Someone asked why European comics (and specifically French and Belgian comics like Silage and Wakfu) were so great, and the comics market there so much more rich and vibrant than in America. I pointed out Euro artists get state health care. - ThreadSky

joeartguy.bsky.social • 2 days ago

Someone asked why European comics (and specifically French and Belgian comics like Silage and Wakfu) were so great, and the comics market there so much more rich and vibrant than in America. I pointed out Euro artists get state health care.

Reposted from David Graeber Institute

When asked about the benefits to society of Universal Basic Income, David Graeber mentioned this.

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kyefox.com•2 days ago

Lingering effects of the Comics Code, which held on to 2011, compounded with this to keep the US from developing much of a comics culture. Imagine where movies/TV would be if the Hays Code were still within living memory of people just entering the business. No Sopranos. No Game of Thrones.

davemaru.bsky.social•2 days ago

Also don’t forget the stupid Diamond Select distribution method

joeartguy.bsky.social•1 day ago

The Code held comics back as an art form, but that started to slip by the 1970s and it was abandoned by the mid-1980s. When I started in comics circa 1992, no one at our company even knew *how* to submit issues to the CCA for review. (We considered doing so for a laugh.)

That’s over 30 years ago.

joeartguy.bsky.social•1 day ago

By contrast, corporate work to preserve work-for-hire without benefits has brutalized writers & artists from the start.

Up through the 1970s (and Neal Adams’ rights campaign) artists could often get by due to cheap housing & relative general prosperity. Reaganomics put an end to that formula.

joeartguy.bsky.social•1 day ago

Throttling of US wages in general combined with previous factors to freeze comic page rates at 1990s levels. But lack of health care is worse.

I’ve known artists that got by just fine until treatable heath problems killed them. Even more who quit to save their insurance. What’s THAT do to the Art?

helmeetelgato.bsky.social•1 day ago

This so much. And we all know the many and so common physical and mental issues one will face in these professions, and how much we all hang from a spiderweb thread 😰

zylver.bsky.social•1 day ago

I shouldn't have laughed at such trivial thing but...

*laughs in European*

lemurdreamer87.bsky.social•1 day ago

Yup. Under capitalism, so many potential artists are too busy working crappy jobs just to survive, so they have no time or energy to create art. And the more capitalism is allowed to run rampant, the more extreme that effect becomes.

zykezero.bsky.social•1 day ago

Being able to do what you love with some kind of safety net is absolutely a big boon to the creators. Even just what they have in Canada has led to an outsize impact on Canadian content creators versus American

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