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UPDATE: Just as this piece was going live, Scout Comics announced that they would be relaunching this summer in partnership with Element Media, and starting a horror imprint and a program to pay creators. Scout Comics, a small, independent comics publisher that hadn’t been pinging on many industry observer radars has been suddenly thrust into the a spotlight – but not in the way they might have hoped for. A squadron of disgruntled creators have been speaking out on social media about their treatment by Scout Comics, alleging non-payment, ghosting and threats of blackballing. Even a brief investigation into the allegations has uncovered even more complaints about unapproved merchandise and covers, and, as one creator told me, “over-promising and under-delivering.” Before we dig in, I should note that Chris Arrant at Popverse has an excellent overview of the story thus far, and Sky Hawkins at League of Comics Geeks (a comics collection tracking website) has been collating allegations, including some new ones that are pretty surprising. You can read that in PART 1 PART 2 PART 3. Things kicked off last week when Jarred Luján, recently announced as the new co-writer of Mezo, let loose in a tweet thread:
If you’re a new creator, please avoid @ScoutComics like the plague. Haven’t paid me for a book out over a year. Won’t answer emails. We delivered a completed, profitable book and still got screwed. Spoke to the Editorial Director and he implied we’d be blacklisted for complaining. CEO came in acting like he’d help and now he’s ghosting us too. If it’s like that at the top, you know why everything else sucks. I’ve tried for a year to work with these people and its clear they have no intention of working with us. Nothing resembling a partnership. I also got a single statement about book sales and not a single one since. Can’t promote books, can’t pay creators, but they got a full Whatnot schedule! My last email a month ago was “hey can you just cancel our contract and we can move past the money you owe me” and they still didn’t answer. That would have cost zero dollars, for whatever thats worth. These allegations broke the dam on other creators with similar stories, including Honor Vincent, Rebecca Good, Brian Wickman, Adam Barnhardt, Massimo Rosi, Matthew Erman, Dakota Brown, and…..well, you get the idea. Lots and lots of creators. (Evan K. Prozias stepped up with praise for Scout, it should be noted.) Perhaps the most serious allegation came in a now deleted tweet from a Scout creator who wrote: “Where was this accountability when we repeatedly asked for details and figures and were instead greeted with anger. Denied a contract termination unless we paid 75k for the huge overprint we didn’t ask for. This is a company full of grifters, don’t believe a word of this at all.” That was in reference to Scout’s official response to Luján’s claims, a statement made on their social media with comments off. It reads:
Dear comics community, Scout started as and remains a company created by and for creators. We love comics. We love reading comics, making comics, and publishing comics for other creators. We love the comics community. While Scout has always striven to maintain high levels of service to our teams, recently a creative team expressed their frustration publicly due to not having had a response to their concerns in several months. This is true. We dropped the ball by failing to respond in a timely manner. We take full responsibility for our lack of response at that time due to internal miscommunication. Regardless, we will continue to strive to do better and improve communication with all of our creators. Despite the complaints we have seen online, Scout has had very few creators reach out to us directly with concerns. We have actually had several creators reach out and support, which we appreciate. As with all businesses, there will be missteps. The most important thing is to learn. At this time, we are openly welcoming any creator with a title at scout comics to reach out to our COO Lesa Miller at [email redacted] with any concerns they may have. All concerns will be listened to and all inquiries will be responded to in a timely manner. As creators ourselves we understand the issues that have been presented to us. Thank you for your patience and grace while we endeavor to learn from the feedback we are receiving. This response did not go over well, as it generally admitted that the “ghosting” many creators had complained of had taken place, and left many serious allegations unresolved. Now how did we get here? Scout Comics, (or to give it its full name, Scout Comics and Entertainment Holdings, Inc) has been around for a while, starting out as Ardden Entertainment, and rebranding as Scout Comics in 2015. The main player behind both is Brenden Deneen, Scout’s current CEO, who has a lengthy CV as an agent and development executive, including eight years as an executive editor running MacMillan’s entertainment wing, along with stints at The Weinstein Company and Fineprint Literary Management. He’s also currently the Head of Film/TV at Blackstone Pub, according to his twitter bio. As if that didn’t keep him busy enough, he’s also an author, with books about Guardians of the Galaxy, Morbius and Alien to his name. Among his books: a four volume series called Night Night Groot. Scout’s other main executive is president James Haick III. At one point, James Pruett was co-publisher, although he left and was replaced by Charlie Stickney, who left the company in 2022 only to be replaced by Pruett again, who has since left the company before all this started. Perhaps some of the current troubles can be traced to something Stickney wrote in his farewell letter: Over the last couple of years Scout has grown from a small company putting out 6-10 titles a month to one that’s internationally known with a slate of offerings that can approach 25 books monthly. With several imprints, a toy line, a gaming division and multiple titles in development as films and television series—in all that growth I believe the time has come for me to pass the baton to the next person into what I’m sure will be a very successful future for Scout. That sounds like a lot of expansion for a company that doesn’t really have many well known hit books to its credit. (Their best selling title, I’m told, has been Stabbity Bunny.) I recall seeing the Scout booth at the 2021 Thanksgiving San Diego Comic-Con: it was a newly expanded affair, and I chatted with some of the folks at the booth who said they were looking to grow and make a move. As we all know, Pandemic era growth was an outlier and things are settling back to normal…or worse. San Diego Comic-Con Special Edition, 2021 I reached out to a few of the disgruntled Scout creators and got similar stories from them. One of them provided me with a sample contract from Scout, which confirms that they had a “shared revenue” model. While the creators retain all rights and copyrights, Scout signs them up for a five year publishing deal, with a 50/50 split on royalties, which come only after printing expenses have been taken out. A separate agreement covers media rights, with Deneen representing properties for development, and either five or ten year terms, with Scout locked in as a producer should anything reach the screen. I haven’t read as many media contracts as I have publishing ones, but this one seems pretty standard (if hardly wonderful) in a time when stockpiling IP is the main function of comics publishers. Overall, the publishing end is an “Image lite” deal that seemed to appeal mainly to up and coming creators. Established creators can go for the real Image deal. I will say, having seen many shitty, shitty comics publishing deals over the years, having the creator maintain ownership is at least a better start, and explains why so many creators have been able to get their publishing rights back fairly cleanly, according to Twitter. Long Lost is one of the titles that has reverted back to its creators. That’s the good part. The bad part is that of late Scout seems…
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