Freelance Cartooning
(Page 2 of 6)
January/February 1970
By the Mother Earth News editors
This is just a variation on the way most writers work and the magic word is cram. Cram yourself full of life. Use it all as your gag writer. Watch TV (if you can stomach it), listen to the radio, go to the movies, read, read, read and keep your eyes open. Soak up every impression you can absorb.
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Then, when you sit down to shape up some usuable gags, you will never have any trouble pulling ideas out of the air. Some of your best gems will pop out of your subconscious when you least expect it: While you're reading a good book or carrying out the ashes or just as you drift off to sleep.
Once you train your mind to think up humorous ideas, you'll turn out material faster than you can use it.
SELLING BEGINNING WORK
Carl Kohler's excellent pieces which follow this diatribe are really gonna open your eyes to the marketing possibilities in cartooning. If you think you can only sell single panel gag cartoons to magazines, in other words, you're going to have your mind pleasantly stretched. Carl's underlying philosophy should prove quite valuable to anyone trying to make it outside the system with anything. Roughly translated, he's saying, "Life is just exactly what you make it".
Although I kinda started at the top and worked down (my gags were published in slick, national magazines first, I next began selling the middle markets . . . and wound up doing local stuff last of all) most beginning cartoonists do best if they concentrate on digging the gold in their own back yard. Every top cartoonist in the country (the world, it seems) is trying to crack PLAYBOY, for instance, but you are probably the only artist knocking on the door of your hometown newspaper.
Prepare a sample kit of your very best work. Make it neat and as attractive as you can. Make two or more sample kits, and you'll have one to show and others to leave with interested prospects.
Now visit local printers and stress the fast, customized nature of your work. There's a blue million "mat" and clip-art services . . . but there's no way for them to customize their art the way you'll be able to.
Stop in at the local newspaper with some editorial or feature cartoons slanted especially for your town. Newspapers have access to more syndicated art work than they can use but most editors are always interested in something with a local flavor.
Offer to do an editorial cartoon or a sports feature about local athletes . . . on a regular basis, of course. Maybe the paper is ripe for a feature reporting upcoming community p rojects. If you like to do caricatures or portraits, you might work up a regular weekly panel featuring an outstanding citizen: The mayor, industrail leaders, local celebrities.
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