The UK Comics Creators Research Report 2026 tells us a little about the state of British comics. It tells us a lot about the state of the Society of Authors.

The numbers at the top of the UK Comics Creators Research Report 2026 are seriously impressive. Or genuinely impressive, as genuinely impressive, as Claude might say.

The UK comics market reached £78.7 million in total sales in 2025 – up 14% on the previous year, and 140% on 2019. Children’s comic strip fiction and graphic novels grew by nearly 29% year on year, the biggest sales year the category has ever recorded. One in ten children’s books sold at Waterstones is now a graphic novel, compared to one in twenty in 2019. These are not the numbers of a marginalised art form gasping for air. They are the numbers of a thriving commercial sector at the height of a boom.

Wait, what?! But what about the reading crisis? But of course, it isn’t proper reading. There are not enough words on a page.

And besides, these numbers are not real. British comics creators live in abject poverty in homeless shelters collecting subsistence state handouts while having their jobs stolen by AI, just like regular authors. It must be true. The Society of Authors says so.

In this case the SoA says so within the comfort zone of the UK Comics Creators Research Report 2026, majestically described as “The most comprehensive overview of comics creators in the UK”.

Most?! Comprehensive?! Overview? In case we are still not impressed (full disclosure: I wasn’t), we are told the “UK Comics Creators Research Report offers vital insights to ensure the creators of this burgeoning grassroots industry are better supported, included, and advocated for, outlining concrete recommendations for funders, policymakers, and industry bodies.”

But wait, there’s more: “Drawing on the responses from nearly 700 creators to the UK Comics Creator Survey in autumn 2025, this report builds on the findings of the first survey in 2020 and explores what has changed in the last five years, examining the impacts of Generative AI, the cost of living crisis and Brexit upon livelihoods.”

So why does the report that opens with those numbers, and that in 2020 offered a comprehensive range of solutions, spend the next ninety-odd pages of the 2026 report arguing that the creators responsible for that boom are being failed, exploited, and left behind – and that the primary solutions involve government intervention, Arts Council funding, and emergency bursaries?

The tension (yes, I know, AI uses the word tension too, so this whole piece must be written with AI, right?)is all too real. But the report, shaped in part by the Society of Authors and the Association of Illustrators, is better at describing distress than diagnosing its causes. And in that gap between description and diagnosis sits a set of assumptions that I suspect you’ve probably already guessed are going to get considerably more scrutiny than the report gives them.

The Aspiration Problem

Take the headline finding that only one fifth of respondents who want comics to be their career actually earn the majority of their income from it. This is presented as an insight. As evidence of structural failure. It might equally be evidence that most people who want something don’t achieve it – a condition common to every creative field, and most others besides.

The survey design self-selects for people who identify with comics, who care enough about the medium to complete a detailed questionnaire, and who want it to be their professional life. It does not ask what distinguishes those who achieve that goal from those who don’t. It does not ask about output volume, submission frequency, genre targeting, audience development, or whether respondents are actively and strategically pursuing the career they desire. It simply measures the gap between aspiration and income and calls that gap a crisis.

If you surveyed 689 people who identified as aspiring novelists, screenwriters, musicians, or professional footballers and asked how much they earn from their aspirational career, you would get roughly comparable numbers. The survey is not measuring a comics problem. It is measuring the universal distance between wanting something and achieving it.

I spent much of my childhood and teens determined to write comic for a living. Working as Stan Lee’s right-hand man at the Marvel bullpen was my dream job as a youth. For many years I treasured a letter from the man himself, who replied to my tween query and said if I were ever in New York I should pop in and say hello, which at twelve I convinced myself was a job offer.

Far too many decades later, not a single comic script was ever completed by me. Books, articles, news stories, documentaries, travelogues, short stories, plays, even TV splashed across my career path, but never a finished comic script, let alone one that made the grade.

So I could honestly have responded to the survey saying my chosen career path earned me sweet Fanny Adams, and if I’d added it was all the fault of ChatGPT and Meta, no-one would have questioned it.

Which is precisely my point. This survey isn’t questioning anything, just gifting struggling creatives with a prêt-à-porter list of Blame Janes, a tradition the Society of Authors has long since elevated to an artform.

The 89% below-living-wage figure from traditional publishing is the same issue in a different dress. Traditional publishing earnings are royalty-based, catalogue-dependent, and intimately tied to continued output. A creator who published one graphic novel four years ago, earned some royalties, and has not yet published another is technically “earning from traditional publishing” while earning almost nothing – not because the industry has failed them, but because backlist earns less than frontlist, and resting output earns less than active output. The report makes no attempt to control for any of this.

The Entitlement Question

The deeper issue is one that the report never directly confronts but that haunts every page of it: the question of what creators are actually owed.

The Society of Authors’ institutional position, consistent across decades, is essentially that any person who wants to be an author and produces work deserves a living income from that work, regardless of whether the market wants it in sufficient quantities to generate one.

This is a position so detached from how any other commercial activity works that it would be laughed out of a room in any other sector. JK Rowling wrote words on pages, the same as every other aspiring author. She got lucky in ways that cannot be replicated by policy. And then her work resonated with an audience and created its own momentum. The vast majority of aspiring authors will not experience that. Most aspiring anything will not. This is not a policy failure. It is elementary arithmetic.

Comics publishers need creative talent, and they want the best. They have limited budgets, specific editorial visions, and commercial pressures. The idea that everyone with a storyline and the ability to sketch something is entitled to a career-sustaining income from the results – independent of quality, output, or audience demand – is not a principle the SoA would ever state that baldly (although it comes bloody close!), but it is the premise that underpins the research framing. The survey never asks whether the work is finding an audience. If the work is good enough. If the creator has made sufficient effort and has adequate skills. It only asks whether the creator is being paid and how much.

The Opera Comparison and What It Actually Shows

The report makes much of the disparity between public funding for comics and other art forms. The numbers are genuinely eye-catching: Arts Council England’s National Portfolio spending runs to £14.18 per head of audience for opera, £5.02 for ballet, and 1.5p – one and a half pence – per head for comics. On the face of it, a damning indictment of institutional priorities.

But the comparison warrants further scrutiny. Opera and ballet funding is not supporting the sale of commercial recordings. It is sustaining live performance infrastructure – opera houses, orchestras, touring companies, the entire apparatus required to put a performance on a stage on a given night, after which it is gone. A live performance earns nothing after the curtain falls. A published comic, like a recorded album or a printed novel, can earn for decades. The commercial model is entirely different, and so is the rationale for public support.

The more pointed question is not why opera receives more subsidy than comics, but whether comics – a commercial product generating £78.7 million in annual sales and growing at 14% a year – needs the kind of life-support subsidy that genuine performance arts infrastructure requires.

The report presents the funding gap as self-evidently unjust. A more honest analysis might note that comics are already doing what opera cannot: standing substantially on their own commercial feet, and doing so with growing confidence. Only the SoA could argue with a straight face that £78.7 million in annual sales and a 14% growth rate is in need of subsidy.

What the France Argument Actually Shows

The report’s most reasonable reference point is the French bandes dessinées model, where the state funds creators through the Centre National du Livre, festivals through public partnership, and the medium is constitutionally recognised as le neuvième art – the ninth art. France holds a 40.8% share of the European comics market. Surely this proves that state support produces commercial success, right?

It of course proves nothing of the sort, but the report doesn’t examine the causality carefully enough to notice. France’s comics dominance is not primarily a product of state funding. It is the product of a century of cultural investment in the medium – a tradition of serious critical engagement, dedicated specialist bookselling, readerships that crossed class and age lines, and the social normalisation of adult comics reading that Britain never achieved and has never seriously attempted.

I can speak to this from personal experience. As a teenager in a British school, arguing that Marvel comics were literature and quality art was a minority sport conducted largely from hiding – in my case, under the tomato plants in the school greenhouse during PE, or behind the goal posts on the rare occasions I couldn’t avoid the football pitch.

The English and art teachers were unconvinced – until, eventually, I organised a school exhibition to show them the evidence.

But here’s the thing. In a French lycée of the same era, that exhibition would have been redundant. Goscinny and Uderzo were on the shelves. Moebius was a name a teenager might know. The cultural permission for comics to be taken seriously was structural, not subsidised – the product of generations of critical engagement rather than government grants.

The British cultural contempt for comics ran deep and ran institutional. As I wrote in April, the publishing industry treated comics as below even the already-undervalued category of children’s literature: academics picketed Neil Gaiman’s university appearances in 1998 because he’d written for comic books. The concept of the “graphic novel” emerged partly as a linguistic workaround – using the word “novel” to smuggle respectability past gatekeepers who would have dismissed the same work in stapled format.

What Britain lacks is not state funding for comics. It is the cultural infrastructure that makes mass adult readership possible – the critical ecosystem, the serious reviewing, the normalisation of comics as reading rather than licensed franchise merchandise. The report itself notes that comics journalism is vanishing, that reviewers are scarce, that discoverability depends on social media algorithms. These are real problems. But emergency grants and Arts Council bursaries will not build a critical culture. Only critical engagement can do that.

The AI Section: Timeline, Paywall, and Opinion Dressed as Data

The report’s AI findings deserve particular scrutiny, given the involvement of the Society of Authors, whose institutional position on generative AI is well documented and consistently alarmist.

Per the report, ninety-six percent of respondents do not use GenAI in their workflows. Yet 36% believe or know they have lost income because of it. That is, as Gemini might say, genuinely impressive.

Let me come back to the 36% nonsense (as you will see, it is utter nonsense) shortly. First we need to address some inconvenient truths the SoA would prefer not to talk about. Like the fact that AI was not mentioned once as the villain in the 2020 survey.

The latest survey, surfacing this week, survey ran in autumn 2025. AI image generation capable of professional illustration quality only became widely accessible in 2023-24. Tools capable of the sequential storytelling, consistent character work, and panel-to-panel coherence that comics actually require are more recent still – and largely sit behind subscription paywalls that the free tiers cannot access.

A community that is, by the report’s own account, majority below living wage is not rushing to pay monthly fees for premium AI image tools. What looks at first like principled rejection of generative AI may in many cases simply reflect economic and practical irrelevance: the technology either wasn’t capable enough (no public AI in 2020, no meaningful illustration -competent AI in 2024, or wasn’t affordable enough, for most of the period creators are reflecting on for the survey.

This matters enormously for the 36% claim. How does a creator know for certain that a client chose AI rather than a cheaper human illustrator, an in-house option, a declining budget, or simply deciding not to commission at all?

In most cases the answer is that they cannot know. What they have is a narrative that makes sense of their experience – one that has been loudly and consistently promoted by the Society of Authors throughout the survey period. The 36% figure tells us much about how comics creators perceive their situation. It tells us sweet FA about what is actually causing it.

The 4% who do use GenAI are doing so almost entirely for research and administrative tasks – precisely the productivity-enhancing applications that free up creative time. That finding quietly contradicts the broader narrative: those engaging with the technology are using it as an assistant, not a replacement. The community might reasonably ask whether that approach is available to more of them than currently believe it is.

Especially in mind he report’s own Key Findings summary that, “57% cited ‘lack of time to create’ as a key challenge (being the main challenge for 25% of respondents)“.

What the Report Gets Right

None of this is to dismiss the real difficulties facing UK comics creators. Brexit’s impact on shipping costs and European market access is well-documented and unquestionably damaging – the report’s detail on customs complexity, import costs, and the effective closing of previously viable European markets is credible and specific.

The cost-of-living squeeze on discretionary spending hits indie creators hardest, as audiences in tighter times retreat to familiar titles – standard recession-era consumer behaviour across every cultural sector. The convention economics section is honest about costs that frequently outrun returns for smaller sellers.

The report is also right that there is a critical infrastructure problem – though it misdiagnoses the remedy. When serious reviewing outlets disappear, when discoverability depends entirely on algorithmic luck, when creators are struggling to find journalists who will engage with their work, that is a real narrowing of the space in which new work can find its audience.

But this is a cultural problem requiring cultural solutions: critics writing, publications commissioning reviews, bookshops curating seriously. None of that requires a grant application.

The Bookseller’s Headline and What It Reveals

The Bookseller covered this report in its customary press-release style, with a headline noting that creators “struggle to survive despite record industry sales.” Read that formulation carefully. Record industry sales. Creator struggle.

The report treats this as paradox requiring policy intervention. It is not a paradox. It is the entirely predictable consequence of a market structure in which commercial success accrues to those who have found and developed audiences, and in which aspiring creators who have not yet done that must supplement their income from other sources – exactly as aspiring creators have always done in every creative field.

The comics market is booming because some creators are making work that audiences want to buy in large quantities. That is not a problem to be solved. It is the mechanism by which any creative market functions. The question we need to ask – the one this report carefully avoids – is what the successful fifth are doing that the other four fifths are not.

Comics are magnificent. I argued that to my teachers as a teenager, from behind the goal posts and under the tomato plants, and I’ll argue it now. The medium deserves serious attention, serious criticism, and serious commercial respect.

What it doesn’t need is for anyone who loves comics to be insulated from the basic condition of creative work: that the audience gets to decide. It doesn’t need nanny-state subsidies and special needs exemptions from commercial reality.

Only a weak advocacy organisation would argue such a position.

This post first appeared in the TNPS LinkedIn Analysis newsletter