Substack Comics: Evaluating the platform after 18 months and several major creative changes

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