Discover the reason comic creators toil away over ink stained pages, even when circumstances don't reward that hard work.

This is what happens when comics meet the real world, coming face to face with politics, war, and big business. Witness creators navigate their passion and careers when faced with the intersection between art and commerce.

This stellar collection includes these essays:

1) The Cost of Comics: A History of the Comic Book Labor Movement

2) Marge Buell and Little Lulu: Women Warriors - America's Early Female Cartoonist Entrepreneur and Her Feminist Creation

3) Hector Oesterheld: Comics Own Martyr

4) David Mazzucchelli Walks Away from Superheroic Success for Indie Art

5) Jeff Smith and Bone: A Little Help from My Friends

6) A License to Cartoon: Art and Capitalism in the Works of Schulz, Davis, and Watterson

7) Epilogue or Why I Write: A Justification of Rejection, Torture, and Bliss