tomversation

My Christmas tree is up already!

15027409_10206308201537552_7656264727295669275_n I put the Christmas tree up yesterday. I know it’s mid-November, but I’m leaving town for a bit and wanted it to be up and ready when I return in December. It’s sort of like early voting, takes the pressure off!

I love the Spidey ornament. I think I won this in this dumb game we play every year. People buy an ornament, wrap it and place it on the table, then after drawing straws or something, people choose the wrapped ornament that they would like. People can then steal from them when it’s there turn and therein lies the rub. I think the ornaments should stay wrapped, so you are gambling when you choose the ornament from someone, it’s like door number 1, 2 or 3. But we unwrap the ornament when we choose it and everyone then knows what it is, so there is a lot of stealing going on. It sort of makes it best to be the last one chosen since you then have access to any ornament you would like simply by stealing it.

I usually get something good. One year I got an Elvis ornament, another year a nice Snoopy ornament and I think last year it was a small record player.

Election day in America

vote

Tomversation and Facebook

tomversation-tommy I’ve had my comics on hold for such a long time, waiting for the right moment. The right moment never seems to come. My goal was to be published in newspapers daily, and I’ve had a few bites from rather large newspapers, but the timing is always off. I’ve also tried to join comics sites, but in the end, they really don’t get the readership that you think they would. The problem is I’m trying to be part of a dying profession. To be part of comics in the 1940s and 1950s would have been ideal. Comics were made for newspapers and it pains me not to be part of the original format. Almost like making a movie and having it go right to video, rather than be on the silver screen, which is what movies were meant to do.

Newspapers tell me they love my work, but they are so hesitant to drop a comic for mine because of the age-old dilemma of people dropping their subscriptions when you drop their favorite comic. Plus after careful contemplation, I was thinking, do I really want to be tied to a non-ending deadline? Comics are digital today and not necessarily published daily, although I am comfortable with that schedule.

I follow Guy Gilchrist, the cartoonist for Nancy, on Instagram and I see how he is constantly drawing in hotel rooms because he travels so much. Deadlines! While I like and respect deadlines, I wonder if I would go mad after a few years of those. Also, for a long time I liked the size constraint. You know, you have this box that this size and you have to do your thing in there daily. But it’s not like that anymore and the current crop of readers – Millennials – are used to different boxes and shapes, sort of like Elaine on Seinfeld with the muffin tops – it’s the part of the muffin that pops out of the pan and does it’s own thing. Digital comics can do their own thing.

230082_426053614117201_1514202927_n But I don’t want to publish at a website daily because I don’t believe that people will drop everything to come to the website to read a single panel cartoon daily, but they will on Facebook and I’ve always been a fan of social media for comics. For a long time I did a comic daily on Instagram and I had thousands of readers a day. It just came up on their feeds and they read it that way. Unobtrusively, because social media is unobtrusive.

Over a billion people use Facebook daily. A billion! That’s some potential audience. When Berkeley Breathed brought back Bloom County, he used Facebook and he publishes there daily, he has about 670,000 fans on there and New Yorker Cartoons has over 913,000 fans and amazingly, Matthew Inman who does The Oatmeal, has almost 4 million fans on Facebook, he links to his website from there. The Facebook posts are “liked” and shared all day long!

I also noticed that some of my comics were shared many times and “liked” many times over the years on Facebook. I had a “Doctor Who” comic shared by actor George Takei once and it went crazy viral – almost 30,000 shares and over 85,000 likes! Recently I had a similar experience with a political cartoon I ran which someone shared on Facebook and it took off.

So it’s come to my realization, which was staring me in the face all the time, that Facebook is the place for my Tomversation comic panel. I had thought of making a widget where people could place it on their own websites and share Tomversation daily, but simply by clicking the “share” button on Facebook, is doing the same thing. And every time someone “likes” a comic, their friends see that they liked it. So starting January 1, 2017, Tomversation will appear daily, or almost daily on Facebook and probably Instagram and Twitter, but Facebook should have the most impact. My goal is to build up my fan base during the year. I know people like my comics, so it’s just a a matter of being consistent in posting them, which I’m good at doing. I had to twist my brain a little into realizing that digital is where comics are these days. Unfortunately, reading a daily newspapers, literally holding it in your hands, is becoming a thing of the past, like dial telephones and film.

I do hope you’ll become a fan at Facebook.com/Tomversation and you’ll receive the updates when they start. That’s one thing I like about Facebook – you don’t have to go out of your way to see news, comics, friends, etc., it all just appears on your wall without any fuss. I hope that Tomversation becomes part of your wall. If you don’t like a comic one day, just bypass it without a mention or “like,” it if you like it, and share it! Easy!

And you can always read my thoughts and see what I’m up to here on the Tomversation blog, where I will post a batch of comics at once, so you can binge read them, sort of like Netflix for comics. If you were directly linked into this post through another site, here is the main Homepage of Tomversation, you can see what’s been posted here lately.

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Calling Tommy

My neighbors’ dog’s name is Tommy, so when they call him, I sometimes think they are calling me, which reminds me of a neighbor we had years ago. Their dog’s name was Richard and every time they would go out and call, “Richard! Richard!” It sounded so funny.

My cousin’s name is Tommy, too, but for some reason, whenever someone calls one of us, we know which one they are referring to. I’m not sure why, maybe it’s the tone of their voice. When we were young, they would call me Big Tommy and him Little Tommy. That stopped, not sure when. Both of us have grandfathers and uncles on different sides of the family that are named Tom or Tommy. On my mother’s side, her brother was Tommy, her father Tom and me Thomas. I never liked Thomas, not sure why. When the others passed away, I became Tom or Tommy.

I can tell when people met me by what they call me. I know which friends introduced us and how long ago it was by what I’m called. One friend used to call me Thomas, and to this day, when someone calls me Thomas, outside the family, I know I was introduced to them by Franco, a friend, so many years ago.

Now I’m Tomversation. 🙂

The Silver Surfer

Love this. Check it out. Reminds me of the guy on the snow boarder during the blizzard.

Remembering friends from my youth

A friend sent me a notice that it’s the anniversary of Tom & Jerry. I’m not sure why, maybe because my name is Tom, but I never really watched Tom & Jerry growing up. I was a big Hanna-Barbera fan and that was one of their first cartoons, created in 1940, but I was a big Hanna-Barbera fan of the 1960s cartoons like Huckleberry Hound and Yogi Bear.

I’m wondering what makes a kid a fan of certain cartoons or cartoon studios. I’ve never been into Warner-Brothers cartoons or Disney. Not sure why, but most Hanna-Barbera stuff I loved and grew up with. I loved Fractured Fairy Tales, too. I had forgotten about them but a friend recently has been posting episodes on Facebook and it all came back to me. And I loved Rocky and Bullwinkle, which I think featured Fractured Fairy Tales and Sherman and Mr. Peabody, they were by Jay Ward Productions.

This is true: my earliest memory is me at age two or three, running around our Brooklyn apartment, with my mother chasing me, trying to get me into the bath and Huckleberry Hound was on the tv. The show was just coming on, I could hear the theme music in my head as I ran around trying to avoid bath time. That’s it above.

And the first character I can remember drawing is Fred Flintstone. I used to draw Fred daily I remember, from when I could first hold a pencil. So along with Huckleberry Hound, I loved The Flintstones and The Jetsons.

I loved Magilla Gorilla and Yogi Bear, Quickdraw McGraw, Wally Gator, Peter Potamus, Jinxie and Pixie and Dixie, Touché Turtle and Dum Dum, etc.

I remember Huckleberry and Magilla and Yogi and the others being on certain nights at about 7 or 7:30 pm on New York tv. They were reruns at the time and for instance, Huckleberry Hound was on Monday night and he had three parts – his own adventures, and Pixie and Dixie and Hokey Wolf, then Quickdraw McGraw might have been on Tuesday nights and he had his adventure and then showed Auggie Doggie and Doggie Daddy and Snooper and Blabber.

The Flintstones were on in prime time, so were the Jetsons and also Top Cat, I remember.

I remember watching the Wacky Races on Saturday mornings with one of my brothers. We would watch each week, cheering on our favorite character. I don’t think the show was on very long, maybe two years, but we watched the reruns over and over again.

Here’s a list of all the Hanna-Barbera shows.

Some of my favorites: Yogi, Huckleberry, Snagglepuss, Pixie & Dixie, etc. Friends from my youth.

Good grief, Snoopy is fired

metlife-blimp After 31 years, Snoopy has been dropped as the face/mascot of MetLife Insurance. I sort of like this since I never liked the idea of him being exploited to sell insurance, but I guess Peanuts is probably the most exploited comic strip out there so MetLife was just one of the group of entities tied to Peanuts.

MetLife is re-branding in some way, but some how, I don’t think Snoopy will be affected. But maybe he will, it’s said that MetLife paid between $10 million and $15 million per year to use the Peanuts characters! Nice work if you can get it.

But I will miss seeing his smiling face on the blimp. Here’s the whole story in Wall Street Journal.

But I wouldn’t mind seeing the Peanuts music and references disappear from that All detergent ad. It creeps me out when I see that kid walking as if he was Pigpen, with all the dust coming off of him and the other kid in the Charlie Brown shirt. It’s sacrilege in some way. If you haven’t seen the commercial, you can see it here.

Sometimes I think Bill Watterson, of Calvin & Hobbes fame had it right, he was against exploiting the characters for commercial reasons. But then again, if someone offered me ~~millions of dollars~~ anything for the use of my own comic characters, I would be all over that.

Dusting off ‘Paws’

I am focusing on my Paws comic now. People seem to like Tombo the Rabbit and Jacomo the Mole and they are constantly asking for them. So I will put a bunch of comics together and submit them to the syndicates.

I am using the Surface Pro 3 now, rather than the Wacom Cintiq, which I used in the past. While I like the Cintiq better, I like the all-in-one aspect of the Surface Pro, being able to use it as a computer and a drawing tablet and also, it’s portable and easier to manage.

I transported all my files and I use Manga Studio 4 EX and Photoshop to create on the Surface Pro, just like I did with the Cintiq. I have Manga Studio 5 EX, but I don’t like it for some reason, I think there is just too much on the screen and the brushes confuse me. I’m more comfortable with the 4 EX.

So that’s where I stand on the comics front now. Getting Paws ready for some sort of revival. I had done something or not done something regarding the trademark, so I had to resubmit some files this week. They were accepted and Paws is fully trademarked as a comic strip.

Why he’s voting for Trump

Thanks to my friend Harry Gottlieb for this clever idea.

Trumpkins

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Have you seen the Trumpkins popping up this year? They are jack-o-lanterns made out to be Donald Trump.

The Huffington Post has a great how-to here. But it seems easy, it’s all in the hair. Just put something on top of the pumpkin and call it Trump!