Comics UK

Original pencil roughs are always more vital and filled with life, even compared with highly skilled inking over the same pencils.

To get paid for just doing pencil roughs would be my ultimate dream job.....

This relates to points raised by Phil and matrix much earlier in this thread. I picked up this 100 million mark banknote at the Reebok Antiques Fair on Monday. No authentic wheelbarrow as well, unfortunately. When I asked the dealer why it was only printed on one side, he said, It was hardly worth the bother, was it? No point in throwing good money after bad.

That's good to see Phoenix. A good dinner party piece as well, if you ever have any fiat currency supporters over, just get that note out of the draw!!

I would also have questioned the dealers comments, and asked him "where was the good money"?

Now that's what I call inflation!

An anecdote that may be relevant here. When I was at art college about 20 years ago, because I was interested in comics I was introduced to Will Simpson, who was then drawing Judge Dredd for 2000AD. He told me how much 2000AD artists got paid - if I remember rightly, it was something like £120 a page for black and white, £180 a page for colour. Twenty years later PJ Holden is drawing Judge Dredd for 2000AD, and what he gets paid is about the same.

Go back to 1950, and Frank Hampson was paid enough for 2 pages a week of Dan Dare to employ a studio of five or six artists. Fast forward to today and professional artists are barely making a living. And that's despite quality full-colour printing being cheaper than it's ever been. That's how severe the collapse in readership has been.

And what about aspiring journalists (which is the background UK comics editors used to invariably hail from) - it's now pretty much accepted that they'll have to work for free to get their foot in the door or move up the career ladder.

Times are tough in just about all aspects of the UK media/creative industries...

Some of the higher-profile artists in comics were on higher page rates----John Geering and Bob Nixon certainly were, in the 1980s.

On 2000 AD, artists like Ron Smith, Brian Bolland and other prominent contributers must surely have been paid a fair bit more than newer, untested artists........I remember Kevin O'Neill saying to me it took him several days to do a single page........his rewards for such astonishing work must have been pretty miniscule, at that time at least.

I got the impression that Mike Mc Mahon, Ron Smith, and especially Carlos Ezquerra were prolific artists and must have made a decent wage---today of course the outlets are so meagre it is criminal that so many talented people are more than likely working for peanuts.

I get $125 a page, and I can't write and draw a page to professional standards in less than a week. There's no way I could make a living at this game!