Get Around Commercial Cartooning With Freelance Cartooning

By Carl Kohler
Published on January 1, 1970
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Photo by Fotolia/hp_photo
Follow these tips for a great freelance cartooning career.

Whenever I hear or read that Playboy, This Week, or Look are the “best markets,” I feel a little like drowning myself in one of the inkpots. Sure, these books are the better paying markets. No doubt about that. But it seems to me that the “best markets” are whichever books buy most steadily from any cartoonist — whether their rates are $5 or $500 per inked image. I agree with you this philosophy could be nothing more than a fat bunch of sour grapes since my sales hover around the middle market range. But you must admit 40 $15 sales each month somehow offer solace. Any cartoonist who has been plying his craft (oh, all right, let’s be important and call it a “profession”) for more than five years and cannot make 40 sales a month had better investigate the profits huddled behind rassling a paid job.

Refine Drawing Skills

Another of my insane theories clears its throat and chants: Too many promising beginners get into the misleading rut of waging a full-scale campaign to rack up sales when they could better be spending some of their drawing time studying The improvement of drawing technique. I’m fairly certain this accounts for the many, many cartoonists whose ability to draw simply does not improve as the years (and the sales) stagger by. Although practice — even that gained through drawing endless roughs to be marketed — does help anybody’s drawing, there is nothing like some concentrated study to weed out chronic errors and smooth up a style.

Team With a Gag Writer

For years, I have wondered why the gag writing element — those who claim a great passion for producing humor copy, anyway — have not gotten together with cartoonists and, in cahoots with each other, produced the short humor essays illustrated with three or four cartoons and slanted to the various markets that want this type of feature so intensely that they are usually willing to pay prices for said features which will wreck havoc with the books’ budgets. For that matter, many magazines are delighted to have the chance to buy properly slanted lightly handled copy — and are quite willing to assign the illustrations to a fair-haired cartoony if the humor piece comes in sans pictures.

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