I’ll get right to the point: our publishing contract with Scout Comics for the Code 45 graphic novel expired January 9, 2025. Since that time, Scout Comics has not only refused to pay us the royalties we were owed from the previous year, but has also told us that it will continue to sell our books even though they no longer legally have that right, putting that money directly in their pocket.
Scout Comics is stealing from us.
How did we get here? I wish I knew. When we first signed our contract with Scout back in 2020, things seemed on the up and up. Our first issue of Code 45 sold relatively well, but the second issue was delayed. This set the tone for the remainder of our relationship with the publisher.
After a months-long gap to get Issue 2 in stores, a hurricane struck Scout’s printer, effectively wiping out their operations and forcing them to outsource. At this point, the cost of printing each issue was equal to its wholesale cost for comic book shops, which effectively meant a zero value for us on royalties for single-issue sales moving forward.
Shit happens. We’ll recoup it with the trade, right? That didn’t get off to a good start either, with Scout losing track of whether they had actually shipped any books to their traditional publishing partner, Simon & Schuster, after having delayed the launch of the trade paperback well past the point we had been advertising for pre-orders and arrivals. In fact, it wasn’t until I reached out to Simon & Schuster directly—and customers began receiving their books—the Scout figured out their logistics issues.
During this entire period, Scout did zero advertising or promotion for our book. None. It was entirely up to us.
By this point, few of the employees or executives who had been with Scout Comics when we signed our deal were still in the picture, or at the very least, in communication with us. That flow of information shrank to a trickle over the final year of sales, during which Scout approached us about special edition releases that we turned down, given their inability to deliver, really, on selling our book in any meaningful volume past that original burst for Issue 1.
We were also told that we wouldn’t get any royalty statements or payments from Simon & Schuster’s trade paperback release until a full year on the market had passed. Coincidentally, this matched up with the end of our contract. We eventually received a royalty statement for that full year of sales, which included a small payment due to us.
It was here that Scout transformed from our publishing partner to a thief. After informing Scout that we weren’t interested in renewing our contract, they sent us a “quit claim” contract asking us to assign them permission to continue selling their existing inventory of our book. Naturally, given how terrible Scout had been treating other creators, in addition to our own issues with the company, we declined to sign this document. We had no faith they would actually pay us any royalties from these sales.
It turns out that we were right. Not only has Scout Comics refused to pay us our final royalties, based on the statement we were sent in early 2025, but a member of their marketing team, Greg Krivac, took over all communications to tell us that according to his interpretation of our contract — and despite prefacing these interpretations by saying ‘I am not a legal expert’ — Scout Comics had every right to keep selling our books. And, presumably, not paying us.
The absurdity of the situation was ovewhelming, and Scout’s audacity even more so. Why would we have been sent a quit claim contract asking for continues sales rights, post-contract expiration, if those rights already belonged to Scout? The answer is: because they didn’t. Scout Comics has no right to continue selling physical copies of our book past the end of our contract, something spelled out in black and white. They were allowed a six month grace period to close up any digital copy distribution, but otherwise, their rights to Code 45’s physical copies ended January 9, 2025.
I immediately got in touch with my legal counsel, who confirmed that Scout had no right to sell our books, and was in clear violation not only of the contract, but of copyright law. If anyone out there needs excellent legal advice about contracts with comic book publishers, I can’t recommend Gamal Henessey at Creative Contract Consulting enough.
Unfortunately, pursuing Scout Comics in a court of law would mean heading down to Florida, where they are located, to file the lawsuit there, which would cost many multiples of the amounts they owed, or were likely to gain in the future from illegally selling Code 45.
That didn’t mean I was completely out of options, however. On the advice of counsel, I immediately initiated a Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown request with Shopify, the host of Scout Comics’ online store. The DMCA provides a tool for copyright owners like myself to engage with fraudulent sellers infringing on copyright, like Scout Comics was doing with Code 45.
The process was involved, but rapid. Code 45 was removed from Scout’s website. I then initiated the same process against Simon & Schuster, and succeeded in removing it from their website as well.
This is only a partial victory. Scout continues to illegally sell Code 45 on Amazon, eBay, and other online retailers. I can assure you that no one on the creative team is seeing a single dime from any of those sales. Scout Comics is actively stealing from us, and has cut off all communications.
If you are a comic book creator, do not engage with this publisher. They cannot be trusted.
In the future, I might take the time to go into more depth about the negative aspects of our Scout Comics experience—our terrible dealings with a movie producer Scout found in an attempt to license our book, the continual employee turnover, the complete lack of promotion, the difficulty local comic book shops had in getting orders filled for our book, and those of other Scout creators.
For now, I wanted to make sure everyone considering doing any business with Scout Comics knew how they treated their partners, and understood that they are willing to break contracts without a second thought.
January, 2026 Update: It’s been a year since our contract with Scout Comics ended, and I’m stilling finding new ways they’ve been stealing from us behind our backs. The most recent was the discovery that Code 45 was available through Hoopla, a service that makes ebooks available to libraries. Not only did we never receive any royalties from Hoopla during the length of our publishing contract, at least according to the records I’ve been sent, but it’s been a full 12 months since that contract expired and Scout was still receiving payments from Hoopla—with a representative telling us that it was a very popular download for their users. Sigh.
February 2026 Update: Scout Comics continues to sell our books and merchandise via their official account on eBay. Not only are these sales illegal, but they are not paying us any royalties from these sales, and haven’t paid us any royalties in almost two years at this point. .
