I Didn’t Quit Comics… Comics Quit Me

The economy is trash, crowdfunding is drying up, and comics are more unstable than ever — but here I am anyway

Hi there!

I hope this newsletter finds you well. I know I skipped a few weeks — school got overwhelming with a mountain of homework, important tests, and endless studying. Thankfully, I’ve got a few weeks to breathe before the next wave of exams hits.

If I had to describe the course I’m in, it honestly feels like speedrunning several semesters of college in just six consecutive months. Every month and a half, new classes start while old ones end, which means every 2–3 weeks there’s either a big, scary midterm or an even scarier final. It’s non-stop, breakneck chaos.

Lately, my classmates often ask me why I “quit art/comics.” Their words — not mine. They don’t quite understand why someone who can produce the quality of work that I do isn’t a millionaire. The assumption is always that maybe I did something wrong. Maybe if I’d just posted one more time on Instagram, I’d be rich and famous by now.

Unfortunately, I know that’s not how it works. It’s been rough out here, and I’m just… tired of “the hustle.” And to be clear — I haven’t quit. I’ve simply chosen to take a step back because comics aren’t providing the kind of future or stability that I need.

There’s no sugarcoating it: I’m disgusted with where the comics industry is — across the board. Mainstream, indie, webcomics — all of it. And I’m not talking about the content or quality of the stories themselves. I’m talking about what’s happening to the creators.

The economy is in the toilet, and it’s getting harder and harder for small indie creators to get the funding they need on Kickstarter. I’ve seen people who used to raise $10k per book now struggling to hit $4k. My own campaigns haven’t been an exception — I used to reliably hit $5k, but Sacrimony #8 barely scraped past $3k. And after dropped and canceled pledges, it was well under that.

Maybe I’m out of line for saying this — but I’m going to say it anyway: big publishers with established IPs, who absolutely do not need to crowdfund, have been invading Kickstarter and vacuuming up money from the ecosystem. If a potential backer has to choose between my little Sacrimony book or a Transformers comic… they’re probably not choosing Sacrimony. And let’s be real — Kickstarter will never do anything about it because they’re making too much money off the big publishers. More than they ever would from hundreds of small indie creators combined.

Capitalism at work, I guess.

Then there’s the absolute dick punch of seeing legendary creators — folks who’ve spent decades working for the Big Two/Three — having to turn to GoFundMe for basic healthcare. People who helped build the foundation of the comics industry are now having to take commissions at 75 years old just to pay for cancer treatment, because the companies they worked for never offered benefits… despite profiting off their work for decades.

Meanwhile, indie publishers are collapsing left and right. Creators are fighting to get back the rights to their own IPs — or even just the money they’re owed. Entire warehouses full of unsold books are sitting in limbo, undelivered, because distribution has fallen apart and creators can’t even get those thousands of dollars of books back.

Honestly, it’s grim. But weirdly, I’m almost relieved that I’ve been rejected by every publisher I ever pitched to — because in hindsight, it probably saved me from the nightmare of losing my IP, losing my inventory, and getting paid next to nothing for the privilege, if they even pay me my next to nothing. I really feel for all the homies out there who are dealing with this shit right now.

Meanwhile, as if things weren’t bad enough, artists are now also losing jobs to AI. Companies are increasingly opting for cheap, soulless machine-generated artwork instead of paying real humans for their labor, skill, and creativity. I’ve personally lost two gigs so far to AI — gigs that were supposed to go to an actual human but instead went to a machine that doesn’t need to eat, pay rent, or get medication for painful chronic health conditions or care about the ethics of scraping work from other artists.

It’s insulting on every level — not just financially, but morally. And the worst part is, the people making these decisions don’t care about quality or integrity. They care about the bottom line. Yet somehow, they’ll still claim to “love art” and “support creators” while actively undermining both.

On the webcomics side, it’s not much better. I constantly see horror stories of Webtoon artists burning out and ending up in the hospital, because the demand for abundant constant content is unsustainable. They’re forced to either work themselves to death or cut into their already low pay to hire assistants just to survive. And then there are the webcomic collectives shutting down, stiffing creators on payments, and blaming it on “unforeseen challenges” — aka greed and incompetence.

The bottom line? Comics aren’t in a good place right now. I don’t know what it would take to fix it — beyond, I don’t know… better management? A functional economy? A system that actually values creators?

It really sucks that something I’ve dreamed about doing since I was a kid turned out to be this soul-sucking and unstable. But here we are.

That said — no matter what’s going on, I’m still here in my little corner, still working on my own comics (and sometimes other people’s, if they’re patient enough to deal with my “full-time student + eventual day job” pace). But I’ve accepted that I can’t rely on comics to take care of me. The ecosystem is fundamentally broken, and people are being forced to choose between a tank of gas and a comic book.

It is what it is. And at this point, my focus is on building a more stable future for myself outside of this broken industry.

I’ll weather the storm, like I always do — and we’ll see where the industry goes from here. Maybe someday the comics industry will figure out how to not chew up and spit out its creators. Maybe.

Thanks for reading my rant.

Also, if you’d like to throw some spare change my way as I continue to work on my comics, I’ve got a Patreon here.

-M