I Don’t Know Why You Say Good-bye, I Say Hello!
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Rudy was a brilliant comic strip that proved to be, as the phrase goes, “too smart for the room.”
There have been several, and I’ve mourned them. I was particularly depressed when Norm Feuti’s Retail failed to catch fire. When I shared the preview packet with young people around my office, they shrieked with laughter, because it perfectly encapsulated the experiences of their generation.
But fat stupid middle-aged editors didn’t get it. There’s a lot of stupidity out there, and you can see it not so much in what is available but, rather, in what is actually purchased instead, by fat stupid middle-aged editors.
Cartoonists do not address an audience. They address a group of potential clients, and comics that would thrill an audience often don’t get past the fat stupid middle-aged gatekeepers.
So smart, funny strips like Retail and Rudy fail not because they aren’t funny and relevant and timely but because humorless, formulaic gatekeepers are looking for strips about cream pies in the face and incompetent husbands hanging from the gutters.
Point being not that editors are idiots — which we already know – but that cartoonists need to stop relying on other people to promote their work, including their own syndicate sales staff.
When I was the Comics Guy at our paper, I sometimes asked for a comic to replace something else, and it was obvious, to me, that while I asked for a comic appealing to a particular demographic, what I got in return was whatever new strip was hot, even if it had absolutely no connection to the strip I hoped to replace.
And “hot” didn’t mean funny or relevant or wonderful, but whatever the syndicate happened to be pushing at the moment. Sometimes they were right, sometimes they were wrong, but they rarely addressed the demographic I was trying to attract.
Here’s my point: If cartoonists think they can sit back and let the system continue to pay their rent, they are desperately wrong.
Some of them have figured this out and are making up the gap with graphic novels and some of those graphic novels are wonderful. And others are crap, because, as Michael Jordan proved, being an amazing basketball player doesn’t make you amazing at baseball.
So, anyway, here’s the message to cartoonists: You’re on your own. And if you don’t promote your own work, you’re apt to find yourself waiting tables at Denny’s.
There’s nothing hypocritical about self-promotion, particularly when the system isn’t properly promoting you itself. And there’s also nothing wrong with helping your fellow creators do well in this uncaring world.
And yet.
And yet a lot of cartoonists seem reluctant to “like” or, lord knows, “share” the postings of their fellow cartoonists (or folks like us or Cartoon Movement or Comics Journal or whoever) on social media. It’s a lovely bit of professional, ethical whatever to stand aside and watch, to see what happens, but social media is where it’s happening.
Which means that, in the current market, modesty and restraint amount to willful self-destruction.
As the anti-terror, anti-drug people say, “If you see something, say something.”
That goes for promoting the art form as well. When someone posts a good cartoon, like it. If it’s a really good cartoon, share it.
Or, y’know, play modest and quiet and see if Denny’s is hiring.
If modesty is your thing.
But you’ve got two choices: Get involved. Or don’t.
It’s your call.
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