The ASK me here yesterday brought this thorny question from Jeff Thayer. I'll try to answer as well as I can…
You mentioned that writing the Welcome Back, Kotter TV show paid you more than John Travolta was paid. I don't expect you'd want to reveal the dollar figure but how did the amount compare to what you made just writing comic books?
Well, I only mentioned the money to explain that it wasn't as much as most people would think. I would say that when I shifted from comic books to TV, the pay was 2-3 times the amount for 4-6 times the hours and at least that much more in stress. If I had given as much of my time, energy and stomach lining to writing comics, I might have made more there.
But! There were other perks of writing for television, a big one of which was writing for audiences. If you write a funny line in a comic book, you don't get to hear anyone laugh at it.
Another was that comics, back when that was my main income, had a hard glass ceiling. There were no royalties, no reprint fees, not much added revenue from the convention circuit. There were folks saying the industry would be gone in 5-10 years.
Even if it survived: If I'd somehow reached the level of making as much as it was possible for me to make writing comic books, that would at the time been as much as it was humanly possible to make writing comic books. Writing TV carried no such limits.
And a big difference for me was this: When I was mainly writing comics, I worked all day at home…and while I liked (and still like) writing alone, I missed the part of life that involved meeting a stream of new and interesting people. I liked spending my days with other writers, other creative people, new potential friends of both genders, etc.
In my twenties, I needed that. It was also a whole new world to explore and learn about.
In hindsight, it was a mistake for me to get so completely outta comics as I did that year but it was an understandable mistake. Kotter was a job that occupied almost every waking minute almost every day. I have not made that mistake again.
But my main point is that I did learn not to judge or make any career choice wholly because of the money. You can profit in non-monetary ways…and there are plenty of them. So comparing one paycheck to another is the wrong way to look at this kind of choice.
