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| The Funny Pages Beckon |
| 02.27.05 (9:43 am) [edit] |
This has been a long time coming. Ever since my childhood I enjoyed the cartoons of Charlie Brown, Garfield, Bloom County and Far Side, and dreamed of the day when I would become a well-known cartoonist myself.
Alas, my attention-deficit problems, along with having to tend to real-life business, kept me from pursuing this dream. Not to mention the chore of having to put many weeks of strips together to submit a comic for syndication.
Lately, however, my life seems to be at a standstill. My job is boring. I want to get a new job, but the market is oversaturated with graphic artists and the number of job openings in that field aren't what they used to be. I'd be open to going back to college and getting a degree, if my study habits didn't suck and I didn't feel like I'd be kissing my social life goodbye for the next 5-6 years. I'd like to teach myself Flash... but I have to either get the program to work on my crash-prone PC, or buy a new program altogether for my Mac. And that'll take a shitload of money. So... revitalizing a comic strip career seems to be the best option right now.
I've had many comic strip ideas come and go. I really wanted to do something original, some comic strip premise that no other comic strip (nationally-syndicated, anyway) was exhibiting. There was "Frederick The Fish", about a bunch of creatures in a fish tank.... but this was when I was in middle school and my wit was not up to par... and besides, "Sherman's Lagoon" would come along later with the same premise.
Then there was "Now What", basically a Gen-X "Doonesbury". I had many different characters thought up... but I couldn't think of any good gags, and besides, looking back on things this strip would've gotten lost in the shuffle anyways.
Then came a novel idea: a comic based on time travel. "Times Like This" would feature a woman brainiac inventing a time machine and her male friend doing all sorts of crazy things at various points in the past. I managed to come up with all kinds of strips and gags... but what got me in the end was the fact that I wanted to keep my characters in their 20s, and that would just not make sense in a time-travel-type strip.
In all these past efforts, I just didn't want to make a load of strips and then waste a lot of my time and money shopping them around to the syndicates and getting rejection slips out the ass. So cartooning for me seemed like something that wouldn't work as a career.... until now.
The Web, as well as a few cartoonists who have quit the syndicate grind and taken their comic series to their own websites, have inspired me to go at it myself. I'm going to start a comic-strip website with my latest comic strip idea, and this time I'm not gonna wait for a syndicate to accept me, or worry about who I'm gonna be marketing this comic to. I'm busy getting together the characters and the basic framework of the strip right now, and hopefully I can launch this thing by summer.
What's it about? It's gonna be centered around a fictional wrestling federation. I've got plenty of gags in mind already in this realm. So stay tuned!
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