Fame and fortune do not necessarily go hand in hand. William Messner-Loebs was an award-winning writer who attracted his share of fans when he was writing issues of Wonder Woman and creating his indy series Journey, but that didn't slow his slide into a poverty so severe that he and his wife found themselves homeless and surviving on a banana a day.

In the 1970s, Luis Dominguez' cover art was ubiquitous, appearing on Marvel magazines like Deadly Hands of Kung Fu; DC supernatural titles like Ghosts, Unexpected, Weird War Tales, Weird Western Tales and Witching Hour; and several Gold Key titles. A quarter of a century later, Dominguez' style had fallen out of favor and the aging artist was struggling to survive on his Social Security benefits.

In the 1980s, Armando Gil had his choice of inking jobs on such titles as Conan the Barbarian, Micronauts, The Nam, Ka-zar the Savage and Dazzler, but after a few setbacks, the turn of the century found him trying to get Marvel to return his phone calls, living in a basement and raising his daughter without an income.

Richard "Grass" Green, a fanzine, mainstream and underground artist throughout the latter half of the 20th century, was well-liked by fans and pros, but he never had much commercial success, and when he was diagnosed with cancer in 2001, he had few financial resources to fall back on to cover medical costs.

Messner-Loebs, Dominguez, Gil and Green are not just isolated hard-luck stories. Like many of the practitioners of the young comics medium, they took things a page at a time, without much thought for the future. Comics creators for the better part of the century had worked without contracts or the most rudimentary benefits, and it was not uncommon for them to enter their "golden" years forgotten by fans and struggling to put food on the table.

During his days as a sports writer, Jim McLauchlin had observed what could happen to formerly famous baseball players. "A lot of Major League players in the early days were only making about $10,000 a year" and were ill-prepared to make a living when they passed their physical peak, he said. Concerned parties literally came to B.A.T. for the sport's aging players, forming the Baseball Assistance Team to help older players in financial need.

Eventually McLauchlin moved on from sports-writing to covering the comics field as writer and editor for Wizard magazine and is currently editor in chief at Top Cow Comics. In the course of a conversation one day in 2000 between McLauchlin and Mark Alessi, owner and publisher of CrossGen Comics, Alessi commented on the sad history of exploitation in the comics industry and noted that Golden Age creators frequently ended up no better than aging baseball players.

McLauchlin told Alessi, "It's been in the back of my mind to create something like B.A.T. for comics creators." Of course, McLauchlin had been saying something similar for a few years but had gotten no closer to making it a reality.

Alessi hadn't gotten to where he was by letting daydreams stay daydreams. As teenagers, he and his cousin Gina had imagined what their ideal comics company might be like and 20 years later he had parlayed a software fortune into CrossGen Comics and made his cousin the chief operating officer. "I've got all these lawyers on retainer," he told McLauchlin. "Why don't I get them working on it."

"Fine," said McLauchlin, not really expecting much to come of it.

"But guess what?" he asked the Journal, rhetorically. "A couple of months later his lawyers shipped a metric shitload of paperwork over to my office. There are so many hoops you have to jump through to get a not-for-profit started. I don't want to say the federal government makes it hard to start a charitable operation, but they make you have to be serious about it. Mark Alessi gave me the balls to act and get the ball rolling."

With the paperwork in place, McLauchlin soon found himself at the helm of A Commitment To Our Roots, the first federally charted not-for-profit corporation devoted to helping comic-book creators in need of financial support, emergency medical aid or access to paying work. The group was officially launched in March of 2001. McLauchlin estimated that Alessi had jump-started A.C.T.O.R. with "$30,000 worth of real cash and man-hours of [attorney] labor."

The resulting organization was administered by two boards of directors, one executive board devoted to raising funds and one peer board dedicated to disbursing those same funds. The fundraising committee is composed of McLauchlin, Alessi, Wizard co-founder and editor in chief Pat McCallum, writer/artist and ex-Chaos Comics Publisher Brian Pulido, Marvel Editor in Chief Joe Quesada, Dark Horse Comics President Mike Richardson and Image Comics Publisher Jim Valentino.

A.C.T.O.R. has built a pool of funds partly through fan and corporate donations but mostly via a range of charitable events, such as fundraising auctions. The six-member disbursement committee, which reviews applications for aid, is co-chaired by George Pérez and Roy Thomas. Charles Novinskie, former Topps Comics publisher and current publisher of Comics Spotlight, replaced Joe Kubert on the disbursement board shortly after its inception. As board secretary, Novinskie fields the applications and then, if they meet the organization's criteria, runs them by the other committee members, all of whom are themselves prominent veteran comics creators: Pérez, Thomas, Dick Giordano, Denny O'Neil and John Romita Sr. Disbursement of aid to a given applicant requires approval by a majority of the committee. According to Novinskie, there isn't much debate around approval of aid requests and, as far as he can remember, "No one's ever been turned down by vote."

Basically, it comes down to whether or not an applicant meets A.C.T.O.R.'s cut-and-dried criteria. To receive aid from A.C.T.O.R., an applicant must have been a comic-book creator -- that is, a writer, penciler, inker, colorist or letterer -- for at least 10 years since Jan. 1, 1934. The 10-year requirement reflects the organization's desire to help older creators who labored in the field before standards were established for the payment of royalties and the return of original art. New creators looking for financial support as they break into the field need not apply. "Some applicants were turned down because they didn't meet the criteria," Novinskie said. "We've had applications from laid-off animators and editorial cartoonists, but they don't meet our definition of comic-book creators. Our aim is to help people who worked on comics with no benefits way back when."

No one organization can be expected to right all the economic wrongs done to comics creators, and it was clear early on that there were limits to what A.C.T.O.R. could achieve. The group's fundraising efforts have successfully tapped into the good will of fans and professionals. But recognizing an industry need on an abstract level is easier than finding the specific instances of that need and addressing them. While those who have donated time and money to A.C.T.O.R. can be proud of the good it has done, it's worth taking a close look at the organization's practices and considering whether it is doing all that it could and should be doing to fulfill its mission.

The average cash disbursement has been between $1,500 and $3,000. If that was what it took to get an applicant on his or her feet again, fine. But if a comics creator had fallen into a hole deeper than the length of A.C.T.O.R.'s reach, that application generally never made it past Novinskie. Applicants must first of all demonstrate a financial need that A.C.T.O.R. can meet. "There's a maximum limit," Novinskie said. "We want to help everybody out, but sometimes you have to look at the situation. If somebody is $100,000 in the hole and about to be foreclosed on or declare bankruptcy anyway, it's hard to see how they would benefit from our disbursement."

Applicants can return to A.C.T.O.R. for additional help again and again, but only once within a calendar year and for no more than a total of $25,000 over the life of the recipient or $15,000 in a five-year period.

Among A.C.T.O.R.'s limitations is its inability to bring the dead back to life. The first disbursement issued by A Commitment To Our Roots went to artist Gray Morrow's widow to help cover Morrow's funeral expenses. McLauchlin heard about her difficulties indirectly: "It was a friend-of-a-friend kind of thing," he said.

A.C.T.O.R.'s first case set a grim pattern for the years to follow: An unsettling number of its applicants were already securely in their coffins. The Golden Age creators it wanted to help had generally drifted too far from the comics field to even be aware of A.C.T.O.R.'s resources, and more often than not, McLauchlin and Novinskie would only learn of a creator's hardships from concerned friends or fans of the creator -- often only after the creator's obituary had appeared in the papers.

Asked to go over some recent cases where A.C.T.O.R. had provided assistance, Novinskie said, "This year we've been involved with a lot of funeral expenses. In the last 12 months, we've helped four estates pay for funerals."

According to Novinskie, the mix of applicants breaks down to about 60 percent creators who are still active in the field in some way and 40 percent retired Golden Age creators. Those in the latter category are often beyond the reach of any assistance other than payment of funeral costs. McLauchlin said A.C.T.O.R. typically pays out up to $2,500 to next of kin for funeral expenses.

Novinskie and McLauchlin recognize that outreach is a problem that needs to be addressed if A.C.T.O.R. is to do the job it was intended for. "We try to get the word out to older creators," Novinskie said, "but it's rare that I actually get the person who needs help [as an applicant]. Usually I hear from other creators who know someone who needs help. We'll often only hear about someone when the creator dies. The big thing really is for us to reach out to touch these people." It is not a problem, however, for which they've been able to come up with an immediate solution other than to keep trying harder.

Asked what outreach efforts A.C.T.O.R. was currently making to older creators, McLauchlin pointed to the A.C.T.O.R. Web site (at actorcomicfund.org), booth appearances at cons and ads in The Comics Journal, Comics Buyer's Guide, Comic Book Marketplace and Comic Book Artist. When the Journal noted that those venues were unlikely to reach comics veterans who no longer worked in the field, he said, "Mostly it's a matter of networking, word of mouth. I'd be happy to hear any suggestions."

Aid recipients are guaranteed confidentiality by A.C.T.O.R., but some have been willing to acknowledge their financial problems publicly. Grass Green was reached by A.C.T.O.R. in time for it to help him with medical expenses for treatment of his terminal cancer and after it took his life July 2002, A.C.T.O.R. was able to cover the balance owed on his funeral expenses.

Marvel's bankruptcy, the dot-com bust, medical crises and a heartless mortgage-holding bank had combined to paint William and Nadine Messner-Loebs into a corner when he finally turned to A.C.T.O.R. for help. In 2002, Messner-Loebs explained, "I was working at Marvel Comics when that company hit hard times but was assured by my editor that my job was secure. Little did he know that he was soon to be fired along with most of Marvel's staff and talent. I didn't scramble for a job when the crisis first hit and when I was let go, all the jobs were filled." Injuries sustained by his wife in a fall necessitated medical treatments that added to the couple's economic burden. The fact that he was handicapped (owing to the loss of his right arm shortly after birth) did not add to his employability. He was able to find work as an online entertainment editor, but the company went out of business owing him back pay and leaving him unable to cover his mortgage payments.

The Messner-Loebs were a major test for A.C.T.O.R. and an example to the nation of how quickly and how far a middle-class professional family could fall, appearing in news segments on NBC and ABC. A.C.T.O.R. came through with more than $11,000 in disbursements but was unsuccessful in saving the couple's home, the bank apparently being more eager to foreclose than to receive back payments. A.C.T.O.R. was able to re-connect him at least temporarily with paying work. The organization joined forces with Marvel to put out a benefit comic book featuring Spider-Man and the Hulk. Messner-Loebs was paid to write the Hulk story that appeared in the book and proceeds from sales of the book, which shipped in December with a cover price of $2.50, go to A.C.T.O.R. Since then, Messner-Loebs has found additional work and income as a comic writer, including a new edition of Epicurus from DC and Moonstone Books' Bulldog Drummond series, which ships its first issue in May.

McLauchlin said, "We try to both give a man a fish, as they say, to get him through right now, and also help him to fish by providing an entrée back into paying work. A lot of creators just ask, 'Can you put in some calls to some people.' It's a simple networking thing."

Knowing how to fish, however, is of limited use if there aren't enough fish in the pond to go around. The 54-year-old Messner-Loebs told the Journal, Jan. 20, "I'm trying my damnedest to get work. I've been calling pretty regularly all my diminishing circle of contacts. Nobody has any openings in a regular series. There used to be a lot of changeovers on series, but now everybody is holding onto whatever job they have with a death grip. I ran into a friend the other day who had drawn Aquaman, who was bagging groceries and glad to be doing it."

Messner-Loebs said he had received, in all, $15,000 from A.C.T.O.R. and is not eligible for further disbursements for the next five years. Thanks to the organization and the charity of fans and pros in the comics field, the Messner-Loebs have a roof over their head, but even that may not last. Messner-Loebs said he and his wife owe the motel where they live $4,000. When the Journal asked if there wasn't a cheaper place to live than a motel, he said it was the only form of housing in that area of the country. That area of the country is rural Michigan, which is enduring its usual high unemployment rate and bitter winter. While he looks for work, Messner-Loebs said he is applying for disability, though with faint hope of getting it. He is also trying to scrounge a large winter coat for Nadine, who currently has none.

The Hulk story that Messner-Loebs wrote for A.C.T.O.R. Presents Spider-Man and the Hulk was penciled by Dave Simons and inked by Armando Gil, another beneficiary of A.C.T.O.R.'s networking efforts. "I've been trying to get back into comics ever since Stan Lee Media fell apart," Gil told the Journal. "I was working on Seventh Portal [the aborted animated entertainment property] and was switched to doing Internet animation of the Back Street Boys, when they laid us off all at once. What made it worse was it was a week before Christmas and just before our stock options matured."

In the 1980s, Gil had been riding high. "Sometimes I got four offers at a time," he said. "I was the inker everybody went to if they needed somebody at the last minute. I don't know what happened."

Gil blames much of his career downturn on relationships. Depressed over a break-up in the early 1990s, Gil found his productivity had ground to a halt. "It was affecting my work in a big way," he said.

For a while he turned to animation, including work for Stretch Films and Stan Lee Media, but after SLM folded, he said, his style no longer seemed to be what either animation studios or comics publishers were looking for. "It used to be each guy had his own identity," he said. "Now it's all the same bunch of crap. They all want whatever's hot right now." The few jobs he's gotten in recent years, he said, called for him to imitate, often less than successfully, "the Image style or Bruce Timm. Bruce Timm is great for Bruce Timm, but leave that to him." Gil's employability in the comics field is also hampered by his decision to remain in Cleveland so that his daughter can be close to her mother, his ex-wife.

Gil was living in a basement with his daughter and picking up work wherever he could find it, including painting murals for local businesses, when Simons, Gil's friend and penciler on the A.C.T.O.R. benefit comic, put him in touch with Novinskie, who had given Gil work penciling Return to Jurassic Park and inking other titles at Topps Comics in the early 1990s. With the benefit book assignment and other assistance from A.C.T.O.R., the 44-year-old Gil and his daughter have been able to move out of the basement and into a flat of their own, and he's now redoubling his efforts to find regular work in the comics field. "Let them know I'm alive and looking for work," he said. "I'll draw whatever people want. I'll draw pictures of them naked with Conan."

A.C.T.O.R. was also able to help Dominguez, who like Gil, had come to find comics-industry doors closed to him that had once been wide open. Novinskie said recipients have been conscientious about only asking for what they need and repaying no-interest loans: "We haven't had anybody default on the loans. We haven't seen people just looking to scam A.C.T.O.R. for money. People think comics creators are just sitting around not working, waiting for the next comics job. The truth is most people just squeak by in the comics industry. And income is very erratic. Freelancers may know they have a big job coming in the future, but they can't get loans from banks."

A.C.T.O.R., therefore, is a small organization attempting to fill a big need. Asked if A.C.T.O.R. is flooded with applicants from destitute creators, McLauchlin said, "It comes in spurts."

Novinskie concurred, saying, "It does get to be time-consuming sometimes. We'll go a month without any requests and then all of a sudden get four requests all at once." McLauchlin, Novinskie and all of the disbursement committee members donate their services to A.C.T.O.R. The only paid position is that of Janine Bielski, development director in charge of day-to-day fundraising operations. Her part-time position became full-time as of March 2003. Office space is provided to Bielski at Top Cow. Virtually all A.C.T.O.R. board business, including reviewing and voting on applicants, is handled by phone and e-mail. The members of the disbursement committee are located all over the country and have rarely been in the same room at once.

The record shows that A.C.T.O.R. has been faster at pulling in money than disbursing it. A not-for-profit, the organization is audited every two years. A.C.T.O.R. was audited in 2002 for the period running from June 30, 2001 to June 30, 2002. According to the results of that audit obtained by the Journal from the accounting firm of Quigley and Miron, A.C.T.O.R. brought in $133,973 during the preceding year -- $130,782 of it from exhibition sales and auctions and the rest from donations. The group's biggest source of income has been the Florida MegaCon, owned until last month by Alessi and CrossGen. Every year, CrossGen employees have volunteered their time to help organize and administer fundraising auctions at the con. "We made $30,000 there in one weekend," said McLauchlin.

During the same period covered by the audit, A.C.T.O.R. disbursed $35,002 in aid to needy comics creators. $40,120 went for administrative and fundraising activities, with total expenditures, including additional costs for printing, mailings and other program activities, totalling $92,512. In the course of the year, the not-for-profit's net assets grew from $63,929 to $105,390.

Since its inception, McLauchlin said, A.C.T.O.R. has disbursed approximately $70,000 worth of aid to a total of 13 creators. Since more than $53,000 had been disbursed prior to the 2002 audit, that total suggests the amount of disbursements has slowed in the past year and a half. Asked if there was a point at which he would become concerned that A.C.T.O.R. is pulling money in faster than it's finding the creators who need it, McLauchlin said, "I think it's good to be bringing in money. You never know what's going to happen in the future. If there's a point where I would be concerned that we have too much money, I don't know what that point would be."

Fundraising, however, has also slowed since the audit, despite a change in Bielski's paid position as fund developer from part-time to full-time as of March 2003. Bielski told the Journal that a total of $40,000 had been raised since the 2002 audit. When the Journal questioned how A.C.T.O.R. could be spending more for a full-time fund-development position, but raising less funds than it had with a part-time fund developer, McLauchlin explained that many of Bielski's full-time efforts were aimed at developing longterm fundraising sources beyond the comics industry. "We don't want to have to count only on the little village of comics," he said. "She has been setting up revenue streams that will continue to bring in money well into the future -- and from outside the comics industry." Those revenue streams are from charitable programs administered through Amazon.com and SchoolCash.com (see sidebar "What You Can Do" at bottom of page) and, according to McLauchlin involve start-up efforts and costs that will pay off further down the road.

Also on the debit side of things, A.C.T.O.R.'s biggest benefactor, CrossGen, has fallen on hard times. The company has divested itself of the Florida MegaCon, the site of A.C.T.O.R.'s most successful fundraising efforts, and most of the CrossGen employees who traditionally donated their time to run the MegaCon auctions have been laid off. CrossGen artists regularly donated original art for A.C.T.O.R. benefit auctions, but many of the publishers on-staff artists have been returned to the ranks of freelancers, and some freelancers have been waiting several months to be paid for work done for CrossGen. Ironically, some CrossGen creators may find themselves in the kind of financial hardship that A.C.T.O.R was designed to alleviate. (See TCJ #257 for a full account of CrossGen's troubles.) CrossGen Chief Financial Officer Mike Beattie had functioned as A.C.T.O.R.'s volunteer accountant, filing its not-for-profit-status tax forms every year since its inception, but Beattie resigned from CrossGen in the fall of 2003. McLauchlin was uncertain as to whether Beattie's assistance would be available in the future.

Asked if CrossGen's downsizing was a major blow to A.C.T.O.R.'s volunteer resources, McLauchlin said, "Some are still there; some aren't. I'm sure we're going to be doing a little more scrambling and there will be a [different] division of labor, but we're not dependent on CGE. A.C.T.O.R. is a free-standing entity, separate from any single publisher. [Chaos publisher] Brian Pulido is on our board, and Chaos ceased to be last year. We're still here."

The amazing thing to McLauchlin is that it took so long to get here. To hardcore, survival-of-the-fittest capitalists who object to the notion that anyone is owed a living he says, "At every point in any job, if you're an adult, you're responsible for your actions. [Golden Age comics creators] knew the cards that were on the table, but a lot of creators were playing with a deck that was mostly stacked against them. It's weird to me that it took until 2001 for something like [A.C.T.O.R.] to come into existence."

The Journal suggested that charitable organizations like A.C.T.O.R. and B.A.T. are formed to compensate for the absence of collective bargaining. Baseball players have their union now, but comics creators have never successfully organized except over immediate or short-term issues. McLauchlin, now a member of management, acknowledged that A.C.T.O.R., to a degree, does serve to alleviate the collateral damage resulting from years of exploitative working conditions, but adding that he puts his faith ("I know it sounds hokey") in a world where "the give-a-shits outnumber the don't-give-a-shits."

Judging from A.C.T.O.R.'s growing coffers, the organization has clearly tapped into the consciences of comics professionals who have discovered that they do give a shit about the creators who laid the groundwork for their industry. It is the fulfillment of a dream for McLauchlin, but its reach is limited and it's come very late in the day. It does nothing to help incoming young art-comics creators who are struggling to work outside the commercial mainstream (nor was it ever intended for that purpose), and most comics pioneers whom A.C.T.O.R. would like to assist have disappeared so far into the streets, tenements and elderly hostels of this land of opportunity that they can no longer hear the comics industry's expression of gratitude or accept its charity, unless it be in the form of a wreath and a gravestone.

Non-comics corporations will donate some of their profits to A.C.T.O.R. when you buy gift certificates through SchoolCash.com. The Web site is designed to raise funds for schools and promises that up to 40 percent of the price of gift certificates from chains like Barnes and Noble, Nordstrom, Land's End, and Office Max will go to the school of your choice. Instead of a school, however, gift-certificate buyers can designate A.C.T.O.R. to benefit from the purchase. According to A.C.T.O.R. board member Jim McLauchlin, A.C.T.O.R. can participate in the program just like any school, though the percentage that would go the comics-creator fund would be no more than five percent. The Web site claims that there is no extra cost to consumers who purchase gift certificates through the program.

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