Look at it this way. Say orders on one of the Infinity OGN equals sales of the trade for Infinity Gauntlet, and they are similarly priced. Starlin and the creators get a small royalty out of the Infinity Gauntlet sales. Starlin and the creators get a page rate and a small royalty rate out of the OGN sales. Which then makes Marvel more money?

So let's look at Infinity Revelation as an example.

It's a 112 page book, but with endpapers, titles pages etc. there's less actual story pages. GCD sets it at 100 pages of story and art so we'll use that for our calculations.

Using the Creator Resource for page rates, Marvel typically pays $200 a page for the big name talent for script + art. Inks will be $90-$120 per page, Colors will get $75-95 per page at the high end, letterers $23-45 per page. Using the average page rate given for inker, colorist, and letterer, that gives us 200+100+86+34=$420 per page of creator costs. At 100 pages that is $42,000 in creator costs (let alone, editorial, printing, shipping, etc.).

Infinity Revelation had an msrp of $24.99, which means retailers are buying it from Diamond at approximately $12.50 on average depending on the size of their discount, and Diamond is buying it from Marvel at approximately $6.25 a copy.

$42,000 divided by $6.25=6,720, whih is the number of copies Marvel has to sell just to pay creator costs, let alone editorial, publishing, etc. before they start making any profit on the book.

According to Comichron, the initial orders for Infinity Revelation for August 2014 when it was released were 9,689 copies through Diamond (book market sales via Amazon, etc. digital sales, etc aren't included here, just through Diamond, neither are reorders and future sales). But it took almost 2/3 of the initial order just to pay creator costs for that book. Now you have got to pay editorial, publishing, royalties to the creators, marketing, etc. so how much profit did it actually make. We can't know exactly. but best guess is not a lot.

Now, compare that to sales of Infinity Gauntlet, where the initial comics sales back in the 90s paid for creator costs and every new edition is almost pure profit (minus small royalty fees and editorial/printing costs).

Until the big 2 come up with a way to cover creator costs better, the OGN format is not viable as the main format for their books, not when they are paying page rates. Major book publishers who do OGN's don't pay page rates, they give advances and larger royalty rates like they d with prose authors, and offer multi-book deals with bigger advances to top tier talent to make it worth their while. It makes for less up front creator costs and creators do better the better the book sells. Image currently operates on a model closer to this, but not quite the same.

-M

I understand that Marvel makes pure profit in a book like infinity Gauntlet but there is a finite ( no pun intended) amount of books like that to continue to release. They will eventually have to pay like book publishers or Image comics does for new books.