For the last six months I've been trying to sell my cartoons to various city papers, local publications and magazines. I've been sending them out in batches of 5 - 8 cartoons at a time to editors and art directors around the country every week. So far I haven't sold any, which isn't all that surprising. I've read accounts from cartoonists who have been successful in this in which they say it took a long time before they started getting positive responses. What has been discouraging more than the rejection has been the complete lack of any response whatsoever.
I guess about fifty publications have received several cartoon submissions from me each over the past few months and in that time only one publication has ever even responded, The New Yorker. (I know submitting to The New Yorker is shooting pretty high for an amateur like me, but you never know if you don't try.) Other then that, nothing. Not even a form letter rejecting my work, not an email, not even my work sent back to me. Zip. Maybe the print world really is drying up or maybe I just suck. I don't know, but the lack of any feedback at all has been really frustrating.
By all accounts from other freelancers and cartoonists print work is in a sorry state. Even the free weekly papers and indie undergrounds have drastically cut back the number of cartoons they print or have an outright hold on buying any new work from freelancers like me. I get that, but print does still exist and the papers still need content so I just thought... hoped... *sigh*.
Anyway, I decided it's time to rethink some things. First and foremost I love drawing cartoons. That isn't going to change. I'll draw them no matter what, probably for the rest of my life. In order to get my cartoons in front of eyeballs other than my own I'm thinking it makes more sense for me to stick to what I know and that's the web.
I ran a comic strip on the web for two years and for the most part really enjoyed it. However, the one thing I hated more than anything else while working on the strip was the ever-present, crushing deadline of maintaining an update schedule. I hated that. A lot. I also hated that there was never any end to it. To maintain readership there always had to be another strip, and another, and another. On and on and on. Always on time or you'd catch flak about it or even start to lose readers. Because of those two things I abandoned webcomics and tried to go the print route. I like projects that have an end, some sort of goal to work towards. Comic strips demand some eternal stretch and if you stop it's seen as some kind of failure no matter how long you worked on it before that. I enjoy creating the strips, but I think it's just not the right format for me.
The work I've been creating lately has been single panel cartoons, stand alone funny, silly or weird thoughts that aren't connected or part of any overall storyline or recurring characters and I'm really liking that. I like that I can create a cartoon and point to it and say there, that's it. It's done. A reader doesn't need any context or know some character history and have to wait for the next one to make sense. It's one single moment in my thoughts that I found funny or strange and that's all it has to be. I can then move on and draw some totally new random thought with all the others behind me.
That is what The Bramble Vine is going to be. I have a pile of cartoons I've built up for the past several months and more will be on the way. Once I have a certain amount I'll self publish them into books and sell them here and at conventions just like the previous books I've made. I have lot's of new ideas for this format and I'm looking forward to putting my cartoons out into the world again.
