I got asked how I make money in comics.

The simple answer is that I work through publishers that sell to retailers & give me the money made after everything & everyone along the way get’s paid for.(Printing costs, payment to the marketing & production people on the book etc)  – or sometimes I’ll just get a flat fee (or an advance against royalties) when I turn in pages. (also I sometimes sell the original drawings– which is an advantage of working on paper over digital) 

Getting to that relationship with a publisher who could pay me enough to live took awhile– I had my 1st books published when I was 19 (and made about $100 for an entire issue–sometimes $15 a page for porn pages)

 I started making a living off of just comics about 10 years later.  

I think the main thing is getting your work out there and building up a body of work. I did a lot of art jobs on projects that I didn’t own– and those were ok to get me money to survive and build up skills that I could use in my own work (or sometimes work like the Prophet series, that was a project that I couldn’t have done on my own)– but while I was doing those jobs I worked on short comics that I still own and can keep in print forever.

There was certainly a Catch22 in that people took me more seriously once I had work in print & most of the work I could get was in porn comics that publishers didn’t take seriously. – 

but yeah, how I make money off of comics and how you do, might be different animals. The way I work is mostly based on the ye olde comics-in-comic-shops idea of making money in comics,  A lot of people post their comics online & then release pages early thought a patrion or a variety of online sales things– Comixology, kickstarter etc.

I dunno if that helps anyone but hopefully it’s some clarity. –Brandon