COMICS, PART 2: SYNDICATION

Here’s the rest of my comic making story (continued from PART 1).

It’s not really a funny story, so I injected some random comics into the mix: serious paragraph — light comic — self-pity paragraph — goofy comic — boring paragraph — dumb comic — dire warning — etc…

Enjoy…

As I approached graduation, I got a deal with Universal Press Syndicate to distribute Feet of Clay in grown-up newspapers around the world. This was something I had always wanted to do, but never dreamed I would actually get the chance.

But drawing comics pays less than delivering newspapers, and I had a truckload of student debt. So I needed a regular job too. Luckily, at the same time I scored a position at a very large greeting card corporation as a writer and illustrator. I was just happy to avoid working in advertising.

During the course of one year, I graduated from college, started a syndication deal, moved to a new city, started my job at the very large greeting card corporation, and went through a severely traumatic personal ordeal involving a girl, many tears, a judge, and custody of a sofa. With all this chaos, I managed to carve out for myself the exact opposite set of circumstances one would desire for producing a lighthearted daily comic strip. My personal life was in complete chaos when I started.

Being young, inexperienced, dangerously depressed, and extremely busy with my day job, I was not able to put the energy into the strip it required. I failed to define, or fight for, my own creative vision, and became extremely dissatisfied with the work I was producing. I lost my way, and was listening too much to other peoples’ opinions. My editor (a kind, patient man) tried really hard to help, but there’s nothing anyone can do in these situations. A comic strip can’t be done by collaboration.

My routine was: Wake up and walk to work. Write/draw greeting cards all day. Walk home and take a nap. Wake up again around 9 PM and work on comics until about 3 AM. Repeat.

Every Thursday I would meet my editor for lunch and bring him 7 inked strips from last week, and about 10 or 11 roughs for the next week, from which he would choose 7 for me to ink. (The syndicate often does that with young cartoonists– have them write 12 strips, and maybe 7 of them will be printable).

Since I never did really figure out my strip’s focus, after about a year of this I became as burnt out as I have ever been in my life. I was going to have to quit one job or the other. The strip was only in about 35 papers at this point– not enough income to make a living.

I remember one horrible night just hitting a wall. It might sound overly dramatic, but if you put a gun to my head, I could not draw one more comic. I had nothing more to say. I was done. The next day I arranged with the syndicate to end the strip, and they were very gracious about it. It was one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever made, and it felt like a huge failure. Twenty three years old, and already washed up.

But immediately after quitting, I felt great! I felt more free than I’ve ever felt in my life. I started getting enough sleep, exercising every day. I was physically and mentally healthy. For six years I had been endlessly trolling my daily life for comic ideas. At last I had time to spend with my friends and family without being preoccupied. It was an amazing experience, but I was glad it was over.

A few years later, I started messing around with animation. For almost nine years, I have not had one single idea for a comic strip and have never regretted the decision to walk away for a single second. I don’t know why it just turned off like that, but it just did. In retrospect, I was probably too immature to tackle something like this.

So that’s how that went down back in those days, yo. I’m not sure why anyone would care to read all this, but maybe it will be interesting to some young person who’s making comic strips.

For you kids, here are the lessons of a burnt out cartoonist:

1. Practice every day and try to publish somewhere so you have deadline pressure and public scrutiny.

2. Don’t listen to anybody. Especially me. Keep your head down and do your work, so you’ll know what you want. When the time is right, maybe you’ll get a syndication deal, including the standard, boilerplate million dollar signing bonus. Or, try building an audience on the internet. I hear that’s big these days.

3. Until that time comes, try not to work in a job that uses up all your mojo. If you put all your time and effort into trying to please your art directors and half-witted clients, you won’t have anything interesting to write about, or the energy to draw it.

4. With a daily deadline, you will inevitably find yourself in the position of having to say something when you don’t have anything to say. Be prepared for that. Try to think and read and live a lot, so there will always be material you can pull out of your ass during the hard times. (comic strip ideas are stored in the rectum, not the brain)

Good luck, kids!

Like you and your friends, me and my friends used to make comic strips back in the nineteen hundreds. That’s just what we did, yo. It was back before I burned out in a tragic blaze of sleep deprivation and mediocrity that led me to seek other forms of self expression, such as animation and drunk. As for all my comic-making friends, well, they just grew up and got over it, yo.

Recently, several nice people (mostly from Singapore) emailed asking about a comic I did for Universal Press Syndicate years ago. I looked back over some of that old work. Most of it is painful to see now, of course.

Anyway, I’ve never put any of that stuff online before, so I thought I’d post a couple things, if only for my own indulgence. If anyone is interested, here is the story of my comic strip making days:

COMICS, PART 1: THE COLLEGE YEARS

Back at the University of Arizona, as an engineering student, I started publishing some comics in our school newspaper, the Arizona Daily Wildcat.

As chance would have it, the Wildcat had an amazing lineup of cartoonists all publishing at the same time. We also had a local weekly paper called the Tucson Comic News, which published full-page Krazy Kat spreads. The friendly competition and exposure to George Herriman made our work better (at least, it did for me). Here are just a few of the people we had in our comics page scene back in my day:

Chad Strawderman – became a drunk, killed a man, moved to Alaska, killed an elk

Jeff Barfoot – became a drunk, moved to Dallas (necessitating additional drinking), briefly served time in El Paso for alleged involvement with a hooker known as “The Argentine Firecracker,” and for attempting to bribe the arresting officer with a roasted chicken

Wes Hargis – always has been a drunk, speaks fluent spanglish, recently injured while beating up a tree with a shovel handle

Joe Forkan – became a drunk, started painting pictures of the world “as Joe sees it”

Adam Rex – finally stopped drinking, wrote some great books, began drinking again, wrote even better books, spent the money on booze

My first two semesters, I started off with a couple of inconsequential comics that led to nothing but public embarrassment (in other words, practice). The first one was called “San Jacques,” and was about some people or something. The second was about squirrels, but I don’t remember the name. During that first year, I learned the two most important lessons in cartooning:

1. Yes, the comics tend to suck in newspapers. But have you ever tried to write a tidy little joke and draw it up… EVERY DAY…FOR YEARS ON END? It’s really fucking hard.

2. It might be possible to do a comic in which a squirrel character serves as a symbol for some aspect of human nature. But it is not possible to make a comic that is literally about actual squirrels. They have nothing to teach us.

Luckily, I was oblivious to how bad I sucked. The best way to learn to make comics is to just keep making them every day, under the looming fear of deadlines and public humiliation. I guess anyone’s first 200 or so comics are probably going to suck (and for most of us, so will the next 1000) so it’s good to get them out of your system. Eventually the thrill of seeing your work in print wears off, and you start trying to actually entertain your audience.

My second year, I took it more seriously. I got a quill pen and bristol board, and invented a cool cross hatching technique. I took a couple art classes. I started a comic called The Masked Galloot (a misspelling of the word galoot that I didn’t catch until 2 semesters into the strip) It was about the daily life of a Don Quixote-esque super hero. That is, he was a pretend, imaginary superhero, who had no powers other than his own delusion. Once in a while he’d try to fight crime, but mostly he just hung around with his friends.

Here is one example of The Masked Galloot. This comic was apparently constructed entirely around the phrase “bastard file,” a hilarious term I had probably heard for the first time that day:

It wasn’t great, but it was my first comic that actually sort of worked. It began to catch on around campus too. Some of my proudest moments in college were the occasions when I would find Masked Galloot graffiti scrawled on a chalkboard or a sidewalk. The next year, I began selling a collection of the strip in the student bookstore, called “Godzilla vs. The Masked Galloot.” A rare collector’s item! (as you can see on the cover, at the time I was going by the ridiculous pen name, “C. S. Harding”)

After three semesters I decided it was time for something new. I started a comic called Feet of Clay. It centered around a monkey named Abbott, who worked in various monkey jobs– science lab, circus, NASA test pilot program… Here is a sample:

During my senior year I even began self-syndicating Feet of Clay in other college newspapers. I think I got it up to about 15-ish papers– hot damn! I also sold a collection of those comics at the student bookstore.

Creatively, Feet of Clay began some characters and themes I’m still trying to figure out today. For example, there was a robot named Herriman, who later evolved into the robot in my first animated short, He’s a Good Monkey, and may even come back in a different form in a future project: (stay tuned for that)

And in looking through the old strips, I found a minor character I had forgotten about– a lab assistant named Dennis. I always drew Dennis with my left hand so he’d look weird. (in retrospect, he looks much better than the other characters– maybe I’m latently left-handed)

Anyway, that’s about what I did in college, yo. Maybe I’ll scan in a few more soon.

Tune in to the next post for… PART 2: SYNDICATION!

I’m currently wrapped up in a really busy few weeks in my day job at the quarry, and I’m also working on a big pitch for some freelance job that– trust me– you do not want to hear about. So there’s not a lot of real production going on right now, and not a lot to write about in the production log.

So instead I’ll post a few more old drawings, just for the hell of it.

Here are some storyboards and a screen grab from one of my very first animated projects– an ecard for shockwave.com. Chad Strawderman and I used to animate many things for shockwave at our web animation studio, Goldhouse Creative.

This one was a Mother’s Day card involving a very ugly baby bird. Mothers are nice, aren’t they? Hi, Mom! You’ll notice that the sketches look waaaaaay better than the final piece. Someday I’ll figure out a way to not ruin my drawings by inking them.

Work in the Mystery Work in Progress continues. But depending on how things go over the next few weeks, there’s a slim chance I’ll have a kind of big freelance job to do, which would set back the short another couple months! On the other hand, it would also fund the short. So that would be progress in a way… we’ll see…

Here are some more old sketchbook pages:

The Mystery Work in Progress is still in progress and still a mystery. It’s going very slowly, but I like it a lot so far. I’m currently making animatics, while simultaneously trying to nail down the exact look. I’ve been working on and off on this project, at night, in my basement, for about 2 years now, with huge breaks for other work and life-living. It’s hard to keep the momentum sometimes. But I have the music nearly done, and listening to that over and over helps put me in the mood.

In the mean time I’ve scanned in lots of random pages from sketchbooks that I’m going to post here regularly, just for the hell of it. Some of these are more than 5 years old, but they’re just laying around, so…

Here is Random Sketchbook Assortment #1:

This is pretty old. I think the dinosaur was drawn when a corporation I know made a really stupid decision regarding the employment of a person I know. The person is doing just fine now. The corporation may be going extinct.

These were sketches for halloween masks(?) I think I also made Shrinky Dinks out of them.

The hands in this sketch are for another short I’ve been wanting to do. Maybe in a couple years…

Here are some sketches and storyboards for an insurance ad or something. I ripped parts of the stage from these drawings and put them in the Robot Family Christmas thing.

In honor of the holidays, here’s teenage robot Penny Clark from Robot Family soiling and corrupting one of the sweetest moments in the history of televesion animation: Linus’ recital of the Christmas story in the Charlie Brown Christmas Special.

Click here to watch!

Have a great holiday, everyone!