The most common primary jobs that were performed are writing and pencil art. Many who selected "other" as their primary job did so because they were a multi-purpose artist or worked in multiple roles throughout a singular comic work that they contributed to.

NOTE: We acknowledge that adding metrics to this question that would have accounted for multi-role artists and/or solo creators could have altered or impacted this particular result, as offering those options would result in the survey no longer forcing participants to choose between discrete productive roles. While we recognize in retrospect that these would have been useful measures to include, we are unable to account for the ways in which forcing a choice between productive roles impacted this particular finding.

To address the limitations presented by a lack of multi-role position in the "primary role" finding, it is useful to consider the full scope of industry positions held by participants. This chart presents the full scope of responses when participants were asked "Which of the following jobs have you done during your career in comics? (select all that apply)".

The above chart highlights the significant areas of overlap that exist within comics: multi-role artists, writer/artists, and sole creators are fairly common in this data.

This chart may also suggest a degree of fluidity within the industry; workers have the flexibility to move into/out of their initial industry positioning and/or hold multiple roles at multiple publishers (i.e. one individual could be a writer at one publisher, artist at another, designer at a third - or simply perform all of the tasks as "sole creator" of a work).

There are roughly equal numbers of participants who reported primarily working under work for hire contracts as there are who are primarily self-published.

"Other" publication methods listed typically referred to one's status as staff of a publisher (e.g. editing, marketing, sales, etc.)

While the most common means of publication is still work-for-hire arrangements with publishers, the full scope of where/how workers are being published suggests that crowd-funding and print-based self-publishing are immensely popular avenues for creatives to produce works. While workers may primarily work in "traditional" comics arrangements, this chart indicates that workers are supplementing this with independently-produced works which are driven by their interests.