>>98371927Non-existant. I want to try and do something to prove this but I can't find precise numbers of employees broken down by writers, inkers, editors, artists, etc, ie people creatively involved in the comic production. However I can find employee numbers, so let's take that as a pretty inaccurate baseline as that's going to involve tons of stuff outside of making the comics, etc but let's just take that as a very rough estimate. I might actually write to these companies and find out.
Let's look at Marvel, DC, Image, Dark Horse and IDW, the five biggest publishers of comics in the US and how many people they employ. These figures are pretty hard to come by and I'm having to do guesswork a bit.
First Marvel, easiest to find, Bloomberg estimates they have roughly 300 people on staff this year.
DC is a bit harder; couldn't find any real figures but they had roughyl 400 in 2010 and downsized by 80, and I haven't heard of any large expansion, so it's safe to say they're about 300 or so as well.
Image, Dark Horse and IDW are much harder to find numbers for. On the grounds of fairness, I'm going to estimate them each at about 150 people each. This is just bullshit numbers, and I think they're far smaller than that.
So, 450 people currently involved with Image, Dark Horse and IDW and about 600 people employed at Marvel and DC.
That's 1050 people roughtly involved in producing the top largest selling US Comic companies.
It's harder to find information on the Japanese companies, but we can find a few; Shuiesha for exmaple which I believe is either first or second largest, employs 753 people alone. That's basically equivalent to the top three companies in the US. In addition, there's far more companies publishing comics in Japan that are noticeable than there are in the US and most have sales numbers that compare favourable to the US in terms of sales (and this is just counting domestic weekly or monthly sales, excepting trades).