written by Doug Mahnke and John Arcudi, with art by Mark Badger, Chris Warner and Keith Williams. The comic was fine but with Carrey in the lead of the movie, it captured lightning in a bottle. It must be said that Mike Richardson was the pioneer of the indie comics to film pathway, and given the long term success of Dark Horse as a publisher and the movies based on their properties, he’s gotten it right more than most people, although Barb Wire in 1996 showed that it wasn’t always a slam dunk. 

The next thing that happened was Men in Black in 1997, based on a VERY obscure comic published by Aircel, with the rights going to Marvel in the Malibu deal. The movie had a long gestation period, with the first option on the film rights sold in 1992. 

The comic was no big deal (Snap quiz: can you name the artist on the original series?) but this was perhaps the first comic that sold to Hollywood on the basis of its “high concept.” The movie was a smash (again, harnessing the young star power of Will Smith was the real magic) and its comic book origins were something of an afterthought, but someone must have been paying attention. 

Marvel was going through an ugly bankruptcy at the time and didn’t have much energy to try to sell more Men in Black comics (although apparently they did do a special issue or two.) Creator Lowell Cunningham was working as a factory security guard, but cashed a low six figure check when the movie came out, so there was some real money involved at the time. (Quiz answer: the artist was Sandy Carruthers.)

But with the rise of VFX, things were stirring. Even in the midst of Marvel’s bankruptcy, the Blade movie series was coming out, further igniting interest in “obscure” comics characters, as did the dawn of the X-men movies. 2002’s Spider-Man was a smash hit and by then the trickle was an avalanche. 

And then came the comic/movie connection that would probably bake The Big Lie into the business plans of every comics publisher to come: 30 Days of Night by Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith. The comic came out in 2002 and the movie in 2007. Niles had originated the idea of a town overrun by vampires in the month long Alaska night as a movie pitch, but when it didn’t sell he changed it into a comic which he sold to IDW. 

The film was an indie hit, but more importantly, it made the comic a hit. 30 Days of Night had everything that people would try to copy: a high concept elevator pitch of a hook, a very good comic that tied directly into the film, and a publisher willing to put together the whole package – AND the marketing and look of the movie were very much based on the comic’s unique esthetic. 

30 Days of Night would go on to have all kinds of comics sequels, a direct to video movie sequel, and I think I saw some collector figures at Toy Fair one year. It was far from the only comic book movie of the period. It was preceded by Hellboy (2004) and Sin City (2006) which were both critical and commercial hits – both, importantly, sold tons and tons of the graphic novels for Dark Horse. Oh look, there was a story about it for Publishers Weekly back in 2007:

In a conference call that also included DH v-p of business development Michael Martens, Richardson sought to dispell rumors that the publisher would not have enough books to meet retailers’ needs. He said that 300 has shipped about 250,000 copies since January 2006. He added that the bookstore market should have 25,000 to 30,000 copies in stock (plus another 10,000 copies at online book retailer Amazon.com) and that bookstore and comics shop retailers have stock to meet demand. Richardson said part of the confusion over the availability of the title is that retailers fearful of getting caught short are reordering even though they have the book in stock. There have been complaints in the past about the availability of reprints for DH’s Sin City and Hell Boy graphic novels after those films opened, although the publisher disputes the notion that it did not have enough books available.

(Sidenote: the PW story is no longer available on the web, even the Wayback Machine, but my Beat story referencing it is still here. Please support our Patreon.)

I feel that 30 Days of Night was the real proof of concept for the comic book to movie trend even more than Hellboy and Sin City. Mike Mignola and Frank Miller created their comics to be comics – that they became movie famous along the way was a bonus for all concerned. 

At the risk of making this a very long article indeed it’s worth pointing out some of the other rest stops along the comics to media highway. There was Virgin Comics, founded in 2006, the first** celebrity driven publisher, with founders Richard Branson and Deepak Chopra on the masthead, and Chopra’s son Gotham running the show. Virgin featured comics by directors John Woo and Guy Richie, to name a few. Actor/director Ed Burns (Saving Private Ryan) wrote one of the comics, Dockwalloper, and as I recall, that was my first “celebrity writes comics” interview. Burns told me that making the kind of indie movies he wanted to make was increasingly difficult, but he could get his ideas out there in a comic and then see what happened. While it may have been my first time talking to a movie star about their comic book, that would be a thought that I would hear repeated over and over through the years. 

After a name change to Liquid Comics, Virgin ultimately dried up, leaving behind not much of a legacy aside from a particularly bonkers SDCC appearance by Grant Morrison talking about their adaptation of the Mahabharata. 

While I could go on about the history of celebrity driven comics, (Tekno, Mayhem, OCT) it should be noted that the form now has its own Robert Kirkman with Keanu Reeves’ BRZRKR, which has been far more successful in most formats than it has any right to be. The could turn out to be the first celebrity driven comic to actually be a movie. 

And that brings us to now and the explosion of comics publishers hoping for the big score. It’s a perilous path. Look at Valiant’s struggles to make a movie for years, only to have Bloodshot open on the eve of a global pandemic. There are many bodies along the way, and some zombies still stumbling along. 

Is The Big Lie really bad for comics creators? As Williams pointed out, some people happily cash those option checks for years, only to be saddened when a movie finally gets made: the pipeline has been sealed off. Money is nice, and options are part of the plan. If you have a good lawyer, and get your rightful cut, it can be a good time for all. On the flip side, there are many bad deals out there, especially for young creators. The recent Action Lab business is a very sad state of affairs. There’s no more publishing coming but the Stan Fandango of the tale stubbornly clings to that IP, desperately hoping for….something? 

(As I mentioned above, I don’t want to get into contract details but ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS get a reversion clause in case the company goes bankrupt or goes out of business or undergoes some other kind of catastrophe. I’ve done partnership deals with The Beat three times and I always had a reversion agreement – that’s the only reason you are able to read my posts from 2007.) 

Why does everyone keep rolling the dice? Well, as I mentioned above, everyone needs IP. Those streaming hours aren’t going to fill themselves, although videos of yule logs and comfy music on YouTube and the rise of AI suggest that they might actually self-propagate.  But for the moment, human effort is required.

But even when streaming is brought into the equation, publishers don’t always have an easy time of it. In 2021 I looked at how streaming affected comics sales for Publishers Weekly. 

Among the challenges publishers face is the effort to link book releases to streaming TV shows: these services often don’t publicize broadcast dates until only a few months out. This means that publishers have to guess what the print demand will be, leaving them a narrow window to prepare. This can mean that books will be out of print for months just as demand spikes, unless publishers turn to more costly printers located in North America that can print and ship books to bookstores and comic shops more quickly.

My story spoke with Eric Reynolds at Fantagraphics and Nick Barrucci at Dynamite about how they had to gamble on printing for The End of the Fucking World and The Boys respectively. But the books sold. (Hopefully relations are a bit better now?)

It would take many thousands more words to delve into all the real world examples of The Big Lie, but my point is this: having a movie or TV show made out of your comic is good and can make you some money, but having a really good book in print and available is the real key to success for a comics publisher. I don’t mean to disparage all the well meaning folks who are taking that investment money and setting out to publish the next 30 Days of Night. Most of them mean well and really do want to make good comics. But if they don’t have a business plan that includes selling comics, they might just join the many skeletons along the roadside. 

I’ll leave this with one more story from the archives: Radical Publishing, Excuse me, Radical STUDIOS. The business plan was baked right into the name. Radical was founded in 2007 by Barry Levine, David Elliott, Jesse Berger, and Matthew Berger. Levine was a photographer turned  Hollywood guy who made low budget films back when theaters were how you got your movie entertainment. According to the IMDB he’s now co-head of “Abstract Entertainment with partner Mike Bundlie to create highly visual films with compelling characters and stories. The company focuses on creating graphic novels based on co-developed or original content that will transition to Film or TV.” The Bergers were related and honestly, I forget how, but Jesse Berger still has Radical Studios on his LinkedIn page and has produced several films, most of them based on Radical comics. David Elliott is a comics lifer, still in the game and at NYCC I told him he needs to write a book because he’s seen it all, including Radical Comics. 

Radical Publishing set out as a multimedia company that would do the 30 Days of Night thing from soup to nuts: publish the comics and make the movies. A profile of Levine comes right out and states the Big Lie:

Levine and his 32-year-old partner, Jesse Berger, founded the company six years ago with a big idea: Create new comic books, own the intellectual property and license the stories to Hollywood. By holding on to the underlying rights, Levine and Berger believe they can make millions with books, merchandise and video games spun off of the movies.

But a little further down we get this:

Revenues are growing along with the company’s reputation. In 2011 Radical had revenues of $985,000. For 2012 income was up 50% to $1.45 million.

But with $1.3 million per year in operating expenses, the company is just a little over the break-even point. Radical is very much in the development phase. On Oblivion and Hercules, Berger and Levine were only able to hold onto a sliver of the rights that lets them sell spin off merchandise in comic book stores, online and at conventions. No Wal-Mart deals for them. Instead look for fancy figurines at your local shop when Hercules hits theaters.

The numbers didn’t add up. It must be said, Radical did have more success than many at this, if by success you mean actually making movies, which is no mean feat. But the movies were a mixed bag, to be charitable. A Hercules movie starred the Rock in one of his early roles, based on a Steve Moore written graphic novel, and it wasn’t a total flop but I don’t think it’s anyone’s favorite Dwayne Johnson movie. Then came Oblivion, starring Tom Cruise and directed by Joseph Kosinski. That was actually a pretty good movie however there was a lot of controversy over whether it was actually based on a graphic novel: legend has it that Cruise saw a book of concept sketches at SDCC and thought it would make a good movie so they had to go along with that. The rest of the story you can read in another Beat vault special: So About that Oblivion Graphic Novel…it turns out there never was an actual graphic novel at all. 

I thought the Radical story ended there (they last published a comic in 2012), but they made two movies based on “Radical Comics” since then, both produced by Jesse Berger. One is 2016’s Abattoir, a low budget horror film which enjoyed poor reviews. It’s not actually based on a comic, but Radical did publish a 2010 prequel comic, so they were trying to synergize HARD. 

The other is 2020’s The Last Days of American Crime based on a graphic novel by Rick Remender and Greg Tocchini. The film came out in June of 2020 on Netflix and got Boodshotted but in another way, Wikipedia tells us:

The film’s release was considered unfortunate for coinciding with the George Floyd protests due to its violent content and depictions of police brutality, leading to it being panned by critics and holding a 0% rating on Rotten Tomatoes as of October 2021.

Ouch. 

Was Radical a success or failure? As a studio I guess you could say it was a success because it got four movies made, although only one had any measure of acclaim. And it’s still in existence so maybe there is more to come. 

As a publisher? Absolutely not. The books their movies were “based on” either never existed or are long out of print from Radical. And owning the rights to the comics is a questionable practice in and of itself. Remender, who has had many go rounds in Hollywood, got the rights back to Last Days of American Crime and put out a new edition from Image, so that story has a happier ending. 

Radical is one of the most yuck stories of the comics to film dice game, and publishers are a lot more sensible in how they position themselves now. But it is true that since the early 2000s, Hollywood has decided that comics are a cheap and bountiful source of IP, and so the dice game goes on and on. 

In my 2013 post about Oblivion I ended it with this:

Are comics the shortcut to Hollywood success? No way. Does hard work sometimes pay off? Absolutely. Save me the aisle seat.

I still believe this, although the MCU has changed the game in massive ways. But all things pass, and even the MCU is looking worn-out these days. Still, comics are cool and wonderful. Comics are cool in and of themselves but people are still going to make comics as storyboards for potential movies, and the movies and streamers will get made. But the publishers will have lasting success the way they always have: publishing things that people want to read. 

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** Footnote:  Okay Tekno Comics was probably the first celebrity driven comics line but that is a story for another time.