It's been a long ten years and I finally get to talk publicly about what happened behind closed doors.
Please take the time to read this letter linked above and please avoid working with these people. You are more valuable than an opportunity for people like them to use you as cash cow for your work.
Three years ago, I was approached by many artists at Hiveworks asking if their mistreatment was normal. That their feelings of horrible self worth within the company was really just a 'them' problem.
Turns out, it was unfortunately normal in that we ALL felt that way.
Stolen funds, reworked projects without permission, favouritism, opportunity sabotage- These were the common occruances over at Hive. Artists felt used, ignored, and walked all over to pay Hives bills and ego. People didn't know what to do.
I helped co-found the guild in response to so many artists feeling this way, and we slowly gathered together to make a better Hive. Yeah, that's right- we thought we could help change and save the company if we all colaborated, hurt set aside and transparency deeply needed.
Unfortunately, that wasn't in the cards. We spent 3 years going back and forth with staff to understand the debt, the mistreatment, the empty promises only to realise that the staff who was left to deal with the mess (because the CEO and COO went hands off or left) couldn't fix what was destroyed.
Hiveworks was supposed to be a beacon for webcomickers. It was supposed to be an indie opportunity to flourish in the small ways we can. But it became yet another example of a greedy publisher who saw an opportunity to take and take and take.
It was also a vanity project for Isa and Xel too. They wanted the prestige of working in 'publishing' but didn't care a lick about the artists who brought readers in. If you were someone she thought was an artistic threat, Isa would go out of her way to humble you and put you in your place.
That happened Many MANY times to me and my fellow creators. Not only was Hive using our work, it also would remind us how worthless we were in the same breath. Everything felt like some sort of competition, and Isa and Xel made sure artists didn't talk to ecahother about it too. So many instances of the two of them going around gossiping in public about 'the real story' when it came to their mismanagment and inability to handle their job. They would use someone else as a scape goat and pretend they did all they could. It was highschool stuff.
As for my particular case, I was the bane of their existance apparently. I was rumoured to be out for Isas job because artists would go to me for support and she hated that. I was apparently trying to ruin things because I saw those cracks.
Squeaky wheel and all that. I took the risks I did, i didn't care about being 'everyone's friend' or missed out on 'the connections' because I didn't want to play that game. Artists were feeling used, stolen from, and neglected. I spoke up, and many others started to feel safe to do so too.
The more we shared stories (and man, there are HORROR stories) the more we realised that the inner workings of Hive were more tangled than we thought. Our years of organising lead us to approach the cartoonist co-op for extra help. We tried our best to do what we could for Hive to survive.
After we were hit with the 'actually we're in a quarter of a million in debt' and they wanted us to help financially (while owing artists and staff money) it was the curtain call for Hive as a company.
Isa left the sinking ship previously to avoid responsibility, and Xel ghosted the rest of us.
All of this is to say that these kinds of people who promise the world with your work and take advantage are such a common and frustrating thing in not only comics, but all creative avenues.
And speaking up and against them is the only way to make these cycles stop.
Please support the artists who were affected by this. Please spread the word and speak up against people who use artists like this. Hiveworks is an example in a sea of greedy people who want our work to inflate their ego.
Don't let them forget we can bite back, and without us, THEY are nothing.
For anyone who is curious why I bailed out of Hiveworks, please read this.
My particular experience is pretty mild comparatively, but it mattered very much to me, and I hold grudges. I'll put this under a cut because it's long.
I joined Hiveworks in early 2015. I was pretty excited! It was the first time I'd ever felt remotely validated as an artist among my peers. I'm generally shy, and my art is something I've been conditioned into keeping to myself, so I'd never had much confidence or luck in finding a community of other artists. Hiveworks built my website, I moved off of Smackjeeves, great. The terms of my contract with them, among other things, were that they'd invest $2k into promoting the comic. I have no way of validating if they did this. I doubt it, given the only way this could've possibly been done was through running ads on other comics, and $2k seems like an awful lot. I think this was before they had a relationship with Flight Rising. It almost doesn't matter now; they will not have records of this. They don't even know how much they owe artists and vendors now.
The other major part of my contract was that I would get a certain amount of revenue from ads run on my site:
Firstly, in retrospect, the fucking nerve of them to suggest that income from my Patreon (something they have never, ever had anything to do with) be taken into account as far as how much they'd pay me. Xel has continued this attitude, by the way, as if she was doing us a favor by not taking a portion of Patreon income from artists.
What I actually received from Hiveworks varied over the years. If I remember correctly, it varied from month to month for a while before becoming a flat $100/month, which then halved to $50/month in early 2020ish with no explanation. I never hit anywhere near $1k, lol. I also never once saw any documentation for how the ads on my site were actually doing, despite asking for it towards the end of my stint with Hiveworks (more on that later), so I have absolutely zero idea if they were paying me anywhere near the right amount at any point.
After I was onboarded, that was pretty much it as far as communication with Hiveworks aside from payments and the stray email; there were newsletters much later on. I held up my end of the contract even after it expired in 2016 (!) and I never saw a renewal (more on THAT later)--my job was to update at least once a week excepting for sudden sickness or pre-arranged hiatus and to not post WN anywhere else besides my own site and Patreon. I've had to turn down offers for translation and serialization in a magazine due to this last thing.
I think there were a few different group chats for Hiveworks artists and staff over the years; I was in a Slack briefly, but I seem to remember it being very quiet. I had to ask for an invitation for the Discord after finding out it existed from the newsletter; Isa told me that she must have had the wrong username in for me, despite us having had DM'd each other for some reason in the past, and even then she could've just emailed me for the right username. Whatever, right.
The thing is, I got ghosted so many times by Hiveworks that I kinda felt like I wasn't really wanted. I didn't bug them about my contract expiring because I was legitimately worried they'd tell me they were going to cut me loose instead. Up until very recently I've been easily discouraged and very sensitive to rejection; I've spent too much of my life trying not to take up space in one way or another. Even then I was also aware that a lot of my confidence issues were probably me projecting, so I just kind of kept my feelings to myself. But it's also crazymaking, to keep perceiving that I'm being avoided while telling myself I'm just projecting.
In late 2019 Hiveworks sent out an email saying they were going to get everyone caught up on current contracts. This never happened. They also let us know that we were being assigned editors-slash-main points of contact at Hiveworks, and to expect a ~personalized~ message soon from that person. I never got that either; I finally asked who it was, and it was Isa.
To make something very, very clear: no one has ever, ever acted as an editor on White Noise. Hiveworks has never, ever had any input whatsoever on it. Isa never contacted me to talk about my comic; I'm not even really sure why she assigned herself to it, given I know for a fact it does not overlap with her interests very much. White Noise is, for better or worse, wholly written and drawn by me. I don't even have a beta reader. I want to stress this because Isa seems to really like getting to call herself an editor, and it personally irks me to think that anyone might remotely perceive that she had any hand in my comic.
In 2020-21 I was trying really hard to get older pages of White Noise up to print readiness, so I could do a print Kickstarter in 2021. People have been asking for this! I wanted to do it! So I emailed my Hiveworks point of contact for help:
You can see how long this process was. At this point, Isa DM'd me on Discord acting as though she'd been trying to message me the whole time but that her messages just weren't going through, or something. Like, an obviously flimsy excuse. I don't believe her; even if that was true, she could have just emailed me. Whatever.
(EDIT LMAO I did not actually send banking details over Discord! Do not do this! It's even dumber: Isa ended up telling me to log into Bill.com, the service that was handling payments for US creators, to change it myself, which I did not realize I could do. I do not know why the fuck she was going to ask for banking details over Discord.)
Followup email I sent afterwards. Never got a response. Everything I am asking for here is stuff that other Hiveworks artists were being (selectively) provided (if Isa wanted to.) After this time my dayjob got super busy due to the pandemic and never really slowed down, and I just felt kind of defeated, so I didn't pursue it.
I also tried to get a storefront set up through Hivemill, by the way, and was ghosted after one email on that as well. Not by Isa, it was another staff member, and to be fair I should've followed up on it--but my window of having the extra bandwidth to deal with setup closed, and again, I just felt kind of defeated, so. Whatever! It's just, if you've ever wondered why I haven't managed a print version of WN or even a POD store, it's not for lack of trying.
I got invited into the Hiveworks Guild in 2023 just as I was hitting a wombo combo of extreme loss of confidence and what I didn't recognize at the time as bad burnout. I cannot thank the creators in the Guild enough for having me there; the knowledge that my experience was not unique helped me get a lot of confidence back in myself and my work.
It also made me angry. I got off really easy by being ghosted, actually. Other artists have had their Kickstarter funds stolen, withheld, used for other projects, ???, used for Xel's personal purchases. Some should have made more money on their Kickstarters, but Isa would purchase overly large book orders with the funds (and a lot of those are still in the warehouse, and creators are struggling to get their stock shipped to them, some overseas, some with no place to store them.) And I wasn't the only one who was made to feel less than by Isa, but with them it was down to her condescension in both inappropriate casual conversation and in 'editorial' meetings.
So I got involved in the Guild to, initially, try to get Hiveworks straightened out in its treatment of artists. I have an easier time getting angry on other people's behalf than mine anyway. I am now also a union steward at my day job and have 11 years administrative work experience, so NOW I know what I'm talking about when it comes to worker treatment and how long any kind of paperwork should take--experience I didn't have when I was a dumb 24yo just signing onto Hiveworks.
I ended up being one of the first Guild members to leave Hiveworks as a member in 2024. One of the things we tried to tackle first were the contracts, which were still not any closer to being up to date since the last time they were brought up in 2019. We were told continually that new contracts were 'in the works.' When a draft did finally appear--read to us, I shit you not, line by line by Isa in a Discord call that was supposed to serve as a 'town hall'--it was so absurdly unprofessional that it had to be discarded anyway. It does not take 5 years to draft a boilerplate contract; it does not take 5 months. It doesn't even have to take 5 weeks. You could have a workable draft in an afternoon if you had your priorities straight.
Another thing was pay transparency. We asked for Isa (who also did payroll) to send us any kind of reports on how our ads were doing each month, so we could, I don't know, correlate that to how much money we got at all. Isa complained that the data was too difficult to share that way. She once said that the data was in CSV format and that made it too hard. Anyone who is notionally familiar with Excel will know this is a fucking ridiculous thing to say. What I think this was really about is that 1) the books were actually a huge mess and I'm not sure Isa was ever paying anyone the correct amount and 2) if we were able to compare our pay vs ad performance, that would be really clear. Not for nothing, but part of my day job is to do payroll every two weeks for ~100 employees in under four hours. Isa was an admin with Hiveworks about as long as I've been at my current day job. She was either simply bad at her job or lying about it, or both.
Personally my last straw was when an email from Hiveworks came out in early 2024 that ad minimums (the amount each artist was guaranteed to get each month even if their ad revenue fell below it) would be discontinued. Not after a new contract was signed; just discontinued. Xel walked that back after the backlash, sort of, because then some people stopped getting paid anyway. I left by the end of January iirc.
I've stuck around the Guild since to help in whatever way I can. I wrote a guide that several comic artists have used to migrate their sites away from Hiveworks servers and am part of the Cartoonist Co-op, where I've helped with their action to assist more Hiveworks artists in leaving. Isa left Hiveworks and has seen no consequences for mismanaging the finances or Kickstarters as badly as she have. I don't know what her deal is.
As an aside, Chimera Comics Collective was indeed born out of the Hiveworks Guild, not as a response to Hiveworks discontinuing their publishing arm (that was after CCC's formation and they should've fucking done that years ago when their Kickstarter queue started to get so backed up due to mismanagement) but because we met and talked about what a) we wanted from Hiveworks in the first place, b) we'd miss if we left Hiveworks, and c) we could sustainably do, and a webring has thus far been the answer. Whether it will ever be anything besides that remains to be seen; we're all very tired, lol. But we can at least lift each other up in the meantime by linking to and promoting each other!
This is about what I have to say on this subject. There is SO much more, but so much of it isn't my story to tell. I'm very grateful to the Cartoonist Co-op and the Hiveworks Guild, and I'm glad I could do something useful to help out. Suffice it to say that if you think I'm being too mean about Isa and Xel...lol. I am not. I could get meaner.
A last note: 99% of the problems with Hiveworks are down to Isa and Xel. The rest of the staff have largely been lovely people who actually care quite a lot, and a lot of them have ALSO been going without pay. Many of them have left Hiveworks as well (no idea if they got their pay!), though I think there's a couple that are still sucked into the vortex because no one is being hired to replace them. Please be kind to them if you run across them. And I don't think I have to ask, because my readers are also largely wonderful people, but please don't harass anyone involved in this. Just do not, under any circumstances, trust Xellette Velamist or Isabelle Melançon with your work or your money.
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