The April 1978 issue of FREE ENTERPRISE magazine, a publication dedicated to talking about opportunities for investors in which they could potentially profit handsomely, ran a number of pieces on the comic book marketplace of the period. The main one was about the increased value that was being placed on old comic books, but more interestingly for our purposes, the publication commissioned industry veteran Don Rico to write and illustrate a six-page feature on just how to publish a comic book and make money doing so. While the information in this strip is dated, it is a fascinating look at the state of the business at this time.
This is a relatively simplistic viewpoint on publishing an independent comic book, but it’s not really off the beam. Both Richard and Wendy Pini and Dave Sim did more-or-less exactly this with ELFQUEST and CEREBUS at around this time, and as the Direct Sales market continued to grow, other publishers, small and large, entered the field as well.
The Tom Brevoort Experience 
Are those rates for the creators accurate for the era? That seems like quite a large wage gap between writer and penciler, I thought it would have been closer (with penciler making more but not much in my mind).
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Keep in mind, it generally takes a lot longer to draw a page than it does to write it.
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I haven’t gotten a page rate increase from either Marvel or DC in over a decade. But, even when I was just starting out in 1972, I was getting around $15 a page, The other rates seem laughably low. On the other hand, we have creators literally producing comics for free these days with the promise of payment on the back end and with the publisher claiming control of and half of all ancillary rights.
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