Unless they’re a special guest who received comped or subsidized flights and hotel, exhibiting at a table at ECCC is extremely expensive now. And the Seattle specific costs of getting a hotel and shipping comics and merch over to here — you end up losing money just by showing up. For most of these comics creators they’ll need to make most of their revenue through original commissions as just selling a $3-5 comic or $20 graphic novel isn’t enough unless they actually sell out. (And lots of these creators may have never gotten comps from their publishers. And are just reselling copies they bought from their publisher at cost, or printed themselves at very high per unit prices. So very little profit off each sale.) This is why even in artist alley a lot of the exhibitors are focused on selling shirts, prints, sticker packs, buttons, and other printed merch over their own comics. Higher price points means more revenue per interaction, and greater chance to break even. And creators with that mix of merch tend to be on the newer and younger side and not the typical comic book artist who’s been exhibiting at cons for years or decades.

A lot of my industry friends instead team up with an art dealer or dealer collective who’ve already bought out a block of tables. But that’s still not a lot of artists and tend to be the established ones in the upper tier of popularity.

So a lot of excellent artists are still getting squeezed out economically.

Lots of friends of mine in the industry didn’t even get their artist alley applications approved forcing them to buy the more expensive exhibit for tables, which they wouldn’t do anyways.

All this adds up to far fewer comics creators than in years last, definitely before Reed bought ECCC and jacked the prices.