“You on the motorbike… You two girls… Tell your friends…”
This is the final week of the Work in Comics survey. As greedy as I am for as big a data set as possible, it can’t stay up forever. I'll be closing it down first thing Monday morning (Mountain Standard Time). So let me take one last opportunity to appeal to you to take the survey and share it with your peers and collaborators.
Most of what we know about the working conditions and career prospects of making comics is based in anecdote and hearsay. There's some truth there, but we can't know how representative those experiences are of the typical creator's without systematic study. And this is, as far as I can tell, the first attempt to do so in the field of English-language comics—it is, moreover, distinguished by including independent/alternative cartoonists alongside mainstream creators as well as recognizing the new opportunities for producing comics independently online.
The survey not only provides a window into the demographic makeup of the creative “workforce” in comics but it tells us about income and benefits, training and education, work–life balance and job satisfaction.
Producing this information and making it widely available will help us to identify challenges facing the comics community, and it will put individual creators in a stronger position to make career decisions and negotiate with their employers or publishers.
So, as they say whenever census time rolls around, stand up and be counted.