comics – Page 31

New York Comic Con 2018

comiccon1 — Stephan Pastis signing autographs at NY Comic Con 2018

Saw one of my idols Stephan Pastis of Pearls Before Swine today at New York Comic Con, he was signing autographs at the GoComics booth. I was manifesting as he interacted with his fans, I do that every year and one of these years, I’ll be part of the GoComics family.

I got there early today and it wasn’t as crowded and sweltering as it usually is. They are expecting 200,000 people this year, so it will get mobbed. And while it was crowded, it was manageable.

It’s such a great event that I look forward to every year. Usually October in New York is the icing on the cake, but it’s 80 degrees today, so no fall weather or red and yellow leaves this week!

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I’m in NY for Comic Con

Another October, another NY Comic Con. I arrive in Manhattan yesterday, Saturday. Comic Con starts Thursday, so I’m here a little early.

I did my usual – visited the green market at Union Square, stopped by Washington Square Park and Madison Square (I like all the squares I guess).

I am tempted to approach the guy at one of the newspaper syndicates if he is at Comic Con this year. He sort of gave me the run around when I showed him my comics so I want to schmooze with him, maybe go to lunch or something. For some reason, people have a rapport with the syndicates, I’m not sure how they start this conversation up, I tried but it went nowhere. Others seem as if they have an ongoing dialogue.

I may be brave and approach their booth this year and start up a conversation. I’ll let you know. I’ll of course take lots of pictures of Comic Con and post them here.

Peanuts Hotel

There’s a new Peanuts Hotel in Kobe, Japan. I would think it would be in Charles Schulz’s home, Santa Rosa, CA.

The hotel in Kobe has 18 rooms, a Peanuts Diner and a Peanuts Cafe. Each room has its own theme, like the “Happiness is a warm puppy,” room.

The rooms appear as regular hotel rooms with a painting or mural on the walls, so I’m not sure if its worth a trip to Japan for that, but then again, if you’re going to Japan, I doubt you’re going because of the Peanuts Hotel.

peanuts1 — Photos courtesy Peanuts Hotel.

peanuts2 peanuts3 peanuts4

New Yorker videos

I’ve been submitting comics to The New Yorker, they like my work and asked me to submit. But even though they like my work, I’ve had to adapt to their style and comic sensibilities. A friend sent me a New Yorker video page which is pretty cool. There are lots of comic-related videos (or cartoons, which The New Yorker calls them).

One is about a little girl named Alice Kassnove, who they call a “caption-writing sensation.” She’s really funny. She says the goal is to not be funny but in the end it is funny and her captions are hilarious.

These two guys, shown above, Rhett McLaughlin and Link Neal do the same thing. It’s funny and interesting to watch and I learned a lot from all of the videos. I guess they rubbed off on me because I woke up at 3 am and came up with a couple of cartoon ideas that I’ll draw today. Here’s the page of New Yorker videos which has much more than just the caption videos.

There is a certain style and a different way of thinking when drawing for The New Yorker. It makes me think of the old days when there were so many magazines that printed cartoons. Did they all have their own style and sensitivities or did cartoonists just submit them in batches to all the magazines at once hoping for a sale?

The cartoon creating process is sort of like writing a song, which comes first, the lyrics or the music? I’ve always had the gag in my mind first, then drew the image based on that, I have now tried the opposite. I picture a funny image and then come up with the caption and it seems to be The New Yorker way of doing things.

Some years ago I had a lot of work published in various magazines but I just drew my usual style and they liked that as it was. I remember one time the National Enquirer turned down one of my cartoons, not because it wasn’t funny, but because they thought I and used a computer to add shading to it! I used Ben Day and for some reason it looked computerized to them. I laugh at that now since we are living in a digital world now and I’m sure the Enquirer is producing their whole newspaper digitally.

The Village Voice is dead

voice

The Village Voice is gone. Dead.

They went from printed publication to online publication three years ago, but that was good, as so many publicatons are going online. But now it is totally gone.

I read it in Gothamist, but Gothamist was dead for a bit but they were resurrected so who knows. Maybe the Voice will come back.

The Village Voice was special to me because it was my foray into New York City when I wasn’t in New York City.

For most of my life I spent a lot of time in NYC, even though home is Miami. But ever since I was a boy, I would go to NYC and spend long periods of time there. I would go during high school vacations and sometimes spend months there and even now I will spend long periods of time there. I spent weeks there this summer and I’ll be back for ComicCon next month and then Thanksgiving in November so the Village Voice was how I kept up with New York when I wasn’t there. And you know what? I don’t think I ever actually read it while in New York. I think it was just my taste of NY when I wasn’t in New York.

There was something forbidden about it when I was 16, I don’t know what, maybe the backpage ads? Maybe the articles? Whatever it was, I would read it in the library at high school and college and also at our town library. It was so New York-y that I felt as if I was in New York when immersed in it.

lifeinhell — Life in Hell, by Matt Groening

I loved the early cartoons as well as the articles. Jules Feiffer, R. Crumb, Matt Groening, Ted Rall, Tom Tomorrow, I could go on; such great cartoonists. I read them all.

I remember at one time their address was on University Place in New York and every time I walked by or crossed University Place, even to this day, I think of the Voice. I don’t think I ever sought out the building, but just seeing the street name reminds me of The Village Voice.

Tapas for comics, do you know it?

biden I was listening to a podcast called, “Tapas Media and Building Your Brand” at Webcomic Alliance.

They have over 35,000 comics at Tapas, and it seems that if you find your niche audience you have loyal fans. They also have some sort of payment system, which is great. I used to post there but found the whole system confusing but if that is where the audience is, I guess that’s where comics should be posted. That’s my version of Joe Biden.

I like the idea that Tapas seems to be geared toward mobile devices rather than computers and it’s the go-to place for Millennial comic readers. The podcast folks were not fans of social media as a means to share comics, but I find that to be quite the opposite. It might not work for long form comics and serials, but I think for gag-a-day, it’s great, especially since you can divide the panels into single panels and swipe through them on Instagram now.

My one concern is single panel comics. I’m going back and forth between my single panel Tomversation comic panels and a strip I have in mind. I don’t see too many single panels on Tapas but I guess with millions of readers I’m sure to find my audience. I think they have more younger readers than GoComics, which seems to have an older audience, including myself.

I was waiting for Sherpa to come back at GoComics so that I could start publishing there, but to be honest, I’m tired of waiting for them to complete the platform.

My plan is to start publishing at Tapas, Facebook, Instagram and possibly Tumblr (I like the sharing aspect of that) in the fall, probably on Labor Day, September 3.

Stay tooned.

My brush with the NY Daily News

sunday news — The first thing I would see on Sundays when I was a kid.

I’ve always wanted to have my comic strip printed in the New York Daily News and just a few years go Iwasthisclose. But due to the current climate and the constant staff changes, it didn’t happen.

At one time, for many years, the New York Daily News was the highest circulation newspaper in the country. It had 1 million readers a day, and way back in the day, say in the 1940s, they had 2 million readers daily and 4 million on Sunday! That was the place to be. They used to say that three people would read every one newspaper – so that is a hell of a lot of people reading one issue.

The editors loved my work, they practically had me in the paper, they wanted to know how many comics I had, how long I could sustain the feature, when I could start, etc. etc. I met with them at the building downtown, not the Daily News building on 42nd Street, they are now in an office building next to the Staten Island Ferry terminal.

I remember how excited I was that day, I had swag with me, Tomversation cube pads and pens and stuff and I had a wonderful meeting. But it never was to be, by the time I got home to Miami, the guys I met with were gone. One was fired for sexual harassment!

I started the process all over and again, the new editors were very interested. The problem at the Daily News at the time and probably even more so today is that there is not one specific editor for features or comics or things like that. At one point I dealt with the Sunday editor of the whole newspaper, another time a news editor. And again, it was not to be, mostly because of total confusion at the newspaper.

I have come to terms knowing that my comics will have a home on the internet and that is really a better place for so many reasons. But that was my brush with the New York Daily News.

I wanna be like Kylie Jenner

Kylie Jenner is my inspiration. I want to be just like her. I want to sell lip gloss. Well, not exactly, what I want to do is have 110 million Instagram followers or at least a bunch of them.

Forbes magazine just named 20-year-old Kylie the youngest self-made billionaire. She is worth $900 million and in a year she should reach the $1 billion mark, making herself the youngest billionaire ever.

She created Kylie Cosmetics and does most if not all of her marketing and advertising on Instagram to her millions of followers, costing her nothing. She leverages her social media following.

In the past I published my comics on Instagram and I had quite a nice following, I plan on doing that again. My audience is there. I would like to start publishing daily on Instagram, Facebook and on a website. Instagram especially is where the audience is.

I’ve always said that social media is so great for so many things. The comics come up in people’s feeds, they don’t have to seek them out and they are unobtrusive. There are a few cartoonists that post to too many groups on Facebook I’ve noticed. One guy posts to almost 40 comic related sites, the only trouble with that is if you post all at the same time, they seem to all come up at the same time, which annoys the readers more than enticing them. I’ve taken to hating the cartoonist and his work due to the fact that it overpowers my feeds! Not a good idea.

Do it the Kylie way. Post on your own pages and create a following through shares and likes, the best part of social media are the shares and tagging and things like there were fans are doing the advertising for you by word of mouth. All you have to do is post quality content. Constantly.

I would love if you followed me on one or more of my social media sites where I will start publishing Tomversation comic panels daily in the fall.

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tomversation.toons/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tomversation
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Tomversation

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.

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.

offtheleash1 offtheleash2 offtheleash3

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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