Daryl Cagle was the first speaker on the second day of the Success in Comics seminar here in Las Vegas. Daryl runs the highly popular Cagle.com website, built his own syndicate Cagle Cartoons, Inc which syndicates comics and columns to over 700 newspapers in North and Latin America. He is also past president of the National Cartoonist Society.
Daryl’s presentation centered on the editorial cartooning community and his work syndicating cartoonists and things he learned while running editorial cartoons on cagle.com. Regarding his website, he made two points of interest. First you’ll notice that he puts his name on everything. Doing so has raised his profile in other media. When a cartoon related news event happens, he’s well known and easily approachable for media interviews. On his website, he started grouping editorial cartoons by topic because he found people are more interested in topics than they were in specific artist’s work.
Looking into the future, he says that pay-per-use is going to be the future. Websites like politicalcartoons.com or Mark Anderson’s Andertoons.com are going to be important “stores” to capitalize on this trend and even went so far as to say it would be important to build multiple versions of a “store” with the same content that is promoted to different markets. He also urged that cartoonists look at their art as products and pay attention to product placement – much like brick and mortor stores.
Daryl was kind enough to do a critique of the rather occasional editorial cartoons that I do, and it was another (per Amy Lago) 10 minutes of great insights and suggestions that I can also apply to my gag cartoons as well. This kind of feedback is invaluable!