Artist Al Williamson put so much effort into drawing this story for EC comics, his pay couldn’t have amounted to more than 37 cents per hour.
And that’s not even including the backgrounds contributed by his buddy Roy Krenkel “for the fun of it.” Williamson later said about his work for EC, “what it shows is that I really loved what I was doing.”
At age 23, Williamson wasn’t worried about a pension or a mortgage.
Apparently he didn’t care about posterity either. All that effort went into comic books, the most fragile medium, which were poorly printed on cheap paper that quickly yellowed and disintegrated.
This was 1955, an era before NFTs and giclée prints. Look at the difference in quality between what Williamson poured into the drawings and what emerged for the public in the printed comic book:
And yet, Williamson continued drawing page after page “for the fun of it.” He was content with the percentage of beauty that made its way into the comic:
In a society in which everything is for sale, in which deals and auctions make the biggest news, doing it for love is the only remaining liberty…. Do it for love and the rich will envy no one more than you. In a world of tuxedos, the naked man is king. In a world of bookkeepers with spreadsheets, the one who gives it away without counting the cost is God.
