18 months after it was initially announced that newsletter platform Substack was intending to make a serious play for comic book creators, the cracks are starting to show in the company’s plans, with talent suspending or altering their offerings as their initial deals lapse. Whatever the future of the comic creator newsletter landscape might be, it’s already beginning to take shape.

Substack comics: Why newsletters?

It’s not as if comic book creator newsletters weren’t a thing before Substack’s investment in the medium, of course; writers like Warren Ellis, Ed Brubaker, and others had been using them for more than a decade before Substack entered the game in 2021. The reason why newsletters are such an appealing outlet is, according to Kieron Gillen, “control, really. You guarantee you're speaking to the people who want to be spoken to, and you're not relying on the nature of an algorithm to design to show it them (and so being reliant on you being a performer on the form enough to make the algorithm work for you).”

That’s important because, as Gillen explains via email, “The level of actual interaction has been going down on Twitter for years. You can have hundreds of thousands of followers, but if they don't actually buy your stuff, there's no work-related point to it.”

“I think what makes a newsletter feel like a good idea at this particular moment is that I've realized I do need to be in contact with the readership, even if it's contact with a handful of them via megaphone from a mountain bunker, and this is a way to do that,” agreed Al Ewing. “It feels like I've turned a corner in terms of my general reclusivity - I'm doing more self-promotion now than I've done in a while, letting readers know when new books are out and so on, I'm doing more writing about music than I have in a while, I'm managing to keep to the ‘I have to do one of these every week’ rule, I'm seeing possibilities for self-publishing through it. It's proving useful.”

Neither of these writers use Substack for their own newsletters, preferring ButtonDown and Ghost respectively. “I heard Spencer Ackerman talk about moving there on a podcast while I was casting about for somewhere to host a newsletter, and I weighed up the options and Ghost came out looking pretty good,” explains Ewing as to his choice of platform, while Gillen notably was a former Substack user who left the platform in early 2021 in response to concerns over the company’s business practices — in particular, the Substack Pro program.

The Substack Pro Deal

Substack Pro launched in March 2021, as a formalized program to subsidize content creators on the platform. As Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie explained at the time, the company had been offering one-off payments to creators ahead of Substack Pro, but Pro was the next step of that idea. As McKenzie explained it at the time, “With Substack Pro, we pay a writer an upfront sum to cover their first year on the platform. The idea is that the payment can be more attractive to a writer than a salary, so they don’t have to stay in a job (or take one) that’s less interesting to them than being independent. In return for that financial security, a Pro writer agrees to let Substack keep 85% of the subscription revenue in that first year. After that year, the deal flips, so that the writer no longer gets a minimum guarantee but from then on keeps 90% of the subscription revenue – which, if we’ve made our bet well, will be a larger overall dollar amount.”

The launch of the program immediately ran into criticism when it was reported that controversial writers like Glenn Greenwald and Graham Linehan, who had been banned from Twitter over his transphobic beliefs, were being paid as initial participants. Annalee Newitz, another Substack writer who left the platform because of the program, would describe the program as a “scam” in her final Substack mailing.

(Additionally, some participants also realized that they were losing money because of Substack’s terms for the initial year, which was a criticism few expected to hear.)

Within months of the launch of Substack Pro, news broke that the company had hired former Captain America and Amazing Spider-Man writer Nick Spencer, and was looking to bring a number of comic book creators in on the Substack Pro program. In August 2021, the first fruits of his labors were announced, with creators including James Tynion IV, Scott Snyder, Saladin Ahmed, Molly Knox Ostertag, Sophie Campbell, and others announced as being part of the initiative. Readers were invited to sign up for a monthly rate (somewhere in the region of $7-10), an annual rate, or with some newsletters, a significantly higher founders rate that offered additional perks. In exchange, they’d get exclusive content - whether it was essays, conversations with other creators, or original comics.

In January 2022, a second wave of Substack Pro comics creators were announced, including Grant Morrison, Jen Bartel, Brian K. Vaughan, and the duo of Tom King and Elsa Charretier under the banner of their comic, Love Everlasting. (“Second wave” is somewhat misleading, as creators had been announced between August 2021 and January 2022, including Chip Zdarsky; nonetheless, in terms of significant announcements, the January news was the second and final big wave of sign-up announcements.)

What creators are part of the Substack Pro deal?

While Substack does not traditionally publicly disclose which creators and accounts are part of the Substack Pro program — although it did name some creators when launching the program — creators themselves are free to discuss their participation. As such, the following creators are confirmed to have received Substack Pro grants:

• James Tyrion IV
• Jonathan Hickman, Mike del Mundo, and Mike Huddleston (as 3 Worlds/3 Moons)
• Kelly Thompson
• Scott Snyder
• Skottie Young
• Chip Zdarsky
• Molly Knox Ostertag
• Saladin Ahmed
• Sophie Campbell
• ND Stevenson
• Jeff Lemire
• Donny Cates and Ryan Stegman (as KLC Press)
• Grant Morrison
• Khary Randolph and Joanne Starer (as Glass Eye Studios)
• Brian K. Vaughan and Niko Henrichon (as Exploding Giraffe)
• Rodney Barnes
• Tom King and Elsa Charretier (as Love Everlasting)
• Joshua Williamson
• Matthew Rosenberg
• Gerry Duggan

Substack comics: The no lose scenario?

Beyond what Gillen and Ewing identifies as the benefits of newsletters above, the Substack Pro deal offered significantly greater rewards, with the financial security of the sign-up amount — rumored to be in the hundreds-of-thousands-of-dollars range, although no-one has ever officially confirmed that — providing a basis to create work outside of the the North American comic book store scene that was previously unavailable to most comic creators.

Perhaps the best analog for this financial situation would be an advance from a publisher or record label towards the creation of new work by an artist, but even this is an imperfect parallel — in those cases, the publisher/label would be controlling certain media rights that specifically aren’t being controlled by Substack: while there was certainly an expectation that new material created as a result of the Substack Pro money would be published via Substack, the company had no exclusive claim to any work created as a result of the grant, meaning that the company is essentially underwriting the all-new material from some of comics biggest names in a way that had, simply, never been attempted before.

It looked, on the face of things, like a no-lose scenario, making all Substack Pro-funded work available for other publishers to take into print at a later date — as happened with Tynion’s deal with Dark Horse Comics and Love Everlasting, which landed at Image, amongst others. What could go wrong?

The hidden costs of Substack comics

“I find the slow burst of the Substack bubble to be fascinating,” read a text I got from an anonymous comic creator the other morning.

That might be overstating things, but it’s certainly been the case that, as the year-long Substack Pro deal lapses, a number of creators are changing their plans in ways that suggest that things have not been working out the way that anyone had originally planned.

“The biggest benefit of having a large email list is being able to tell your most die-hard fans when you have something to sell, and messaging how important what you’re selling is. That was the whole impetus behind building a free Substack Newsletter in the first place, when I launched it in 2019,” wrote James Tynion in his retrospective post on his Substack Pro experience. “But I’ve found its utility flattened by the frequency of posts I was contractually obligated to hit, and the constant chase for a larger paid subscriber base. The constant drive to get more members for the Onion Club, or the paid version of the Substack, or what have you, means that every post was effectively selling the audience something, and the primary thing that I was selling was this newsletter, not my comics, or any other side project I might decide to kick into motion.”

The mention of a contractual obligation for a number of posts wasn’t entirely new — it had been hinted by other creators that Substack expected 100 posts during the period of the year-long Substack Pro deal, if never quite stated outright — but it wasn’t the only obligation Substack Pro creators had to contend with, as Chip Zdarsky revealed when talking about his own plans for his newsletter post-Pro: “I’ll be dropping the cost from $7 a month to $5! What used to be the price of one outrageously expensive coffee a month, is now a pretty decently priced coffee a month! I would go even lower but Substack doesn’t allow that for some reason!”

Brian K. Vaughan and Niko Henrichon’s Exploding Giraffe newsletter is also reducing its subscription cost by the same amount; both Exploding Giraffe and Zdarsky are dropping the Founding Tier subscription — which charged $250 annually in both cases — entirely.

After Pro

There have been additional problems as newsletters have moved outside of the Substack Pro program; Kelly Thompson has paused the paid portion of her newsletter due to an error with re-billing, with the company charging subscribers for renewals despite her belief that she’d created a 90-day grace period. That grace period was created initially because she felt that she was “running behind on our ‘Year 1’ stuff… and it’s only fair both not to penalize you guys for the delay and also to reward you for your incredible support.”

One creator has gone so far as to suspend recurring payments altogether. As his Stupid Fresh Mess newsletter finished its year of Substack Pro, Skottie Young made all posts free moving forward, explaining, "We spent a year cooking up ideas for this platform to help grow subscriptions. Each idea took time to discuss, research, weigh pros and cons, learn from, and to finally implement. No matter what the idea was, for every new paid sub we’d get, one or two would drop off. Haha. We pretty much stayed at the same Sub number since last September. All this took huge amounts of time away from me working comics, covers, commissions, daily sketches and all the other stuff that brought you all here in the first place."

He did, however allow payment options to remain open as, in his words, "a tip jar-like way to support the crew who works hard to put together giveaways, the streams (when we get back to them) and all the other things we want to do while we keep building this community."

Tom King and Elsa Charretier went even further, announcing their intent to remove the paid element of Love Everlasting entirely. Charretier wrote that “I’ve come to the conclusion that [Substack is] not the platform that best suits me,” while King added that, unfortunately, he doesn’t “have enough time to contribute enough to this newsletter to earn your hard-earned money. I really love posting scripts and updates and podcasts, and I will still do that when I can, but it’ll all be put up without a pay wall. I hope you come back and visit and post and say hi. It means the world to me.”

A week after this announcement, the paid shared the eighth issue of Love Everlasting, noting that it was the last issue to be made available on Substack. " From #9 and up, the comic will only be available in physical form. I do hope you’ll keep following Joan’s adventures," Charretier wrote.

Not every Substack Pro comics account is going through this kind of attrition, however; Jonathan Hickman’s 3 Worlds/3 Moons — the most financially successful of the Substack comics newsletters by the company’s own reckoning — has sailed full speed ahead into its second year, unveiling both a scriptwriting contest for subscribers and a community chat function available on the Substack app.

Where next for Substack comics?

What appears to have tripped up many who were part of the first year or so of the Substack Pro comics program was, perhaps, the strings that were attached to the money being offered: the need to constantly promote the paid subscription options, the need to produce a certain number of newsletters in a certain period of time, or the feeling that — in order to earn pre-set payment amounts — a certain amount of work was required. Substack Pro was initially positioned, at least publicly, as something akin to a grant with the company asking little in return, but the reality is that it was more of a second job, however well-paid… something that, bluntly, isn’t for everyone, especially given what they might otherwise want their newsletters to be. (See Tynion’s comments above, for example.)

There is, undoubtedly, value in the newsletter format for comic creators looking to reach their audience. Even as other platforms like Revue are shuttered — Cullen Bunn and Dennis Culver, two creators who used that platform, have moved over to Substack, notably, although neither appear to be part of the Substack Pro deal judging by the lack of requests for paid subscription — there remain alternative venues for those who want to try smaller, more playful options: ButtonDown, Ghost, and the comic-centric Zestworld, to name but three.

Substack, however, remains the most high-profile platform out there for this kind of thing, despite Nick Spencer quietly leaving the company over the summer. It’s true that there haven’t been big name announcements from the company since Joshua Williamson, Matthew Rosenberg, and Gerry Duggan joined the platform last September, but that’s perhaps beside the point; the proof of concept pilot signings have done their job, and placed Substack front-of-mind for anyone thinking of starting a comics newsletter. There’s no specific need to keep spending to promote it at this point.

From the outside, I’m unconvinced that Substack’s bubble is truly bursting at this point, although it’s certainly deflated more than a little. The company as a whole cut 14% of its workforce last summer, but was boasting of its success again just months later. “We don’t believe it’s going to slow down any time soon. On the contrary, we expect it to accelerate and expand,” Hamish McKenzie boasted of the company’s success. “All of this is happening against a backdrop of decline in the legacy news business and disempowerment in the legacy social media business. All of it is new. All of it is needed. Our work today, and for as long as Substack exists, is to keep this new economy powering forward.”

The only question at this point is, how much of that new Substack economy will belong to comics?

Check out this preview of the first four pages of 3 Worlds/3 Moons' first print release.