On Becoming A Cartoonist
Rick London
"They" say you have to be funny and artistic to be a cartoonist. I beg to differ.
I love cartooning but I'm not a great artist. I can write as well as the best of them. Thanks to some of the leading cartoonists in the country, they showed me how it can be done, without even drawing a straight line. Their names are Leigh Rubin (Rubes), John McPherson (Close To Home) and Dave Coverly (Speed Bump). The year was 1997. My confidence level was at an all time high. My pocket book at an all time low. Could I make it? Would there be landmines? The best and worst was yet to come.
Starting even the most socially acceptable stable business can be difficult. Imagine a 44 year old who couldn't do much else well deciding cartooning would be his way up the corporate ladder, so to speak. That is the beginning of my story. It goes downhill from there.
The secret is simply to learn, research, and act. Keep working. If you draw, draw your cartoons. Send them out. Post them on the net. Let trade magazines know you exist. Blog. Do article marketing. Do everything you can. You will succeed if you don't give up. You will be one of the 1% or so who does.
It was not easy finding good artists. Some would stay a week. Some a few months, but they always left for bigger and better things. I thought, "who can blame them"? But I kept recruiting new ones. Finally the better ones were approaching me for a chance.
So do you have to draw to be a cartoonist? See above text. Of course not.
Being funny is very much about extreme self-editing; saying in a few words what many say in several hundred words. Shakespeaere had cartooning right when he said "Brevity is the soul of wit".
One does not have to stop with a cartoon site. There are ways to produce revenue from them, such as making Ecards, creating a membership site, or selling the cartoons to magazines and newspapers, but the big money is in merchandising and licensing, that is, creating products, or letting others do it, with permission to use your cartoon images.
Planning, studying, researching, and finally doing, That is really all there is to it. When you hit obstacles and challenges, and you will, don't be afraid to act even if it means making mistakes. Because if you learn from those mistakes, you will do it right, or at least better next time.
I have framed so many letters from New York agents whom I mailed early on. Some were form rejection letters and some were downright nasty. I can remember one, "What do I need with another failed cartoonist"? I am so glad I kept that one.
When I started Londons Times Cartoons there were no cheap domain registrars. Now one can be purchased at places such as GoDaddy for $9 a year. That's a lot better than a subdomain with popup ads and people take you more seriously
One day, in 2005, I got a call from a newspaper publisher wanting to know if he could run my cartoons. He said he saw my website was the 67,000th most popular site on the Internet according to Alexa.com (Amazon.com's analytical site). I had no idea. I thought we were still getting a few hundred visitors a day. We were getting 4000 hits an hour, and to date have had over 7.5 million hits since early 2005. I am still astonished.
I can't imagine trying a project like this, unless it was local, if there was no Internet. The Internet and all its new tools and information almost prevent you from failing, if you will learn but just a fraction of them.
Like my mom, a former schoolteacher, words, and the turning of a phrase was important. Mom was right. More right than I knew at the time
Once upon a time only the Rockefellers, Perots, Rothchilds and others had access to very important business tools. As you can see, that is no longer the case.
Our founding fathers probably had cartooning in mind when they expanded upon Freedom Of Expression. There can be no purer form, in my humble opinion. And for those of us who truly love to express ourselves in a very different way, this forum was built for us. Good luck to you all!
4.5 million visitors click on Londons Times Cartoons by Rick London each year at (htt;://www.londonstimes.us/cartoons/) offbeat cartoons and his new unique comic merchandise gift shop, Londons Times Superstore, and new cartoon clothing line store Rick Londonwear. He launched his venture in an old warehouse in Ms. in 1997. You can get a
http://www.uberarticles.com/?id=17118&b=79 unique content version of this article.
