A Comic Strip Culture

Let me first apologise for two things, I kept promising to do a blog-piece on these strips long ago, and now that I finally get well again and get round to it, newspapers in the US are dropping strips and some are even dropping comics pages, and secondly, I'm sorry about the scans, but I really wanted to capture something of the scale of the broadsheet-sized comic sections so they lose bits of strips - what can you do?

On the other hand, it looks like a good time to finally get it up here because one of my fellow British cartoonists, the talented Alexander Mathews, has a strip called King Monkey that he is hoping to place with a syndicate in the US, soon, and I'm also sending a strip, that I'm very excited about, to the US in a week or two. Now, even at the best of times the comic strip business is very difficult to break into, never mind during these challenging times, but I think that both Alex and I should at least give it go. The usual cartoonist maxim should apply, "if you don't send it in, it's already rejected".

I'm a huge fan of US strips, and by that I mean strips that the US syndicates distribute because some of my favourite strips are produced in Canada, but there are a good few cartoonists out there who can't say a good word about them. I have to say I think that on the whole, the syndicated strips are underestimated, especially in the US, where people seem to take the things for granted. They should try living here in the UK, in Edinburgh, for instance, a city of 500,000 people, where the local paper, the Edinburgh Evening News, carries two comic strips, Hagar and Garfield, and it shrinks them to about 3/4" x 5" and it really doesn't care how squished and squashed those two strips look. They are an afterthought.

Despite coming from this comic-strip-challenged culture, young Alex and I are willing to take our chances in the spiritual home of comic strips, the US, where a tiny handful of British cartoonists already have their strips syndicated. One of those pioneers is Roger Kettle, one half of Beau Peep and the writer of Andy Capp, who, like me, is amazed that the fantastic collections of strips that the US readers enjoy is regarded by them as too few, or too small, or unvaried. Oh, to be sure, I understand where some of the older strip fans are coming from because I once had a collection of vintage Sunday Funnies that were as big as an old British Topper comic, and as thick as a phone book, but come on, these things are a joy, rich and varied and colourful and a testament to an art-loving culture.

There is a serious point to this, of course, the US is, I think, as is clear from the samples of the newspapers below, much more comic, or comic strip, literate than the UK. The papers I've posted below, from 2004 and 2005, supplied by Mike Lynch, Dan Collins and Jay Nocera, show the sort of daily and weekly diet of comic strips that US beginning cartoonists, and would-be comic strippers, grow up with. Picture it, as the beginning cartoonists in the US are practising their craft the sheer variety of the visual language of the comics, the beat of the language, the form of the jokes, the cleverness of the language, is all there to be soaked up even before they first pick up a pen and dip it in the ink. And what is crystal clear to me, looking at the comic pages below, from the Boston Sunday Globe, the Hartford Courant, the Columbus Dispatch and the New York Daily News, is not just that comic strips are taken much, much, more seriously in the US than they are over here, that's a given, but also that there is a very real respect for the cartoonists and the reader, and a clear attempt to run comic strips that will appeal to a very wide audience.

The following full colour comic sections are about the same size as a Sunday Times broadsheet and as thick, if not thicker, than a British kids comic, with a wide range of strips covering everything from Dilbert to Prince Valiant.

I once asked, on Darrin Bell's old Toontalk forum, why American cartoonists often thought they were not real bona-fide cartoonists unless they had a syndicated strip out there, especially since lauded cartoonists like Chris Ware and Jaime Hernandez and Daniel Clowes were clearly world-renowned cartoonists without working in that oeuvre. Of course it was a rhetorical question, the answer for me was that comic strips are part of the American psyche.

Copyright of the comics pages above rest with their respective publishers, and the various cartoonists and agencies.

So, should we pity poor Alex and poor Rod as they send their creations of to be measured and judged? Well, no, not really, you see the work is done and the syndicates are the top market for main stream comic strips, they are the Super Bowl, the F.A Cup final, the Olympics, they are the ultimate test for a comic strip. How on earth could we resist sending the work to them? It may seem like a cliche, but it is the turning up and taking part that counts and you never know, one of us or both of us might just sneak one by them. Wouldn't that be something?

It's Weird But...

Borghal's piccy.

Okay, I know you'll think this is weird, but I can't write anything at the moment because of the Feng Shui (wind water). I'm afraid my Qi is just all messed up at the moment, man.

I have two set-ups you see, computer, scanner and printer, in one area and it faces "in-the-way" (no directional sense , sorry - might be East). In the other room I keep a laptop and all-in-one printer where I draw. Where I draw faces "out the way", through a picture-window, to landscape - it's the opposite of this. That is my writing area. However, my laptop AC adaptor blew, and I have to get a new one, but I forgot and ordered P.G Wodehouse's Woodhouse Playhouse; thanks largely to Brian Fies and Mike Lynch and I suppose Raina Telgemeier,

Digression: Stop Press; how cool is this, I just added the link and spotted that Raina Telgemeier has original art from The Baby Sitters Club books, up for grabs. What a great present.

because a conversation concerning all three was on my mind when it should have been Fujitsu cable.

So here I am, reluctantly sitting at the computer facing the wrong way, and for some reason it makes me uneasy and unproductive, so I'll leave shortly and go watch John Alderton as Mister Mulliner, and Pauline Collins as a variety of very attractive, plummy gels.

If you ever wondered why cartoonists are lone creatures who dislike working with other people, you now know why - they are just a little bit off-kilter. I'll be back when the Feng Shui works, and when my new cable arrives.

Mike Lynch interviewed by Mister Media

My friend and fellow cartoonist, Mike Lynch was interviewed by Mister Media (click this link to hear the Podcast) on Friday. I was impressed by Mike's memory for the things he said earlier in the interview and how he managed to relate later questions and answers back to what he had said before; because it was live and because when these things are live, like lectures, it can be a little like being dragged in many directions by a team of wild horses. Any beginning-cartoonists would be wise to listen to the Podcast and if possible, to download it and listen to it more than once.

I've been a fan of Mike's cartoons from the moment I saw them. When he draws domestic situations they seem very contemporary to me, very now, and that is something that a lot of cartoonists can't capture. But he also has a bizarre, surreal, twist to his humour that allows him to tap into recognised cartoon tropes and add a new twist to them; as this mixture of whimsical fairytale and modern political practices illustrates so well.

Copyright, Mike Lynch, 2008. Visit Mike's Blog to see more cartoons.

I do like lots of cartoonists, but I have a special affection for just a few, as cartooning is a business full of people who are simply either 'space-fillers' (they produce the sort of unremarkable cartoons that editors use to fill white gaps in the text) or insiders who, frankly, will never sell a cartoon outside a publication staffed by the people they went to school with.

As for entering cartooning as a profession, well, to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, I would caution you about one or two unknowns that "you don't know, that you don't know". For instance, this can be a problematic profession and the lie that humour is "subjective" (so there's no such thing as universal humour or worldwide releases for comedy movies then?) is often used as an excuse for the continued publication of work that is demonstrably sub-standard, and the rejection of cartoons that subsequently sell elsewhere and meet with acclaim. The phrase "it wasn't right for us" is of course a hollow-sounding, transparently dishonest declaimer that allows certain individuals a get-out clause and that allows them to exploit educational affiliations, social affiliations, sharing the same agent, and much, much more insidious relationships, determine whether or not work is accepted. It is an unacceptable state of affairs that would be outlawed by a variety of anti-discrimination laws that would almost certainly apply were all cartoonists not work-for-hire and/or freelancers who dare not upset the applecart.

Tidbits

Yeah, 'Tidbits', now you can see why I'm not covering the problems below in this post.

I'm been writing a 3-part piece on The Changing Face of Minicomics on The Forbidden Planet International Blog. The first part is in relation to some discussions we have had on The Comics Journal Forum about minicomics and the second part features comic work by Gerry (Sister Mary Dracula) Mooney* and Bill 'Stik' Greenhead's World of Cow cartoons. The third part will have details about price of producing your own comic, or making use of POD.

Go to Gerry's Mooneyart site for details. The 'sistermarydracula.com' site is not there yet, and it's a really irritating add that traps you on the site and won't let you back-button out (I hate that!).
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I was talking with Playboy cartoonist Mike Lynch about roughs. I send roughs to publications and Mike sends finished cartoons, you can do either, as long as the Cartoon Department you're sending to doesn't insist on one or the other.

Just to clear things up, because 'Literally Hundreds of People'* have emailed me about how 'rough' my roughs are ( those of you familiar with the code here know that probably means I've had one email). Of course I'm tempted to say my 'roughs' are 'dead hard; really, really, rough', but they are pretty close to being the finished article - it's just that because they are still pencil drawings, and not yet inked, I can change the parts the Editor might want changed, more easily.

If no changes are required, I don't actually have to ink the thing, I can adjust the drawing on the computer to darken the pencil lines to very black and the grey pencil-smudged ares to white. But I really like inking.

Of course some publications can, and do, publish the pencil drawing, and I think, at times, that it looks better than the inked one because the pencil work really is a sketch of the idea as it happens, rather than a cold-blooded execution of a commercial idea; if you get my drift. Put it this way, it's more spontaneous.