Making comics is not a career

Excerpt from the Foreword for Best American Comics 2017 by Bill Kartalopoulos

It is true that many people have built careers by making comics, but in the United States, those artists who support themselves entirely through their comics work are a small group. They are rare exceptions among the countless others who also support themselves with day jobs, freelance work, teaching, original art sales, commissions, illustration, animation, graphic design, and in countless other ways. Artists must often budget their time as they seek to achieve a balance between passion projects and paying work.

The field of comics has changed radically in the past twenty years, as robust graphic novel sections have appeared in most bookstores and libraries. I think it could be easy for young artists entering the field now to see so much professionalized output and imagine a broader set of economic possibilities than actually exists.

The truth is that most authors of graphic novels - like most authors of prose novels can not subsist on modest advances and royalties alone. They are a drop in the bucket relative to the many months often years of focused labor required to produce a book-length work in the comics form. Some countries like Canada and France have grant programs that support artists and publishers in order to develop and promote culture, but the United States has few such public programs.

The notion that society should invest in humanizing culture has little traction here, and unfortunately seems at the time of this writing to be rapidly losing already meager ground. Comics remain healthier as a category of culture than as a category of commerce.

Precisely because those odds are so daunting, artists entering the field should engage the medium and take risks: expressive risks and artistic risks. In a field with no guarantees, compromising one's work to meet a perceived marketplace is a much riskier gamble than wholehearted, incautious engagement. The odds of financial success are always low, but if an artist pushes his or her work as far as it can go, the chances for personal satisfaction and growth climb exponentially.

Personal creative ambition is a safer bet, on its own terms, than a career plan

The artists who have broken through to mainstream attention in the biggest ways have often done so by making the work that they were motivated to make despite the lack of an obvious market or audience. Art Spiegelman serialized Maus in the comics anthology magazine he self-published with Francoise Mouly at a time when no publisher on earth was looking for a graphic novel about the Holocaust featuring cats and mice.

Raina Telgemeier self-published the work that would become Smile in black-and-white photocopied form before children's book publishers became interested in comics.

Alison Bechdel serialized her cult comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For for years in the alternative press before Fun Home made her a household name among readers. The world did not know that it needed this work until artists made it.

When artists resist limitations, readers gain a fuller and truer picture of everything the art form is capable of. It takes a little vision for artists to see beyond the edges of what comics have been to imagine what they could be. Readers can share this kind of vision, too. Certainly many who do function as critics, scholars, editors, and curators. But it's not necessary to be professionally involved with comics to share this vision. It only requires some thought, some curiosity, some imagination, and an open mind. This is the posture shared by artists, critics, and engaged readers that keeps us all open and primed and ready to appreciate new expressions as they emerge, no matter how alien they may appear to be upon first contact.

A culture will die without readers who are willing to read adventurously, to push beyond their own comfort zones so that artists may push beyond theirs.

by Bill Kartalopoulos