The Market Is Booming. The People Who Built It Are Not.
Creative work was already undervalued. Now there’s an excuse for it.
The UK comics market hit £78.7 million in sales last year. Record numbers, the highest ever tracked, children’s comics up almost thirty percent, adult graphic novels sitting just shy of their all-time peak. By any measure you care to apply, the industry is thriving.
So why are the people who made it happen mostly earning less than £20,000 a year?
Those two facts have been allowed to coexist for long enough that the industry has started to treat the contradiction as a weather condition, something unfortunate, persistent, and largely beyond anyone’s control. It isn’t. It’s a choice, one that gets made quietly, contract by contract, commission by commission, in the gap between what the market generates and what ever reaches the person who actually drew the thing.
This isn’t a new problem. Page rates in British comics have barely moved in real terms for four decades. The freelance model has always transferred financial risk downward, onto the creator, while the upside travels in the opposite direction. Work-for-hire contracts strip creators of rights to work that gets reprinted, adapted, and monetised long after the original cheque has been spent. None of that is new, and none of it has ever been acceptable. Publishers paid poorly because they could, and everyone understood, dimly, that this was the arrangement.
What’s changed is that exploitation now comes with a rationale.
Generative Ai has handed commissioners and publishers something they’ve never had before: a respectable economic justification for paying less. The conversation has shifted, unmistakably, from “we can’t afford to pay you more” to “the market has decided your work is replaceable.” Those are not the same claim. The first is a negotiating position. The second is a verdict, and once a verdict lands, it changes what feels reasonable to ask for.
Hannah Berry has been watching this more carefully than almost anyone. An award-winning creator, former UK Comics Laureate, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, she first began structured research into the relationship between comics creators and emerging technologies in 2020, when generative Ai was still largely speculative. She returned to the same research in 2025, not to prove a point but to understand whether anything had actually shifted. What she found was quietly devastating: almost none of the creators she spoke to were using generative Ai themselves, and yet around a third had already lost work or income because of it.
“That’s the part people don’t quite grasp,” she told me. “It’s not a tool that creators are adopting, it’s a tool that’s being used around them, often instead of them.”
The economic damage isn’t coming from creators changing how they work, it’s coming from the people who used to buy the work deciding they no longer need to. And it’s not the high-profile commissions going first, it’s the smaller ones, the cover for a small press book, the character design, the poster, the kinds of jobs that sit between larger projects and quietly keep a creative career financially viable. The hidden scaffolding, as Hannah describes it. The first thing to be replaced.
“It’s not dramatic when it happens,” she said. “That’s the problem, it just stops. The emails stop, the small jobs stop, the bits of work you rely on without really thinking about them just disappear.”
What Ai introduces is a language of inevitability that makes it harder to push back. When a publisher says the budget won’t stretch, you can argue the budget. When they gesture toward a generative tool and imply the market has already decided, the conversation changes shape entirely. The devaluation of creative work isn’t new, but the new justification for it is. There’s a meaningful difference between an industry that underpays people because it has always gotten away with it, and one that underpays people because it has convinced itself, and them, that the work was never worth more to begin with.
Hannah put a question to me, simply, without drama, and I’ve been sitting with it since we spoke earlier this year;
“If comics are doing well,” she said, “why aren’t the people making them doing well too?”
Follow the money rather than the announcements and the answer is bleak: the industry was never designed to share its success downward. Ai hasn’t created that problem, it has given the people who benefit from it a new argument for why fixing it can wait. And the longer it waits, the more creators do the maths, find it doesn’t work, and leave. The shelves stay full. The sales figures hold. And somewhere in the middle of all that, the industry quietly becomes less itself.
What’s happening isn’t disruption. It’s removal, and it’s happening in plain sight, while the market reports look better than ever.