around 3,000 new French-produced albums were released in 2025. that's roughly half the number of new manga volumes released in Japan that year, even though the global manga market is probably 10 times larger.as a result half of French comic authors (writers and artists) get an annual revenue below the French minimal salary. and unlike other artistic professions (such as actors) they get no social benefits from the state.so my question is: is it the same in the US? do /co/mics authors get enough to live decently even with only a few thousands sales a year?
>>153101672idk but i am curious so i will keep track of this thread
>>153101672https://label619.com/catalogue
>>153101672God I wish there were graphic novel stores like this in the US. If it wasn't a money burn, I'd do it myself.So tired of the dingie shops that haven't been touched since the 70's filled to the fucking brim with unorganized longboxes stacked to the ceiling.
>>153101833I sort of like Mutafukaz more than a lot of western comics, but like Gunning for Ramirez, they just don't seem to get wide releases in English.I hate that NBN wrapped up it's translation of Donjon. We are never getting that again.My only remaining French pull is Radiant, and that's Franga/Manfra.
>>153101672Oh, I forgot to answer your question. No. US Comic publishers, like Marvel and DC, do a pay-per-page rate. It's something like $100 for writers and $150 for artists/colorists (iirc). So, if a writer pumps out a standard 28 page book, they're looking at $2,800 per month before taxes, $33,600 a year, which puts them in poverty level earners in the US (which is why you tend to see one guy on 3 or 4 books a months). Bigger names obviously get better deals, trade deals, etc.
>>153101970For artists it's a $250 starting rate at Marvel, and I believe closer to $450 at DC? Most mid-tier pubs average out around $150 on Work For Hire (i.e. licensed) work so earn below min wage.t. artist in the industry
>>153101672I don't know about decently but they can support themselves. I don't really hear about guys having to work a day job. You do hear a lot about guys being fucked in old age because they have no savings and no benefits though
>>153101970interesting.in France it's the same system as written books, meaning you first get an advance, and then royalties once the advance is refunded by sales. except the rate goes from 1% to 10% max of the price. the vast majority get fewer than 5%. since an album is usually €20, that's €1 per album sold. so you need to sell 20,000 albums a year to get the minimum wage. that's roughly the total numbers of book stores in France, so you need each of them to sell at least one of your book, but counting manga you have 8,000 opposing new albums, and probably as many old ones.so yes, having a day job and quitting after a few years is the norm for 2/3rd of the authors.
>>153101672No, comic authors and artists are largely raped without lube in terms of finances and paymentWhy this hasn’t changed in the past 50 years despite it indirectly causing Marvel’s bankruptcy and directly harming both companies, I cannot fathom
>>153101672Skill issue>>153101833>CCA dissOBSESSED
>is it the same in the US? do /co/mics authors get enough to live decently even with only a few thousands sales a year?Ahahahahhahahaha
>>153101672US creators seem to live fine lives even if they're just jobbers, they just complain because their greedy, Japs have it the worst compared to anybody.
>>153101898The fuck you talking about? those places almost all died out and got replaced by stores that look like OP pic but more Reddity.
>>153101672I'm sure they'd have a bigger market if they made a concerted effort to translate and market stuff to the outside world like the Nips do.
>>153103614a great chunk of it is full of leftism and/or nudity and is therefore unmarketable. also the format is unsustainable, it's already a miracle they manage to keep 40% of the domestic market when a manga volume is half the price of an album for four times the page count (and twice the plot density). full colour and larger art is barely enough to justify the difference, especially when nothing happens.
>>153103614>like the Nips do.The nips actually aren't the ones doing that, a lot of that is people outside of Japan who are just fans of manga going to online retailers, buying the manga raws, and translating them into other languages themselves because they're fans of the material.Generally speaking, there aren't many random Indonesian college kids clamouring for the latest BD releases like they do manga.
>>153101672writing generally isn't a sole occupation; most writers don't make their money only from writing (and to various degrees this has usually been the case), but it's worse now because, after years of having copy rates driven down by the death of print and the expectation of free-read articles, someone has finally invented a machine that simply produces lorem ipsum 24/7 under heavy subsidy from investors and at the moment - energy crisis notwithstanding - appears to be cheaper than hiring a human to think for a bit and write for an houras far as making money? if grant morrison's unaudited publicly filed accounts are to be believed, he may have between £1.4 million and £3 million split between his four companies, though how much of that is real cash, how much is being moved around between the four companies, how much is "his" (ie earnings based on his works and not investment from other parties or money invested elsewhere on the company's behalf) and how much comes from comic books is anybody's guess (these are after all very basic balance sheets and declared to be unaudited)alan moore's sole company's latest accounts reveal a more modest capital of about £300k, with annual earnings of around £30k; though in any case, when a writer's works are being adapted, their reprint earnings probably go up at least a little bit, I suspect Moore's work probably does sell more than Morrison'sthere's also the infamous "£3m" that Millarworld was sold for, having declared its worth to this amount of "intangible assets" (concept IPs) for several years of prior accounts; again, it's not clear if the Millars actually received a lump sum or whether the full amount was dependent on development of works proceeding past set goals, but that figure of £3m was simply what Millar claimed for years Millarworld was worth until someone paid it - prior to that, the company wasn't worth shitthose are big names whose company accounts are public because they're filed in the UK
>>153104383Hell, a lot of manga is flat out translated and typset by anons on /a/, often times right in the live dump threads.Makes me wonder why there's no equivalent on /co/ for Eurocomics.
>>153104655I'm not gonna sit through a four-hour storytime of 120 pages being told that my translations are wrong and stupid
>>153104655there simply aren't enough French speakers on /co/.French BD is a niche even within /co/, whereas /a/ is fully dedicated to Japan only.
>>153101672>they get no social benefits from the stateFrance has the best public universal healthcare system in the world, 4 months of paid maternity leave plus 1 month off for the dad, and bachelor’s degrees that cost $800 total for citizens (thanks French Revolution), so the playing field for an individual starting and maintaining an artistic career is quite different.
>>153104742>4 months of paid maternity leave plus 1 month off for the dadthat's only if you're a regular employee. as an independent you get nothing.
>>153102216to be honest, those 2/3 are usually hobbyist-tier that can only talk about their teenagehood feefees drawn with stick figures.
Is it some sort of law, like in radio? Do french bookstores HAVE to carry french-made books written in french made by french authors IN france by 50% volume or they have to close, like radio stations?
>>153104782Ah, I see. In the US there’s zero regardless. The healthcare and education cost is a much more significant impact. Higher education, or time off to train is a luxury even for young people.
>>153104782you can get RSA like anybody else, it's just annoying to declare your status every months
>>153104836oh yes. just increasing the share would not be the solution. the base share would naturally rise if the total amount of sales was divided between fewer genuinely good authors. the publishers are cynically exploiting wannabe authors who are willing to work for nothing and produce shit. who cares since the book will be sold at the exact same price in the end thanks to some retarded law
>>153103500I wish. All the places around me still look that and it sucks.
>>153101672Do you have a source for those numbers?
>>153105713This is /co/ we're talkin about. OF COURSE they don't.
>>153101970>$33,600 a year>which puts them in poverty level earners in the USNot even close for federal level. However, states have different definitions that are usually higher.
>>153104655>Makes me wonder why there's no equivalent on /co/ for Eurocomics.Plus4chan's /coc/ used to serve this function. Not sure how much happens there, now.
>>153101970Standard issues are 22 pages dumbass. Your rates are well off too. Colorists are cheaper than writers.
>>153104655We've had a few people translate them, notably Ouash whose Les Nombrils translations are better than the official ones.
>>153103614Actually there's a lot of manga that's untranslated like a bunch of Shotaro Ishinomori and Go Nagai stuff.
>>153105713several specialised articles and a book seller I know who simply has access to the full internal retailer catalogue.btw one article said that in 1996 the total number of new albums (excluding manga which was still marginal at the time) was 650. now it's 3,000, and their price has increased too.
>>153104855no, but the law says that the publisher set the price, and the bookstore cannot reduce it more than 5%. also imported books (manga) cannot be sold cheaper than in their country.but publishers get a much higher share on BDs (and their price is higher) so they are pushing bookstores to keep them at 50%. bookstores cannot read every single new book so most of them will just do what the publishers say.
What are your thoughts on Donjon?
>>153104655There used to be a few of us, but nowadays it's really just me, there are a couple of guys on kaskus who occasionally drop stuff like Spirou, Cedric, Colin Colas, kids' series I guess you'd say. Unfortunately I haven't been NEETmoding it for over a decade now, so I only get a handful of releases done each year.It's just too niche and too much work for most people to want to put the effort in. It doesn't have the benefit of anime adaptations and orientalism/japonisme to give it the allure that manga has. So you don't have hordes of people online clamouring for even the shittiest isekai shonenslop, you e-peen isn't getting any action. I think though with the rise of AI tools we might get some more shitty translations. I'm pretty biased against AI but I will admit it'll probably do a better job on French to English than moonrunes to English. If some ESL can feed in a book and 20 minutes later get a vaguely passable sloplation and get praised by his fellow ESL forum-dwellers then good for him I guess. On the reddit bandedessinee sub, I see more and more adverts for paid AI slop translation apps, and every time there seems to be less opposition to them.Anyway, as luck would have it, I did just finish up a couple of volumes in scanlation, so if anyone is interested: >>153109729
>>153104855no, eurocomics just sells so there is no reason to not sell them. comics are the specialty that you won't get everywhere
>>153104655>Makes me wonder why there's no equivalent on /co/ for Eurocomics.I think cost is a big problems. if you get mangas in shounen jump it's cheap (and printed on the shittiest paper you will ever see), and you can wait for online releases for clean art. Eurocomics prepublication is marginal and expensive (it's in color after all). volumes are really expensives because they are sold as a quality art product. online publishers are rare if they ever exist.
>>153103614Even non-translated Franco-Belgian comics are hard to find online.
>>153109923Not really, loads are on libgen and anna's, and if you don't mind putting in a tiny bit of effort to get on the ancient emule p2p network, ebdz.net is the best place to find almost anything.Like >>153109856 said, France's comic industry is quite behind on digitals, intentionally so, though there is more and more stuff on izneo and amazon in digital these days, it's still more expensive and lower quality than it should be. But that does mean that there is still a thriving scanning scene for BDs.
Interesting thread.
>>153112147Is it?
>>153103500Granted i live in the deep south but every store around is like that. At least some of them have decent organization, but massive boxes of poorly sorted superhero comics are the norm. The audience for comics around here is definitely more millenial and genx so i get it, but as a comic lover with pretty much zero interest in marvel or DC its disappointing.
>>153104655Manga has a lot of new stuff. Most of the stuff that gets semi-regular /co/ threads hasn't been new in ~20 years and they're really interested in a couple pages, not the actual comics, also it's boring stuff like Cedric, not the real interesting weird stuff.
>>153113321It is.
>>153112147French comics are fascinating and the mere proliferation of them is amazing to bad they didn't found a niche to milk instead of grasping every genre imaginable
>>153107714it's honestly 70-85% if we're talking about currently running weekly/monthly stuff, since most aren't big enough series to even have korean/mandarin, let alone english
>>153115095>it is bad that there are a variety of stories in BDWhat?
>>153115095weirdly horny science fantasy isn't a niche?
>>153115330it is bad because these stories are shit. there unironically was more creativity under the strict "no-young-women no-love one-page-per-week" regulation of the 1930s to 1960s.
>>153115095That's a good thing though. That's how every thing except American comics are.
