Image Comics and Prophet #5, Cover by Stephen Platt
While going through comic boxes (Gina recently organized all of the comics; thank you, Gina!) I ran across a pocket of Prophet comic books from the nineties. I never really followed the storyline all that closely, but about a decade ago I found issues for a quarter each and grabbed them for a look at Stephen Platt’s artwork. The single issues don’t have any value these days (Amazon.com search*), but Platt’s artwork still stands out as insanely hyper-detailed and as Imagetastic as anything else we saw during the nineties.
What’s astounding is the possibility that Platt was paid $40,000 per issue for these comics way back in the nineties. Over at bleedingcool.com — see “Fanboy Rampage: Rob Liefeld Vs Stephen Platt” — Rich Johnston collects together various bits of Facebook posts to assemble an unusual, and insanely unexpected, story in which Rob Liefeld reportedly paid Stephen Platt $40,000 per comic for pencils and inks, as well as covers.
“Well, Larry Marder, that’s the least he could do considering I was paying him 40,000 dollars an issue.”
Woah. That’s a hell of a lot of money for a comic book. Just how many comics does a publisher have to sell to make $40,000 a sustainable rate to pay for a single issue’s artwork? Don’t forget that the writer, colorist, editor, and rest of the team also need to be paid. $40,000 an issue? Wow.
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I really dig a lot of that 1990s art — so over the top! But I fear that many of the stories have not aged so well…Image was often an aptly-named company.
@Wolf – Those stories of Platt’s drawings makes me want to see one of the originals. Just so many lines everywhere; how many hours did one page take to finish?
And yeah, a lot of the stories haven’t held up at all.
Have you been reading good the new Prophet? Holy space awesome Batman–great stuff in this pages!
Here’s the first volume: http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1607066114/ref=mp_s_a_1_2?qid=1431905111&sr=8-2&pi=AC_SY200_QL40&keywords=prophet+comics&dpPl=1&dpID=61WB1OW7GqL&ref=plSrch
@Jay – No, I’ve not read these. I’ll give it a try. Thanks for the tip!
I liked Prophet as a kid, at least for the first 6 – 8 issues. I really liked the artwork. Speaking of hyper detail, I remember Stephen Platt drew a picture of Prophet for the cover of Wizard #35, and Wizard had a contest for people to count and send them the correct number of bullet shells in the pic.
@clark – Time to hunt down Wizard #35!
Even though that number is insane in today’s comics industry, that number was not unheard of during the height of Image’s popularity. I’ve heard some crazy numbers pertaining to Liefeld. Those guys were swimming in cash back then and living like rock gods.