An excerpt from a 1981 issue of The Comics Journal discussing pace and money:
Kim Thompson: The catch is that the people who make good money in comic books do so by producing four or five pages a day.
Harvey Kurtzman: God bless! Four or five pages a day… Well, isn’t that kind of sick? I mean, when a man is turning out four pages a day, what’s he doing? Hack! How can you do anything creative at the rate of our pages a day?
Gary Groth: It’s almost a rote action.
Harvey Kurtzman: Exactly. You fill your head with ten formulas and you just rearrange and repeat them again and again. Four pages a day is astonishing to me because I do four pages every two months, and at that I’m slaving. I remember seeing the new generation of comic book people at work, and it was so disappointing. There was a bunch of paper over here and a bunch of pencils over there, and a pencil sharpener. That was it. You could practically hear the machine going, ‘Ba-dum dum, ba-dum dum!’ There’s something very pitiful about an artist working that way… But what do I know?
Kim Thompson: There are certain people in the comics industry, particularly during the past 10 years, who have been much more conscientious and much slower and eventually the economic situation just forces them out because they’re making hardly any money at all. The person who does one page a day gets the same page rate as the person who does five pages a day.
Harvey Kurtzman: Well, that’s what used to happen with me up at EC. I was working on Mad magazine, and my competition was Al Feldstein, doing all of those EC magazines, and he was fast! He just turned that stuff out!
Kim Thompson: A story a day for five years.
Harvey Kurtzman: And I would always be bitching, ‘I don’t get enough money, I don’t get enough money’ and Gaines would hit me with the reasoning, ‘Well, Al turns out more pages and gets more money going.’ And it was a very simple logic that I couldn’t argue with.