Brief Tales of Comics: Rory Root And Pricing Your Art (Patreon)

Sarah is still in the hospital, and things are busy, but I don't want to neglect saying hello and thank you to the new backers (and hello and thank you to the ongoing backers).

So, hello! And thank you!

I also want to stay in touch here even though things are a mess, so I am going to try to put up some quick posts. 

Here's a brief convention story that revolves around a question that faces a lot of comic and other visual artists: How Much Should I Charge For My Art? For every artist who knows their value, there's a few who overestimate it, and then there's the great lot of us who undervalue ourselves and practically wave the Imposter Syndrome flag. 

Anyway.

I was set up at a table at San Diego Comic Con, it would have been some time between 1992 to 1994, earlier part of the decade. Based on the table location and my dim memories of my surroundings, I can tell that it wasn't my Artist's Alley set-up for the event, that I was either doing a signing at another table for some reason or, more likely, I was doing something for the retailer show that prefaced the actual convention.

The main point is that most of the artwork I had on the table was a stack of Bill and Ted's Excellent Comic pages. This was the only series I ever wrote and drew for any length for another company, and while it was well-received in some quarters, it didn't exactly bring in the quarters, if you get me. And although it was a Marvel comic, it wasn't a "Marvel" comic, if you get me. And back then Bill and Ted fandom was solid but not as strong or supportive or worked up as it has since become (I remember being interviewed by Starlog and a Bill & Ted fanzine in the day of the comic, years afterward an online site would contact me occasionally). At this point I didn't have a lot to sell to anyone at my table, the Predator pages were probably all gone at the time, I sold some early Milk & Cheese pages, and I had some Pirate Corp$! pages. None of these were exactly in demand or sold for very much. Despite my stressing over how to price the art, I did raise the price on the Predator pages because the damned thing, as amateurish as it looked, sold over two hundred thousand copies, and I knew it had it's fans. Even so, I priced them "high" only in relative terms. 

I was selling Pirate Corp$! pages for as low as $10, which, even in the early 90's, was pretty low. But I was unhappy with the pages and the characters weren't recognizable to anyone and my few fans always seemed broke back then. I equated the Bill and Ted art with those pages, and started pricing them at $10, $15 and -- good lord, choke, gasp, etc -- $20. Maybe I had something priced over that because I secretly wanted to keep it, I would do that a lot (I still do, I guess).  

At some point Rory Root comes over to my table and starts looking over everything. Rory was one of the best-known comic retailers in the country, he owned Comic Relief in Berkeley which had a good reputation as a full-service, full-line direct market store. I knew Rory through Jim Hanley, and had met him at our store (Jim Hanley's Universe) on visits to NYC, through retailer summits when I was working at JHU, and at conventions. If you're an old-timer like me from the con circuit, or shopped at the store or whatever, you would know that if someone made a custom Rory Root action figure, the two accessories they'd have to include would be his ubiquitous hat and coffee mug, which he traveled the con floor with. Possibly traveled everywhere with. 

So, Rory's looking over the table, and he's looking over the art stacks. He's leafing through the Bill and ted pages, turning a few over to check the prices, going through the pile. And I'm doing what every artist sitting behind the convention table does, I'm hoping he pulls a few out to buy.  And Rory is shaking his head. He's not making a face, there's nothing nasty behind it. He almost looks sad. Disappointed? I feel weird, because not only is it weird when people go through your art and you're feeling itchy and unworthy and stupid, but I was still pretty young, and to me Rory was an adult, and I was a dumb kid. And my art was being judged.

Or was it?

Rory neatens up the pile, all the pages are stacked up straight and high. No sale. And Rory taps the top of the stack. 

And he looks at me, seriously.  

And Rory says something along the lines of, "You really need to raise the prices on your pages. You're selling yourself short".

And I replied, "So how many are you taking, Rory?".

And he looks at me, and he taps the top of the stack two times with his finger, and he nods and says, "Good point". And he moved on. 

I liked Rory, we lost a good guy on the front lines when he passed on at the young age 0f 50 in 2008. I always appreciated his intent and his words, but the fact is, those pieces of paper with marks made all over them can't be exchanged for rent, for a mortgage, or for food. Unless you're a huge name like Robert Crumb, since someone traded him a house in France for five sketchbooks, or so the story goes. I'm not Crumb (I also don't want to be him, but I'd like free real estate, especially out of the country right now).  I've traded art for goods, for other art, for art supplies, for toys. But in general, if you're stacking those pages on a cheap table in a faceless auditorium with overpriced food that tastes terrible, you want to sell that stuff for money to pay bills and buy things.

And if you have a whiff of self-doubt, imposter syndrome or self-loathing (hello, three fingers raised here, at least back then for sure), you are likely pricing your work in a desperate attempt to not only move them but hopefully boost your flagging self-esteem. Then you get to a point where you feel like a jerk because you realize you cut your legs off many, many times (I don't know how you regrow all those legs, but apparently it's what happens). 

I still have people telling me my prices are too low. I want to scream at artists on IG who undercut themselves imo (if I knew Tess Fowler personally I'd be DMing her to double her prices immediately for her 4" x 4" watercolor art, at the very least -- of course, that puts me in the Rory Root position because I'm not buying anything -- but the hope is that the people who are buying will still buy, and those numbers slowly increase or you splash big for some reason from a book or an RT from a bigshot that puts eyes on you or stuff like that, there). We are our worst enemies, we who don't recognize our value (or grossly overinflate our worth, and those folks amazingly tend to be shitty artists and often shitty people, anecdotally speaking). Anyway, I say this as someone who can literally freeze up into a cringe position when I price my stuff, and who loses sleep if he quotes a high price for an inquiry on a "good" page of mine.

The thing is, it always comes down to how many Rory is taking. But you might as well remember that people will pass you by even if your pages are $20, or the modern equivalent. So you might as well bump it some, and keep bumping it, because this is a business as well as an art.

Also, file this advice under "Do as I say, not as I often do".

There's another brief little comics story for you. 

Thanks and good afternoon.