Andrew Feinstein, co-creator of Girls and Sports was the second speaker of the day here at the Success in Comics seminar. Andrew and Justin Borus started the comic strip while in college and self syndicated to other about 80 universities papers before they attempted self syndication to dailies. They set a goal back in 2004 to get into 100 non-college papers by the end of the year, something that Andrew accomplished by getting up at 6 a.m. to start cold-calling east coast papers working his way west until 5 p.m. when he’s stop his marketing efforts to work on the strip only to start calling Alaska and Hawaii later that night.
Andrew and Justin signed with Creators Syndicate because he was exhausted trying to do both the marketing and the artwork of the strip. Since signing with Creators, it has freed up his time so he could focus on other things like their book and animation projects. Andrew suggests anyone going into comics to make sure they create iconic, consistent and relatable characters. He also talked about the 10,000 hour rule: the amount of hours one has to invest into any effort to be really proficient and skilled at it. The notion of wanting your comic on the refrigerator door is an antiquated idea. In today’s world, the equivalent is having your cartoons forwarded through email, posted on Facebook walls. A couple of other things Andrew advocated is that if you can help not be both the artist and the salesman, life will be easier. Selling a cartoon sounds better coming from a third party.
I loved seeing how Andrew was working with animation and seeing some of their latest creations as well.
I hope it was recorded. Andy is doing some very cutting edge work in what I called ‘brand theater’. The NFL shorts sponsored by Burger King are timely and very funny. You can see one at http://www.metacafe.com/watch/3401816/the_king_and_us_week_1/