Satisficing (?) career choices

A quick look to mid-20th century job stability, from not your everyday insider

Cartoonist, author and painter Carl Barks (aka the Duck Man, the creator of Scrooge McDuck and much of the Disney duck-verse), reflecting on his pay per page and other job aspects:

…I don’t know the main line of prices per page paid for art and stories by Western Printing and Litho. The price varies according to the type of subject matter. Tarzan stories, for instance, I’m sure get higher prices than duck work. My payment for the last several years was $11.50 a page for stories, $34 a page for art. Cover ideas were $20. Cover art $50. I’ve been told that some other publishers paid higher rates. I didn’t feel cheated, however, because I was a regular employee after 1953, and as such I got free medical and life insurance, bonuses twice a year and a company-paid trust fund that built up into quite a figure by 1966. I had no rights, however, on anything published...

Barks valued hard work and honest entrepreneurhip

Quite a sober assessment from a great artist. The defense of his employee status against flying to competition or retaining the rights to his (far-reaching and impactful) art has stuck to me some years now (first read it in a Greek volume). I finally located it here:

Letter from January 9, 1968, to Carlo Chendi (Italy) https://cbarks.dk/thecorrespondence1960s.htm

His original works, it turned out, were thrown to the furnace post print. The few that were preserved (by the occassional employee) became so rare that even the Big Mouse had a hard time finding them.