My Epic Journey was the behind the scenes report of a Newsarama columnist’s pitch to Epic comics and its road to publication. Now, in part 26, the writer discusses the end of Epic and the death knell for his book, Phantom Jack. The story will now be packaged in a quarterly anthology with little hope that the story will be told in its entirety…and no payment to the authors until it sells.

This strikes me as the worst of both worlds…the two worlds being corporate comics and self-publishing. Your characters are owned by a big corporation, but you don’t see any money until the book is published just like with an Indy book. I think that Marvel has legal claims to the original character so that it cannot simply revert to the creator to have it published elsewhere…at least, not without a fight. Meanwhile, the creators have a product that they have poured a great deal of work into with no way to be paid for it unless Marvel actually publishes the comic.

If they could just take the Phantom Jack character and the story back and publish it via Image or elsewhere, problem solved. I don’t see how it can be that easy, though.

Epic is shaping up to be a gigantic screw job for those creators involved. As Rich Johnston says, “I can’t think of a better introduction to working in comics, can you?”