The Dark Herald notices some very bad signs at DC, formerly DC Comics:
DC Comics has for decades been able to survive as an IP farm. Yeah, it’s a loss leader and has been that way since forever ago but that red ink is barely a rounding error for Warner Brothers. And now they are seriously under the microscope. DC has never been audited by Warner Brothers before because it wasn’t worth doing it. It was actually a waste of money to find out if it was a waste of money. Because it obviously was. Now, DC Comics is having to explain its terrible decisions and why they are pursuing storylines that killed sales. The answer is, we wanted to be popular with the cool kids and you never cared about the money we burned doing it before now, so why not?
DC Comics didn’t send out their royalty checks to writers and artists. DC has never missed a royalty payment since they got bought up by Warner Brothers. The only reason they wouldn’t be sending out money is if there was no money to send.
I have it on very good authority that the royalties were finally paid, but they were paid uncharacteristically late. That’s a problem when large corporations are involved, because it means that the scheduled routine has been intentionally altered, most likely because the finance department is shuttling dwindling resources around from one department to another as needed.