When I first started trying to publish comics in 2004, I lost so much money and fell so deep into debt. I had paid thousands of dollars for the inks by Dick Ayers and all the great pin-ups I’d gotten. I’d printed three books, and it had cost me thousands of dollars. I’d thrown thousands of dollars aside on advertising schemes, and none of them paid off in sales, and all that money was gone in a blink, with nothing to show for it. Our credit cards, which I was hoping would be paid off by then, were getting higher and higher. I was beginning to get stressed, and that stress was a consistent buzzing in the back of my head all the time.
It took some months to add up all my receipts and figure out my taxes. My dad was a huge help, because he has a computer program, and it asks you questions, and you answer them as you go, adding up the numbers it tells you to, and before you know it, you’ve got your taxes figured out.
The good news was, I lost so much money trying to publish comics, I got a huge write-off. HUGE. We were such a financial failure, our tax refund allowed my wife and I to pay for our trip to Europe and the Bristol Con, and we still had enough left over to get Elizabeth laser eye surgery. It was such a huge return, I was really nervous the government would give us an audit just out of sheer spite, if not to see if I really knew what the hell I was thinking trying to claim so much. But our numbers were legit, and I assume that for a beginning business it’s natural to have some start-up costs, and the audit never came.
Here are things I claimed, in addition to printing costs, pin-up and inking costs of other artists, and advertising costs.
Monthly DSL bills, since I’m finding and making all my contacts with pin-up artists, doing research, finding images to reference with my art, and more, online. A portion of my phone bill, since it’s now my business number. A portion of my rent, because now the extra bedroom is my office where I draw, scan, contact other professionals by phone or email. A portion of my utilities, because a portion of that electricity is used in my “office.”
Buying a new computer, scanner, printer, ink cartridges, mailing supplies for when I sell comics online, stamps for sending review copies to reviewers. Fonts, website fees, work-related computer programs. Art supplies. Paper, pencils, brushes and ink. Rulers, French curves, t-squares. Furniture, such as art lamps, tables to draw on, chairs that don’t screw up my neck while I draw. Storage containers and file cabinets.
Comic books I bought, as story and art research. It’s my industry of choice, and I need to keep up to date on what’s going on. Plus get inspiration for my own ideas and see how different artists handle things that might give me difficulty. For that matter, make sure I’m not just doing the same old boring thing everyone else has already done.
Books I bought: Same thing. Mostly story and writing structure research.
Audio books I bought. Story research, as well as an office supply, because I listen to them while I work.
DVDs. Storytelling research, as well as immense photo reference. Film is the most similar medium to comics out there, because it combines text and images. You can learn a lot from how films are structured, so long as you don’t lose sight of the fact that they are still different mediums.
Movies I go to. Research in story and pop culture. The only problem with this one is that I pretty much never go to the movies any more, because I don’t really enjoy the experience any more. But it’s a legitimate expense.
I rent a storage space, because I’ve printed so many comics that haven’t sold, we just simply ran out of space in our tiny apartment.
Airplanes and hotels and transportation and food and convention fees and rental cars and parking, for our business trips to conventions. Mileage for every time I drive to a comics shop, art store, visit to my storage, or convention we don’t fly to. If we fly, I write off the mileage to and from the airport.
It seems weird to write off all these, basically entertainment items. It’s all stuff I get immense pleasure in. Everything that gives me pleasure now is technically my business research, so I’m rewarded for my hobbies. It doesn’t get cooler than that. It’s like Mike Allred had told me, “Work is always going to be work, but if you can make it something you love, it’s so much better.” However, if I had gotten an audit, I had ammo in my guns. I had been saving receipts for comics-related purchases five years before. That five-year period is when I began writing and drawing stories that were published in Tabloia. Technically I think I could have claimed all that as “start-up fees” for research, self-educating, etc. So if they had called me in, and said, “You owe for this and this,” I would have retaliated, “Well, while I’m in here, I had some questions about this extra five thousand dollars in receipts I didn’t claim, and maybe we could go through them together for the next couple hours.”
But man, you hear such horror stories about audits, you just dread it happening to you.