I work in comics as a colorist. Pretty much everyone on the art end are freelance and work assignment to assignment. I wish we could unionize but it feels hard to do that when you literally are never technically employed by them. When a job might only last a month or a week and you’re getting a page rate rather than an hourly rate.
To be fair, marvel does actually pay OK page rates and I get residuals every time they reprint stuff or sell digital copies. It’s small amounts per book but I’ve been working with them so long that I’ll occasionally get payments for hundreds of dollars.
Smaller publishers tend not to pay anywhere near what the big companies do. Especially if you’re working on properties/characters that you don’t own the rights to - if you’re just work for hire on someone else’s stuff.
One huge downside in my situation is my page rate hasn’t budged for like 10 years and we all know that doesn’t exactly match the change in cost of living…
I worked in animation for a while until zazlav laid us all off. That was awesome. Good pay and benefits. And that’s literally because the animation industry in Los Angeles is unionized.
