Category: art

For most of my life, I daresay for all of my life, my goal was to have a daily comic strip on the newspapers. A syndicated comic strip was my life’s dream.

For a few years – maybe 10 or so, I dropped that dream, I started a business and concentrated on that. I’m not a businessman or into that, but that was my life. I think I didn’t see a future in comics for anyone and I felt that the dream was dead.

But then it resurrected and my goal was to be published and be in print. I only had that goal in mind. I felt that comics were created for newspapers and that is the only place to be if you created a comic strip or panel. It was like producing a movie – you want it on the big screen. But things change.

Now I am not interested in being in print, which was a shock and horror moment for me to even conceive of this. It was so out of my normal thinking. But in reality, the readers are online. I myself have stopped reading comics in newspapers years ago. For one thing, I never care for the selection the newspapers have and I can pick and choose what I like.

Even with movies, there is a brand new world out there. You get more viewers for most movies on Netflix and Amazon than you do in the theaters. And that is how comics are.

My goal is to have millions of followers on social media – especially on Instagram. Yes, I said millions! And this is not a strange concept. Many cartoonists have millions of followers and many have hundreds of thousands! That’s where people are reading comics.

I have quite a nice following on Facebook and it’s growing on Instagram. I also publish on my own website. Eventually I would like to be part of GoComics and I’ve been working on getting press lately. I think if I get local or national press, it will give me a big bump in readership.

“Don’t curate your art to what gets likes. Curate it to what you like.”

That’s a quote from cartoonist Jason Chatfield from a recent interview in Medium. Jason is the Ginger Meggs comic strip cartoonist and also a New Yorker caroonist. Ginger Meggs is a 100 year old comic strip from Australia, that Jason took over in 2007.

I like what he says about the art and cartooning being what the creator likes rather than the audience. I do seem to concern myself with the audience. But I do get a bit giddy when a cartoon is completed, so I guess I do like what is being put out there.

About The New Yorker magazine, he says – “be prepared for rejection,” which is what I am up against whenever I send them submissions. But they get so many submissions and they probably just whiz by them.

Another thing that Jason says is that he ignores social media. While he posts on social media, he ignores the comments. It would be nice to do that too in many cases, but I think the whole point of social media is to be social, so reading the comments and interacting with readers is just part of the process. If I don’t like a comment I just ignore it.

I met a syndicated cartoonist a few years back who has the comments blocked on his GoComics site. So he publishes daily, but gets no feedback, which works for him but again, everything has comments these days – Facebook, blogs, news articles – comments are sort of what’s expected.

So anyway, enough about Jason, Jason, Jason. I just thought some of the things he said were quite interesting.