By Joshua H. Stulman

Both DC Comics and Marvel have had a disturbing and shady history of maligning and excluding writers and artists from a share in billions of profits made directly from their creative efforts.

DC Comics’s most recent attack on the livelihood of artists comes with their announcement that DC will actively prevent artists from creating digital artworks, using DC characters, for sale as NFT’s ( Non Fungible Tokens).

Don’t know what NFT’s are? Think Bitcoin but for Digital Art. Basically, each artwork offered as NFT has a unique identifier that remains with the Digital artwork as it is bought and sold. It can be traced throughout its sales history as it changes hands of owners. The great thing about NFT’s for artists, is that each time the digital artwork is sold, original artist gets a cut of the new sale- like a type of royalty.

The creation of commission artwork by comic artists using DC and Marvel characters is an old tradition that has been in practice since the beginning of the comic industry itself. These one-of-a-kind artworks often generate a second income for comic artists and offset the relatively low pay (and mostly zero benefits) offered by Marvel and DC. Most comic artists understand this practice as an unspoken agreement between themselves and the comic companies in exchange for the rigorous editorial demands, deadline crunching and re-draws, and of course the knowledge that they are denied any ownership of their characters or stories that they make.

And Marvel and DC have been fine with that since the 1980’s. So long as artists weren’t doing production runs of t-shirts and merchandise of comic characters, DC and Marvel didn’t mind the annual artist sketchbook, occasional unlicensed print or original artwork sold at conventions across the country. In fact, many successful artists have made a second career out of producing original artwork; just look at Alex Ross, Neal Adams, and most notably John Byrne- just google “Byrne Commissions” and check out all the wonderful artwork!

So what happened? Well, former Wonder Woman artist, Jose Delbo age 87, made $1.85 million dollars selling his Wonder Woman comic inspired artwork as an NFT.

Once the DC Comics lawyers got wind, they immediately went into action to make sure that no other retired octogenarian can never again “dupe” them! Its not like fine artists like Andy Warhol, Lichtenstein or even Banksy have been doing this for decades, god forbid a comic artist gets in on making real money too.

DC Comics responded by issuing a memo on March 12 to all its artists forbidding them from engaging in the creation of NFT’s using DC characters, stating “please note that the offering for sale of any digital images featuring DC’s intellectual property with or without NFTs, whether rendered for DC’s publications or rendered outside the scope of one’s contractual engagement with DC, is not permitted.”

So the official word from DC goes something like this, “we’ll let you make a little bit of money but if you actually use your talent to make too much- then we want our cut!”

Well, then why would DC stop there? Why not prevent the sale of Original Artwork at conventions or online? Can you imagine what would happen if EBay started blocking the sale of Sketch Covers, Commissions or Published Comic Art? What if DC Comics opened a lawsuit to prevent the sale of all Original Comic Art on the secondary market?

Scary stuff, right? The real question is how will comic artists respond? There’s no union for comic artists to demand standards or benefits, in fact most comic artists aren’t even full-time employees!

For artists at DC Comics, they are going to have to take a long hard look at the real life financial cost that they are willing to endure for the “privilege” to draw their favorite childhood super-hero.

Joshua H. Stulman

Owner, Brooklyn Comic Shop