tomversation

Seeing double; a good sign

I’m feeling very good about things these days. This Manhattanhenge proves it. Isn’t it good luck? I captured this shot the other day.

I also see the two people who bought my comics out of the blue as good luck, the fact that they were back to back unrelated buyers. For years this was the case with me.

I always had good luck. I willed things. I was always in the right place at the right time and I think maybe 10 years ago or less, things started changing. I was always a minute or two late for something, not in the right place at the right place anymore.

I sell promotional items. Almost once a week, I would get signs – I would get double orders withing minutes, if not seconds of each other. If Pepsi ordered frisbees, Coke ordered frisbees, within a minute of each other. If a high school ordered flags, within a minute another high school ordered flags. If a guy name Oscar ordered something another guy named Oscar ordered something. This became the norm.

It has been a long time since that happened, but the two ladies buying comics within minutes of each other was a good sign.

The next day I got another double order – for post it notes. But they were not regular square post it notes. They were thought bubble shaped – you know, like from comic strips. Comic strips! There is the tie-in. But get this – a guy buys them and then within a minute another guy buys them.

They aren’t a regular item, in fact, the last time I sold that shape post it note was to the first guy who was reordering the pads from a previous order from the year before. He was in New York state, the other guy is in Springfield, IL. Another weird happy coincidence and they are comic strip related.

I’m seeing good things ahead. I could go on and on about the signs I have received over the years but all this doubling stuff means a lot, especially to a Gemini like myself.

Selling my comics out of the blue

comics

So I sold some cartoons this week and I didn’t even try. In fact, it all came out of the blue – twice! Being a Gemini, things happen to me in twos and that happened this week.

I’m in New York for a couple of weeks. I received a couple of emails from a couple of different people. Both had seen my cartoon panel, “Tomversation” online, one lady said she was doing a Google search and the other, I’m not sure, I think she was just going through my work on Huff Post and Medium.

Ironically, they both reached out to me asking to purchase some comics! One lady was a realtor and she was interested in a real estate “House Hunters” comic I did, she wanted to purchase the rights for a newsletter or something. She also asked for more real estate related comics, which I’ll send her once I return home to Miami from New York.

The other lady purchased a bunch of comics for a magazine, I believe. I billed them both through Paypal and I sent them high resolution comics to reprint. They paid right away and that’s that.

Not bad. Here I am on vacation, minding my own business and my comics are selling!

I’m thinking of starting daily publication of “Tomversation” starting in the fall. I think I’ve gotten enough of the run-around from syndicates, newspapers and the rest. I was just told by the head of one syndicate that he didn’t like my work or my drawing style. Yet, this is the guy who runs stick figure and crayon-type drawn comics with no imagination of any kind. The Universe has better plans for me.

Revisiting a ‘haunted castle’ 30 years later

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When I hear “Domino Park,” I think of the small park on SW 8th Street in Miami, where the old Cuban men play dominoes, but there’s a new Domino Park in Brooklyn. It’s the site of the old Domino Sugar refinery. They created a new park and ultra modern condos are going up along the park, you can see it in the rendering above.

What I love about Domino Park is the old, haunted? Domino plant itself. You can see it in the photo below and you can see it sort of renovated above. Apparently they are going to leave most of it alone. It was built in 1856. Domino Park will redefine the neighborhood just as Gantry Plaza Park redefined the Long Island City waterfront a hop skip and a canoe ride up the river. I visited Domino Park this week with my cousin Roni we checked out the neighborhood and had lunch. This is near where I was born in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, a quite different place than the Brooklyn of years ago.

I love this old building in all its decreptness and always have since the day I came upon it in the mid 1980s. I was lost in Brooklyn and ended up right in front of the plant. It was blacker then, full of soot and scarier and bigger. I turned the block and there it was, all Harry Potter-like. I didn’t know what it was but I was intrigued. I couldn’t get in, but the front gates were open and I stared at it for awhile. I’ve thought of it so many times over the years and each time we passed it when on the Circle Line boat ride or on a Ferry, I would stare at it, imagining the inside.

Now thirty years later, I’ll be able to go into the old building, in what looks like an glass-enclosed bar/restaurant on the roof. That part is not complete yet, but I’m looking forward to it. I feel the old plant is haunted. It sits right next to the Williamsburg Bridge and is so easy to get to, it’s right on the waterfront, a few blocks from the center of Williamsburg hipsterhood.

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Drawing at the Met

Michael and me

Beautiful views from the Met’s rooftop

Michael

Michael’s drawing

I met my cousin Michael at the Metropolitan Museum of Art today in New York. He texted me to tell me he would be there – drawing. He was with a friend and he said they both do that together – draw. You may remember Michael was the one who took me around the Spider-man exhibit that time at the Society of Illustrators.

It sort of reminded me of that time I came upon the school kids drawing at MOMA and I ended up doing a story for the Huff Post about that. In this case, I knew the artists.

I went over and it was nice. They took a break after awhile and we walked around exploring the new exhibits. What’s funny about that was that Michael marked his spot so he could go right back to it to continue his drawing in one of the sculpture courts. But when we went back there was someone in the exact spot – the resident artist! Of all the places in that whole huge museum, they resident artist sat in Michael’s spot! We didn’t say anything, we just went on to look at more exhibits.

We are supposed to go to the David Bowie exhibit this weekend at the Brooklyn Museum, but I canceled to go to The Hamptons instead. Priorities. Guess we can go to Bowie next week.

Great comics I just discovered

I came upon Off the Leash Dog Cartoons by Rupert Fawcett on Facebook. I love social media for finding new comics. Rupert posts all over the internet, on Facebook alone he has almost 1 million fans! you can see his work at his website here: http://offtheleashdogcartoons.com/

I love how true and close to home the comic is and I love that it’s in black and white. Not enough comics are in black and white these days. Rupert has Off the Leash animations on YouTube, too.

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Another comic that I came upon on Instagram is Meeting Comics by Andrew Neal. This first comic is so close to home that its sad, but excellent. As of yesterday these poor kids were being taken away from their parents and locked up in cages. As of yesterday that effed-up policy has changed.

I like that Andrew posts the comics as a photo image of the drawn page, also in black and white, and I love where he adds post-it notes to make changes or cover up mistakes. It’s such a common practice with cartoonists, but Andrew just puts it out there in glorious ultra yellow.

You can see his website here: http://www.meetingcomics.com

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Ivortoons by Ivor Healy are mostly puns, but so funny. His work has appeared all over from the Wall Street Journal to Woman’s Weekly. He’s quite clever, I found him on Instagram.

You can see his work here: http://www.ivortoons.com

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He says my style is rushed

I had sent my work to one of the heads of one of the major newspaper syndicates. He gave me a lot of good advice, which I appreciate. He did say something quite puzzling, he said my work looked rushed – that I drew too fast. These three drawings are samples of my style.

First off, he is right, I do draw fast, I’m not sure how he knew but I guess its his job to know. But is it a bad thing that I draw fast? That’s just my personality, I do things fast. I don’t think it diminishes the drawings. I see so many comic strips that look as if they were drawn fast, I mean people can’t even draw hands for gods sake, but that is the cartoonists’ styles, in fact many of them draw other things that I’ve seen that are totally different than their comic strip style.

Just this morning I was looking at a blog of a cartoonist who draws his comic strip very simply but he had other drawings on his blog, greeting cards, or something like that, which I really enjoyed, they were quite detailed and sort of a fine-line drawing style which is nothing like his comic strip style. And there is a woman cartoonist who does the same thing, when she draws things other than her comic strip, the drawings are quite different, more refined and detailed.

I don’t like to pick on other artist’s styles because art is art. Who am I to judge, which did make me wonder about this comic head who judged my art. I mean, I can understand him judging the comic as a whole, but since when is a cartoonist’s drawing style judged by an editor? There are so many comic strip and comic panel artists in the newspapers and magazines like The New Yorker, who have a very simple, fast style, but the finished work is perfect.

Backstage at the strips

I started reading “Backstage at the Strips” again, by Mort Walker. I bought the book when I was a kid in the late ’70s and every few years I look at it.

I love that whole idea of the cartoonists being in their own little enclave in and around Westport, Connecticut. I like that life. I’m always tempted to move to New London or Mystic CT, but the cold is too much for a Florida guy. Vanity Fair did a story not too long ago called, ‘When Fairfield County was the Comic Strip Capital of the World“, which describes exactly what Mort does in his book.

It seems like a perfect life – living on the waterfront in Connecticut and waking up in the morning and cartooning. I like the way Mort describes living an 80-year-old house at the time, in a shore community and working in an old barn.

I notice that in the book Mort says that Bob Gustafson handled his fan mail, so that letter I received so many years ago that I wrote about here, probably came from Bob and not Mort.

Backstage at the Strips, written in 1975 describes there being over 300 newspaper syndicates at the time and 1700 daily newspapers in the US, but still describes how hard it was to break into daily newspaper syndication. Now it’s almost impossible.

The book is really a great look at a cartoonist’s life with lots of valuable information about the cartooning industry at that time and before that time. The book is timeless. But it also encapsulates a time back then, in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s when things were different and times were simpler. It’s a place you want to go back to and just the fact that I first read the book when I was a boy it sort of does take me back to that time because as I read it, a lot of the passages remind me of the first time I read them back in the ’70s.

International House of Burgers?

I know it’s just a publicity campaign, but I thought of this comic when I heard that IHOP, International House of Pancakes, changed their name today to IHOb – “b for burgers.”

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Anthony Bourdain; a friend in my head

Anthony Bourdain is friend in my head. You know how you see people on tv or movies and you just feel as if you know them? Every once in awhile someone famous dies and I feel as if they were/are a family member. I mean I guess I feel that same way when they were alive, but it hits hard when they pass on. Random people have had that effect on me over the years. It was shocking to hear his name announced on the tv this morning. I had my back to the Today Show, I was making breakfast when they announced a famous chef had passed. I held my breath as they said the name, hoping that I didn’t know the person they would announce, so it knocked the breath out of me when they said his name.

I loved Anthony’s attitude and story-telling technique. I was drawn in like so many millions when he took us on adventures of far away places and even places close to home. I’ve lived in Miami most of my life, but on his Miami episode I learned so much.

First No Reservations and then Parts Unknown. I would watch marathons of these shows, always drawn in from the beginning of each episode. The food and the locations were featured, but Anthony was the star.

The New York Herald

Whenever I’m in New York, I look for the New York Herald building in Herald Square. I stand in front of Macy’s and look around and try to imagine which of the old buildings is the Herald. But of course that building is long gone. It stood on the triangle at Broadway and 6^th Avenue between 35^th and 36^th Streets. It originally was downtown on Park Row where most of the newspapers in the 19th century were, but in 1895 James Gordon Bennett, Sr., founder, moved the newspaper uptown.

herald2 — Detroit Publishing Co. (ca. 1900-10) – George Grantham Bain

I had only seen photos from the front, which faces downtown and love seeing these photos which I came upon recently where you can see the whole side of the ornate building. Shame that it is gone as is so much of old New York