Silver Sprocket, the San Francisco-based publisher and retailer, currently finds itself hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt that is personally held by owner Avi Ehrlich, the Comics Journal has learned. The financial squeeze comes as the company increasingly faces scrutiny over dealings with its artists, including accusations of unpaid royalties, questionable accounting of costs charged against artists’ payments, and self-dealing between Silver Sprocket’s publishing operation and a single retail location in San Francisco.
The result has been many Silver Sprocket artists who report receiving little to no monetary payments for books that have gone into multiple printings, and a company staff that has been roiled by disagreement and discontent in recent months, as a wave of layoffs and voluntary departures has left the fate of the alternative publisher increasingly in doubt.
Growing debts and growing doubts
In the third week of January 2025, Avi Ehrlich called together the full Silver Sprocket publishing team for an all-hands Zoom call. Present at the virtual meeting were all of the key employees of the company’s publishing and retail operations, including general manager Josh PM Frees, managing editor Ari Yarwood, production manager Joan Zahra Dark, publicist Kyle Daileda, and social media manager Raul Higuera. The previous week, Diamond Comic Distributors had announced that it was filing for bankruptcy, and it was an open secret within Silver Sprocket that the consequences for the small press publisher, which had relied heavily on the distributor, would be dire. The staff’s questions for Ehrlich were blunt: How far had Silver Sprocket fallen in debt? Was there a business plan to avoid layoffs? In the words of one staffer present: “Are we screwed?”
From the outside, the moment might have come as a surprise. Since its founding in 2007 as an independent record label and indie-comics publisher, Silver Sprocket quickly became a notable voice in the independent comics scene. Its roster featured critically acclaimed cartoonists like Caroline Cash (Peepee Poopoo) and Adam de Souza (Blind Alley). The company made a name for itself as a leftist indie label dedicated to publishing works by largely queer and POC artists. In 2020, the San Francisco-based publishing house opened a permanent retail location on Valencia Street, an area known for its shopping and high rents. Their books were selling well and Silver Sprocket seemed to be thriving.
But within the company, there had been signs of trouble even from several years before Diamond’s bankruptcy. Employees who had been with Silver Sprocket since 2021 recall both an unstructured environment, and endemic low pay, though many felt the latter was a necessary reality of small-press comics publishing. Social Media Manager Higuera recounts being assigned a constantly rotating series of responsibilities, with no clear hierarchy or delineation of duties.
“There was not a lot of structure,” Higuera said. “So there would be a lot of conflict between Josh, the manager, and then Avi, the owner, who would give conflicting orders. It seemed like a pattern that Avi had Josh, but Avi would still want the final say in literally every decision.”
“A lot of people would agree that it felt very micromanaging to work under Avi,” Daileda said. “Which I always say I understand, because this is their baby. It’s very hard to let go of certain things and trust people when it’s been your baby that you’ve worked with for years and years.” Avi had a personality that several employees described as “intense,” even when instructions and guidance weren’t always clear.
More troubling, at least in retrospect, was a certain opaqueness in the handling of contracts and finances. Multiple staff members confirmed that only two Silver Sprocket employees – Ehrlich and Frees – had full knowledge of the company’s accounting, and that financial information was never openly shared with the rest of the staff. An early sign that this might present a problem came in 2023, when Higuera was one of several staff members who complained to Ehrlich about the lack of any pay raises in over a year. “They said that they were still trying to figure things out, because we had a flood at the beginning of 2023, which affected our finances,” Higuera recalled. “So they had to figure out how to come back from that before giving us any more raises.”
By the beginning of 2024, however, Ehrlich was indicating to key staff that finances were tight and that changes might have to be made in the shop in order to make it more profitable. Ehrlich told the Journal that this was the result of severe losses being incurred by the company’s bookstore, which never generated enough income to offset the rising rents and falling foot traffic in one of the United States’ most expensive retail districts.
“There was a year and a half period when the bookstore was losing money at a pretty substantial pace at around $15,000 a month,” Ehrlich said. “Prior to that, the bookstore had been doing really well, and that was exciting and cool, but around early 2023, the entire publishing industry took a big hit and bookstores everywhere were really suffering.” In fact, the publishing industry overall did decline moderately in 2023, but that drop was far more significant for graphic novel sales, which declined that year by 22.4% overall. To that degree, Silver Sprocket’s difficulties did indeed mirror those of the industry as a whole, albeit exacerbated by the specific demographic and real estate challenges of San Francisco.
That said, however, two longtime employees of the Silver Sprocket shop both said that while they did note “spotty” sales in 2023 (compounded by a flood at the location that January, and an especially slow holiday season), they would not characterize it as a memorably significant drop compared to the previous year.
But general manager Frees concurs with Ehrlich. “We saw a pretty significant drop off in sales from 2022 to 2023,” they said. “The company was definitely growing … we were getting more attention and more direct sales from both direct customers and wholesale customers. But our sales in person at conventions and at the store were lower … we were seeing a pretty significant drop-off in overall sales, even though that drop off was less than other bookstores, and even less than other businesses on Valencia Street.”
It was that central San Francisco location that both Ehrlich and Frees agree was chiefly responsible for the company’s losses. Valencia Street was, at the time of the shop’s establishment, a high-traffic commercial district, but it was (and is) among the most expensive retail neighborhoods anywhere in the country. And San Francisco’s changing demographics, which increasingly price out the younger and more bohemian residents presumed to be Silver Sprocket’s core market, presented a serious problem.
“We had a sit down meeting with the head economist of the city of San Francisco,” Ehrlich said. “And we learned that the city had seen a massive reduction in people living here between the ages of 20 and 35. And that was the primary shopping audience along our street. That was really the direct reason for why our sales were down. It wasn't because of construction or some other temporary blip. And it took me way too long to really understand what was happening.”
Nevertheless, said Frees: “I think that outside of my field of view, there were more financial issues than I was directly aware of.” By the middle of 2024, Frees was being privately instructed by Ehrlich to tighten the company’s budgetary belt. “They [Ehrlich] were very deliberately trying to, I think, keep up the pace of growth,” Frees said. “While paying our team [and] paying royalties. And I know they borrowed money to do that. Starting in 2024, Avi did ask me to cut back on hours.”
As the fourth quarter of the year approached, Ehrlich was intimating to Frees that the company’s days of expansion may have come to an end. “Avi finally came to me with, I would say, an overview of the financial situation that showed some cuts would be necessary,” Frees said. “At first it was like, ‘We probably need to lay off one person.’ And then as we were discussing things, it became clear through my gaining understanding of what the actual situation was with Avi that it may need to be more than one person.”
By last fall, it was clear that the mounting financial issues had to be brought into the open. One Silver Sprocket employee, who asked to remain anonymous, remembers when the situation first came to the attention of staff. “I've been aware of there being some sort of immense financial issue since at least October of last year [2024],” they said. “I'm assuming there have been issues prior to that, but October is about when Avi came forward to the staff and … made us aware of there being a financial issue.”
This came in the form of an all-staff meeting, called by Ehrlich to address what they now acknowledged to be at least $100,000 in debt, which they said had been taken out in the form of a home equity loan in Ehrlich’s name.
“They told us that they had to take out personal loans and liens on their house that they own to essentially keep the shop, the storefront, and the publisher going” an employee recalled. Ehrlich now acknowledges this to be the case. “Aside from the normal credit card cycles that are paid in full every month, and our payment terms with printers that are paid in full whenever they're due, there's no debt being formally held by Silver Sprocket,” Ehrlich said. “Any debt would be money that I have borrowed as an individual and then lent to the company that I'm hoping to be paid back at some point. But it is in my name as an individual. It's not in the name of the business.”
Ehrlich would not specify precisely the amount of their own personal finances they had extended to Silver Sprocket or at what time those investments to the company were made, except to say that they began in 2023 in order to forestall otherwise necessary staff layoffs, and had continued thereafter until layoffs were ultimately made in early 2025. They did emphasize, however, that while Ehrlich did take out personal loans to generate the money they extended to Silver Sprocket, they did not expect to be paid back by Silver Sprocket in any specific amount, or by any specific deadline. Rather, they viewed their personal loans as “a sunken cost” that they hoped would someday earn money for both the company and themself as owner.
Ehrlich’s proposed solution at the time was a public fundraiser that would take the form of a subscription membership, alongside a somewhat less emphasized sale of commissioned prints from artists. By all accounts, the plan was a personal project of Ehrlich, and was met with bemusement from Silver Sprocket staff, many of whom urged the owner to pursue a more traditional mode of fundraiser such as a GoFundMe campaign. Ehrlich, however, was insistent.
According to Frees, who had been told of the model in advance but was not involved in planning it, the impetus was in part a desire to draw attention away from the financial issues necessitating the fundraiser. “The pivot to focusing on subscriptions seemed to grow out of a desire not to quite broadcast the exact issues we were having. I don’t want to say downplay them [but] to kind of couch them in, ‘We do need to raise this amount of money, but maybe we can do it in a way that is a little more limited in effect,’” they said. “One thing I can say clearly is that there was a desire to maintain a certain confidence in the publishing operation.”
Darke and Daileda said that Ehrlich instructed staff at the time not to discuss the company’s debt publicly, and several employees were surprised to find that that the membership’s website claimed that the purpose of the fundraiser was to pay a “real living wage for our staff that makes this all possible” (that text still appears on the web page today). This came as a surprise to several staff members in question, since no subsequent pay raises were forthcoming. In effect, they assert, contributors were being misled into thinking they were supporting employee pay, when in fact the money was going toward the owner’s personal debt.
In any event, positive results were not immediately apparent. Ehrlich continues to stand by the campaign, viewing it as a long-term sustainability strategy rather than a mode of immediate financial relief: “There's a lot of misunderstandings around the fundraiser because it was not successful as a fundraiser to raise money as a one-time thing,” Ehrlich said. “It was successful in getting a bunch of recurring subscriptions. And the end result of those, even though we have around $9,000 gross a month in subscribers, after covering the cost of buying the books, paying the royalties on them, fulfilling the books. shipping them – it's an additional actual net revenue of closer to around $3 to $3.5 thousand per month, which is nothing to sneeze at.”
Ehrlich also denies that any of the raised funds went toward paying off their debts, if only because it never generated enough revenue to do so. “I naively thought that these limited risograph prints by pretty high-profile artists would just sell out immediately,” they said. “Who wouldn't want a Michael de Forge or a Katie Skelly? I thought that would be a really popular, big deal. And the very bestselling one sold about eight copies over the course of the entire operation. So as far as a lump sum thing, all of that money went directly into keeping the lights on, and none of it went out of the business into paying back any debt that I was holding.”
So as 2024 ticked toward its final months, word began to reach staff that things were getting worse. At the all-hands meeting, Ehrlich had indicated that the debt stood at around $100,000. Now, higher numbers began to circulate, sometimes as high as double that amount or more. And, as it turned out, this was only half of Ehrlich’s troubles.
How does Silver Sprocket pay its authors?
Adding to these existing complications is the nature of Silver Sprocket’s contract, which, from roughly 2022 until late 2024, took the form of a bare-bones, three-page document written in bullet points that did not employ typical legal terminology. While that contract does, for example, state that “Profits are to be split 50/50 between Artist(s) and Publisher after reasonable expenses related to the production, marketing, distribution, and/or sub-licensing are covered,” many other details are left unmentioned or undefined. Notably, the contract does not: mention any details relating to the accounting of book copies sold at the Silver Sprocket shop or by artists themselves; mention whether artists have the right to approve or be notified in advance of multiple printings that would be deducted from their earnings; or even specify a time span or number of print runs through which the contract would extend.
Indeed, the term “royalties,” as used in Silver Sprocket’s contracts, as well as in other communications and statements from both Ehrlich and artists, is at odds with the way that term is typically employed in publishing. Traditionally, a royalty refers to a percentage paid to an author based on the retail or wholesale price of a book. The Silver Sprocket contracts in question do not entail royalties of this kind, but rather what might be called a profit-share model in which profits, usually defined as the amount of money left after expenses such as printing are recouped, are split between the author and publisher.
Ehrlich, however, says that they did not know the term was used differently from the way they employed it. “I was not aware of the word ‘royalty’ having the very specific meaning you’re describing,” they said. “You could be right, this is the first I'm hearing of it. Substituting the word ‘royalty’ for ‘artist payment’ or ‘artist commission’ doesn’t change what these payments are.”
According to Ehrlich, that simplified contract was a replacement for an earlier and more comprehensive version which did specify that sales through Silver Sprocket channels would be counted toward royalties at the wholesale rate of 50% of the retail price. “This was the case until being removed on the request of an agent I was negotiating a contract with, and around the same time, the advice … of a comics lawyer [who] explained to me as being redundant with the language already addressing associated costs, and concern that having it spelled out in the contract in this specific detail could cause problems if I were to in the future find a way to deduct a lower amount of costs for direct sales,” Ehrlich said. Isabella Rotman, an artist published through Silver Sprocket during that period, confirms that the contract did indeed contain the language Ehrlich describes.
The second, simplified contract has since been replaced once more by a much longer and more thorough contract that more explicitly defines many of the questions at issue in this dispute. But while this has been offered to both new and renewing artists at Silver Sprocket, those who have operated under the older agreement have more questions than answers about what, if anything, their publisher still owes them.
Even as Silver Sprocket staff were expressing growing discontent over pay and the business’ plan to deal with its debts, a separate wave of complaints was emerging from the publisher’s artists. Over the course of 2024 and into 2025, a growing number of Silver Sprocket cartoonists began to complain of irregularities in the frequency and accuracy of their royalty statements, as well as a lack of royalty payments received on their books.
After speaking to several artists, both publicly and on background, multiple allegations of irregularities have emerged. Several whose books had gone into multiple printings told the Journal that the cost of these reprints was deducted from their future royalties, leading to several years without royalty payments, despite sales high enough to warrant more than one print run. Yasmeen Abedifard, who published her book When to Pick a Pomegranate with Silver Sprocket in 2024, now asserts that she has been paid a total of only $500 in both advance and royalties, and that the full $2,142 cost of the second print run was deducted from her earnings without any prior notice (this deduction, as well as the cash earnings Abedifard reports, are confirmed by her royalty statements shared with the Comics Journal).
Adam de Souza, another Silver Sprocket artist who worked with them on his comic ish, was likewise dismayed to see reprint costs deducted from his income. “The most troubling thing is that they put reprints against our royalties,” De Souza says. “So it feels like it effectively punishes good-selling books. Whereas I'm sitting here having received $800 from Sprocket, having sold [so] many copies of my book, it feels like a really backwards business model.” De Souza, like Abedifard, had signed the profit-share contract described above, making such deductions inevitable. Nevertheless, they and other Silver Sprocket artists found the debits to be an unexpected and unwelcome surprise given their understanding of what the contract entailed.
A second grievance surrounds the publisher’s practice of requiring artists to “purchase” copies of their own books to sell at conventions or other events, with the cost likewise deducted from future royalties. What raised eyebrows was not so much the practice itself (which is not unknown in comics publishing), but the fact that such sales to artists were divided along the 50/50 split used for retail sales – a cut into artist profits that they considered unfair.
A third and final area of dispute concerned sales of artists’ books that took place through the Silver Sprocket shop or at the publisher’s convention tables. On those sales, as on other sales made via wholesale distribution channels, Silver Sprocket takes a 50% cut from artists’ royalties. This would not in itself be out of the ordinary, but for the fact that until February 2025, both the Silver Sprocket publishing operation and retail shop legally existed as the same entity: only then, after Ehrlich had begun receiving a growing number of complaints from artists, was Silver Sprocket Store LLC legally incorporated in the state of California as an entity separate from Silver Sprocket.
For many artists then, treating sales through the publisher’s own channels like other direct sales posed an ethical, if perhaps not a legal, problem, especially since Silver Sprocket shop sales and conventions constitute the majority of the publisher’s sales overall. “In [the early part] of this year, I get my first check, and it’s basically saying I owe Silver Sprocket even more money than before,” said one artist who asked to be anonymous. “And I think, ‘Well, that can’t be right.’ And that’s when I figured out that they were basically selling themselves the book at wholesale rates and taking 50% off the top.”
Ehrlich responds
Ehrlich, for their part, now acknowledges that royalty statements were frequently delivered late or at irregular intervals, a failure that they chalk up to their own personal stresses. “There have been times where my life and all of the things happening in the world made it difficult to keep up with the schedules that were initially talked about,” they said. “A lot of the earlier contracts said that royalties would be quarterly. And the truth is that I started this out as a passion project in my bedroom and kitchen, and I never dreamed that it would grow to there being over a hundred releases. … And as things grew and as I kept on spending a lot of money out of pocket and time and energy to make these better systems, it just got to be a tremendous amount of labor.”
Ehrlich also concedes that the payments might have sometimes been delivered late to artists (“Saying missed royalty payment is a pretty big statement. I do know there have been times where it has taken me a little bit longer than I would've liked to get everything done,” they said), but they insist that all of Silver Sprocket’s artists are currently paid in full for the royalties they are due. This, however, might depend on how those payments are defined. Ehrlich cites Abedifard as an example, saying that she has been paid a total of $1,000 to date: a $500 advance in 2022, and a subsequent $500 advance in 2025 after the book went into a second printing, which Ehrlich characterized as “just a goodwill gesture.”
Abedifard’s own position — reflected in royalty statements shared with the Comics Journal — is that the 2025 payment of $500 was actually provided in the form of copies of Abdedifard’s own book, which she now needs to sell in order to earn the money in cash. Moreover, the second of the two advances occurred only after the costs of the second printing of the book had already been deducted from her future royalties, which deprived Abedifard of any money she would have otherwise earned from sales. “So,” she says, I have 3% of my entire print run [to sell], a $500 advance, and an additional $500 I have to pay back, as well as all printing costs from both runs.”
Ehrlich asserted that any artist is free to return advanced copies of their book to the publisher with no penalty, so they would not have to “pay back” sums advanced in that way. However, they could not recall any instance in which an artist has attempted to do this.
Ehrlich also claimed that artists have been told in advance via email that second printings of their books would occur prior to the fact, and that those print runs would be deducted from their royalties. Although Ehrlich said that they could share examples of such emails with the Comics Journal, they have not done so as of press time, and no artist reached for this article was able to recall receiving one.
The question of wholesale exchanges made between Silver Sprocket as a publisher and Silver Sprocket as a retailer is more complex. Ehrlich likens the relationship between the two entities to that of a corporate-owned fast food restaurant with its parent company: “If there’s a McDonald’s store owned by the McDonald's corporation, it’s not an independent separate business — the location is buying materials and supplies from the parent company, and they both have their accounting,” they said. At the same time, however, Ehrlich admits that Silver Sprocket has not been either accounting or filing taxes separately for the two operations, which have until recently existed as a single LLC. California state records indicate that Silver Sprocket Store was registered as a separate LLC only in February 2025. Consequently, Ehrlich declined to offer any comment specifically regarding the legal status of wholesale exchanges that took place between the two halves of the company.
Despite these questions, Ehrlich is emphatic that the contract itself is both fair and competitive with those offered by other comic publishers. “If a Sprocket book sells through a distributor to a store, the most amount of net revenue that we can expect to be collecting per sale is 37% of the retail price,” Ehrlich said. “Typically a lot closer to around 35%. Whereas with the store being the Sprocket store, there's no distributors taking a cut and there's no waiting to get paid. The sale is recorded when the sale happens and it's recorded at the 50% wholesale rate, which translates to a royalty. That is almost double what the royalty would've been if it went through any other channel while having the added benefit for artists of, there's nobody who's going to promote the catalog as well as we do.”
Confrontations with artists and staff
As Ehrlich launched Silver Sprocket’s fundraising campaign in late 2024, artists who had become aware of these concerns through their royalty statements began to speak independently with one another, ultimately realizing that the issue went beyond any individual cartoonist. According to several artists who spoke to the Comics Journal off the record or anonymously, the collective action began with a nucleus of three creators: Caroline Cash, Adam de Souza, and Abedifard. Cash, in particular, had seen a rapid increase in sales following a number of high-profile awards and profiles in the comics press in the past two years, and so was quicker than other cartoonists to notice the absence of higher royalty payments.
“When Caroline realized what had happened, she was very upset, obviously,” one artist recalled. “And then Caroline started talking to other artists, and we realized that basically everyone was in the same situation. Everyone had kind of been blindly trusting the books on Silver Sprocket. Almost nobody had been paid at the time I spoke to Caroline: she still had not been paid a dime for any of the issues of Pee Pee Poo Poo.”
The issues in question currently consist of four in total: three one-shots and a #1 issue of an ostensibly ongoing series, all published through Silver Sprocket. Ehrlich denies the accusation that all of Cash’s royalties are unpaid, calling it “a majorly inaccurate claim.” They declined to comment more specifically for the record, however, on the grounds that, “I don't think Caroline's royalties are anyone's business.”
Between March and April of 2025, that core group of authors began “systematically … talking to artists one by one,” and they in turn began a series of individual email exchanges with Ehrlich, none of which appeared to resolve the issues. They also began speaking with employees at the Silver Sprocket shop and the publishing staff (who were, by then, becoming concerned about the company’s management), and this made the situation especially fraught. At one point, social media manager Raul Higuera says, Erhlich confronted them with accusations that they had been “talking to artists about things going on at Sprocket,” a claim which Higuera said the artists in question later denied (Ehrlich agreed that there had been tense disagreements with Higuera around this time, but could not recall having made these accusations). In another instance, Ehrlich accused Abedifard of speaking ill of the company and its owner to her students at the California College of the Arts, a claim for which Ehrlich later sent a written apology.
The situation came to a head in mid-March, when (according to four people with knowledge of the situation) Cash threatened to pull the forthcoming treasury edition of Pee Pee Poo Poo scheduled for publication with Silver Sprocket. “At this point,” one artist said, “Avi sends out kind of a panicked email to everybody, in which they explained why they have to take 50% off the top of everything” and proposing a series a series of steps that they would take to mend the situation. Among them: promising more legible and transparent royalty statements due by May 1; scheduled check-ins on royalties every six months as requested; and options to either move from the older Silver Sprocket contract to the newer and more thorough one, or converting to what Ehrlich described in the email as “a flat royalty per book sold instead of profit-split if desired.”
All of this had the effect of merely postponing a confrontation, not ending it entirely. In the meantime, frustration among Silver Sprocket staff had taken on a life of its own.
Ultimatum and delay
The gradual realization among all three components of those employed or published by Silver Sprocket – shop staff, publishing team, and artists – meant that all three conflicts came to a head simultaneously in early January, as the results of the Silver Sprocket fundraiser led to an increase in workload but no apparent relief of the company’s debts. The result was a written list of grievances presented to Ehrlich jointly in early January by eleven employees. The letter was wide-ranging in its complaints, which included “poor communication,” “frequent unprofessionalism,” “lack of respect for time and labor,” unsustainably low wages, “poor management,” and a deliberate block on communication between the shop and publishing crew.
The letter then went on to enumerate a bullet-pointed set of specific demands, which they asked to see implemented by Feb. 15. They included in part:
- A $25 per hour minimum wage for all Silver Sprocket workers, with raises formally tied to memberships purchased through the fundraiser.
- Health insurance for all full and part-time workers.
- A formalized process of training and guidance for all new employees.
- A requirement that the management team enroll in a project management course to “prevent scope creep, help understand project timelines/structure, and to respect workers’ time and labor.”
- Other demands related to greater clarity in communication lines, safety and health protocols, and increased vacation time and benefits.
Although the signatories to the letter were aware by then of Silver Sprocket’s debts, they say that they were compelled to make demands for higher pay due to what they saw as duplicity in Ehrlich’s handling of the company fundraiser. “The public facing terminology was that the money was for ‘a living wage for employees’, so we, incorrectly, assumed with the money raised, we would be seeing raises instituted across the board,” one signatory said. “Additionally, we thought it was the best course of action to ‘overshoot’ our demands, ask for what we deserved, not necessarily what we expected to receive. That way there would be wiggle room for discussion and bargaining. We all had reached a point emotionally where we could no longer put up with the glaring issues we were dealing with from Avi and Josh.”
Other employees assert that Avi’s evasiveness in discussing Silver Sprocket’s debt had left them unaware of the full extent of the company’s financial straits at that point. “While we were aware that there was a debt to be shouldered and dealt with, we never really knew the full weight of the debt (both Avi’s and the store) until after we presented the grievances as Avi used the full weight of the debt against us as a reason (and understandably so) as to why they couldn’t give anyone raises,” Kyle Daileda wrote.
Another noted that the demand for health insurance for part-time workers was driven by a desire for equity with full-time Silver Sprocket employees, who had received healthcare from the publisher as a benefit throughout 2024.
The confrontation came as a clarifying moment, if not necessarily a surprise to Silver Sprocket management. “They laid everything out pretty clearly,” Josh PM Frees said. “I think a lot of it was stuff that, if they had felt that they could talk to me directly about a lot of those things, I could have responded to some of them sooner. But some of them were things that just needed to be brought forward to both me and Avi, and some of them needed to be directly addressed with Avi. But, yeah, at every turn it wasn’t easy to hear.”
Then, unexpectedly, a new development: on Jan. 14, nearly two weeks after the ultimatum had been presented, Diamond Comics Distributors filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Like many small publishers, Silver Sprocket had depended heavily on Diamond for its direct market distribution, and the distributor had gone bankrupt, owing Silver Sprocket $5,751.52: not a vast sum, but hardly insignificant for a publisher that was by then mired in hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt of its own. It was at this point that Silver Sprocket’s staff convened once more for an emergency meeting to discuss whether, and how, the company was going to survive.
Now presented with an almost improbable number of concurrent crises — questions over royalties due artists, demands for payment and management reforms from staff, growing debts, and a bankrupt distributor — Ehrlich’s next course of action came as a surprise to a nonplussed staff: they left on vacation, a long-planned personal trip to Japan. Ehrlich defended the trip as a justifiable personal necessity, and the result of overwhelming stress from the past months. (Moreover, they added, “I've had these frequent flyer miles that have just been atrophying in value since the pandemic.”) But it meant that Ehrlich was out of touch with their staff during a key juncture, during which they had expected to receive a written plan of action for the company’s reforms. Nor were staff, with the single exception of Josh Frees, aware that while on the trip, Ehrlich was in touch with private HR consultants to discuss the company’s next steps. This, they were soon to learn, was preparation for what was to happen when Ehrlich returned.
Layoffs and recriminations
On March 17 (one day after Ehrlich returned from their vacation according to staff), Silver Sprocket announced the layoff of three staff employees. In a social media post announcing the decision, Ehrlich explained that it came as a result of unavoidable financial necessities, writing that “the store was losing too much money and not in a sustainable position.” All three of the terminated employees had been signatories on the ultimatum presented to Ehrlich two months earlier.
According to both Ehrlich and Frees, the layoffs were a long-considered course of action — floated as a possibility, according to Frees, as early as the summer of 2024 — made unavoidable by the debts stemming chiefly from losses at the Silver Sprocket storefront. “It was a very unpleasant experience for everybody and not how I would ever want to do something like that,” Ehrlich said. “And I think [making the decision to lay off employees during their vacation] really contributed to bad vibes and distrust. But if I didn't do it that way, there was a very real chance that the entire business would be bankrupt and not exist in a matter of months. And that clear and present risk was very terrifying. It would mean that there is no business, that there's no money to pay any royalties, that there's no store, that everything about this whole thing would just be eviscerated.”
Others at Silver Sprocket are less charitable in their interpretation of the layoffs. “I think the people who were organizing the loudest about it were two of the people who got laid off, which is why it felt retaliatory.” said Joan Zahra Dark. “And again, I don't want to make any claims … because I don't have any hard evidence. It felt icky.”
“The layoffs also feel very retaliatory,” Raul Higuera said. “It's not lost on the team, which suddenly has to take up more responsibilities, which management and ownership are not going to do. So I brought up during one of these meetings: ‘It can't be that your decision-making has brought us here, and you're talking about us finding solutions as a team, but now everybody else has to grit their teeth and do more work. You guys should be joining us in the trenches.’”
Both Ehrlich and Frees, however, insist that the layoffs were in no way retaliatory. “That’s one thing I can confidently say, that the layoffs were not retaliatory,” Frees said. “In my personal opinion, the timing of the staff approaching both Avi and I about very legitimate concerns, and having very legitimate questions about why they weren't getting raises when they had an understanding that that was in the cards, was extremely unfortunate.”
“The two people who were part-time were let go, and the full-time person who'd been hired the most recently was let go,” Ehrlich said about the logic behind the terminations. “I had no way of even knowing [that the complaints against Ehrlich’s management] were from a group. I wouldn't even know who to be retaliating against. And I really was doing my best to look out for the people who were affected by it.”
More exits follow
Whatever the impetus, the layoffs did little to assuage tensions within Silver Sprocket, or between the publisher and its artists, which had now reached a boiling point. Even as staff found themselves with greater workloads as a result of the layoffs, there was no immediate indication that a response from Ehrlich to the earlier written demands would be forthcoming. Nor was this the end of departures from the Silver Sprocket team.
On the week of April 21, Ehrlich announced that Joan Zahra Dark and Kyle Dailada had both opted to leave Silver Sprocket (Dark and Dailada both dispute this characterization of their departure. While acknowledging that the choice to leave was their own, they feel that they had in effect been pushed out of the company by Ehrlich). That Wednesday, Silver Sprocket staff and artists were surprised to receive a second email from Ehrlich, informing them that, in addition, managing editor Ari Yarwood and art director Carina Taylor would both be leaving the publisher in June, following the release of their final slate of books.
It was clear that something would have to be done, and Ehrlich’s idea at this point was one that perplexed many on the Silver Sprocket team: They would commission a cartoon infographic laying out the nature of Silver Sprocket’s profit sharing agreement. When Ehrlich broached the idea, it was presented as something that would be used internally and sent directly to artists working with the publisher. “It was being made as an internal resource for artists to explain how the contracts and royalty calculations currently work,” Frees said. “I was not told that it was going to be posted anywhere.”
Then on May 1, Ehrlich surprised staff by announcing that they intended to post the cartoon publicly on the Silver Sprocket website and social media accounts. Less than 20 minutes after making the suggestion on the publisher’s Slack channel, and without waiting for replies, Ehrlich did exactly this. When staff realized what had happened, they immediately urged Ehrlich to take down the cartoon, to no immediate avail. At 11 p.m. Pacific time that night, some 12 hours after the cartoon had initially gone up, Ehrlich did delete the social media posts. However, it remained on the Silver Sprocket website, albeit with a new sentence appended to the header reading: “This is not legal advice! You should get an agent or lawyer to review any publishing contract!” (It remains in this form on the site as of press time. Asked about the belated addition of this sentence, Ehrlich says, “It just occurred to me on my own pretty immediately that that [sentence] should have been part of it, and I put it up there. I'm not a lawyer person.”) “But,” one Silver Sprocket employee said, “the damage was done at that point.”
Over the course of the day, a handful of Silver Sprocket artists, angered by the infographic and taking it as a signal that their concerns were not being appropriately addressed, decided the time had come to speak publicly about the situation. On Bluesky, Adam de Souza began posting about the nature of Silver Sprocket’s contracts, warning followers to avoid signing with publishers who follow such a model. At roughly the same time, Yasmeen Abedifard posted a story to her Instagram account (since deleted) going into granular detail about what she saw as the irregularities and inconsistencies in her royalty payments, and including screencaps of several communications with Ehrlich. This was later reposted by another Silver Sprocket artist, Sam Szabo, the following day.
On the afternoon of May 2, Raul Higuera, in their capacity as social media manager at Silver Sprocket, took to the publisher’s official Bluesky account to broadcast a series of since-deleted posts expressing dismay at Ehrlich’s behavior in commissioning and posting the comic without Higuera’s knowledge. The situation had visibly gone out of anyone’s individual control, and what had begun as an internal dispute over debt, payments, and management had now become the bane of any comics publisher: a topic of internet discourse.
Ehrlich stands by the comic as a valid way to communicate the company’s business model, but concedes now that their decisions resulted in its being “handled terribly.”
“I really think that making the comic was a really good move.” Ehrlich said. “But I think that by posting it publicly at a time when there was tension and disagreement about it, that just opened the floodgates for people to take it [with] the perspective that they had…Strangers on the internet really dragged me about things that they believed to be true, that they saw posted by people on the internet, but that were not actually backed up by the facts.”
Uncertain Futures
The period since the public furor in early May has been an uncertain one for everyone within the Silver Sprocket ecosystem, management, staff, and artists alike. For the Silver Sprocket crew, now significantly reduced in number, it has been an uncomfortable time. Following the episode on the company Bluesky account, interactions between Higuera and Ehrlich have been less than cordial. The following Friday, May 9, it was confirmed that Higuera had left Silver Sprocket.
Artists, too, are left in an uncertain position, both in terms of the future of their publishing contracts, and because they remain unsure how stable a position Silver Sprocket will be in as a publisher in the days ahead. Though none of the artists who spoke to the Comics Journal for this article said that they were considering any legal action, several said that they had begun exploring alternative publishers for future books or editions of their work, or had started considering self-publishing as an alternative.
Behind all this is the lingering question of whether any deliberate misdeed occurred here, or whether Silver Sprocket’s difficulties are simply the result of a sizable number of unfortunately timed missteps. On that, few within Silver Sprocket can agree. For Yasmeen Abedifard, Ehrlich’s behavior is evidence of deliberate exploitation. “At first I was like, ‘I wonder if Avi’s just stupid,’” Abedifard said. “If someone made a mistake, they would do all that they could to remedy and understand it. But everything Avi has said to the crew and to the artists just feels deliberately malicious, and deliberately dubious, and really strategic.”
Dark and Dalaida are less certain. “I don’t think that Avi has ever been deliberately malicious with anything,” Daileda said. “I don’t think that Avi is, at the end of the day, a bad person. I think that Avi was reacting rather than taking a step back and processing.”
“I don’t think Avi is intending to cause anybody harm or acting in a way that’s intending to be a bad actor or anything like that,” Dark agreed. “But I think that there's that reactiveness [on Ehrlich’s part] when there is a kind of tension that isn't necessarily able to be cleanly resolved in a way where everybody feels good about each other, and everybody enjoys working together.”
Another Silver Sprocket employee, speaking anonymously, agrees with this assessment, describing Ehrlich as a poor manager and communicator, who was simply ill-equipped for the size of the business that Silver Sprocket became.
Ehrlich, for their part, now admits that their handling of the situation has left much to be desired. “I think my response was shitty and terrible,” Ehrlich said. “I imagined that I was really good at talking to people, and communicating difficult topics, and deescalating, and being able to make space for calm, reasonable conversations. And this has really made clear to me that I’m lacking in a form of emotional intelligence, and very specifically in dealing with people who are stressed out or angry.”
But beyond the personal questions is the more material consideration of Silver Sprocket’s future. Ehrlich denied that Silver Sprocket is at risk of financial insolvency, but pressed to put a number to the company’s current debt (which continues to exist, they said, entirely as personal loans in Ehrlich’s name), they acknowledged that it currently stands at “a little under $300,000.” In a June 4 update email to artists, Ehrlich outlined what they believe to be a business plan that will create solvency for the company. Silver Sprocket now plans to publish no more than 8 new releases per year (down from their output of 25-30 since 2022), focusing instead on backlist titles which they say generate 70% of the company’s sales. The same update announced that interviews were in process for a “smaller local team” to take the place of outgoing and laid off employees, though Ehrlich declined to comment further on the number, nature, or pay scale of the new employees at this time.
So for those who drew an income, real or anticipated, from Silver Sprocket, and from those readers who had hoped to find in the publisher a continuing avenue for a particular niche of offbeat and frequently queer-centered stories, there appears to be little certainty about where to go from here. “The future,” Ehrlich said when asked about Silver Sprocket’s current business plan, “is not entirely known.”
The post High debts, high rents and miscommunication: What happened to Silver Sprocket appeared first on The Comics Journal.
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