Creating the New Cartoonist
Caught between a rock and a new place.
Born in 1965. You know what that means? That’s the year that conveniently divides the Baby Boomers from Gen X, so you’re not comfortably either one. It also means that when you went off to college, you got the very last classes that dealt entirely with analog skills, and if you were lucky, the very first classes in digital skills. Both kinds of classes were almost immediately worthless as the old skills were obsolete and the new skills were supplanted every time a new version of hardware or software made the scene.
I’m not saying the universe came down particularly hard on me and those my age. My father, for instance, was born into a world of “Be loyal to the company that employs you, and you’ll get raises when you marry, when you have kids, and you’ll get a gold watch and a pension when you retire”. He then went to work in a world of “Man, they fired me because I was due for a raise and it’s cheaper for the company to grind through newbies than to keep career staff.”
I was born in a world of newspapers and phone books. I used encyclopedias and pay phones. I was born in a world of the Myth of Cartoonists and their syndicates making money hand over drawing pen, and that’s the myth I chased. And now? The old guard has had the rug pulled out from under them, and the new guard couldn’t give them a hand up if they wanted to.
I joined the National Cartoonist Society back in 2002, just after I got my name on a syndicated newspaper strip. There were dark rumblings about how things were getting tough, and how these kids and their computers were running amok. Some of them even wanted to join the NCS, and all they were doing were scrawling junk and putting it on the computer! How could that ever qualify them as peers of Charles Schulz, Rube Goldberg, or Al Capp? Those guys had been in PRINT, for heaven’s sake. They’d had to battle EDITORS to get where they were. These new kids didn’t even have anyone to fix their spelling errors or take the bad words out of their comics.
It took a few years, but now there are Webcomic divisions in the Reuben awards that the NCS hands out every year. The mental gymnastics it took to get the categories and metrics decided on were, well, funny. Not Cartoonist funny, though. Meemaw on her first iPad funny.
Here’s why is wasn’t ‘funny’ funny. Over a century ago, William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer got into a little socio-political-powermedia chess game that resulted not only in the creation of the first syndicates to sell content to multiple newspapers, but the turning of ‘illustrators’ (an old thing) into career ‘newspaper cartoonists’ (a new thing). The cartoonists did work that had demonstrable value to competing newspapers, and since the syndicate did the legwork (for half the money) cartoonists no longer had to be businesspeople. They just drew pictures and paychecks.
And so, over a century later, one of the issues with NCS membership was income. Historically, Prospective members had to show that a significant amount of their income came from cartooning. That’s a misleading metric, but it didn’t matter. If the syndicate sent you money, it was for your cartooning, even if the syndicate got a lot of that money from T-shirts or stuffed toys or product licensing. Webcartoonists (Or, Cartoonists Nowadays, if you prefer) make income from selling ad space on their cartooning sites, and T-shirts, and hats, and with convention appearances, and a lot of other things. Is that income from cartooning? Of course it is, in the same way that the money that came to cartoonists from newspaper sales was generated by ad income and Sunday supplements and all the rest. But it didn’t FEEL that way. There was no editor and syndicate between cartoonists and reader. The gatekeepers were becoming obsolete.
But now? Crowdfunding and Patronage! By golly, THAT’s income based on your cartooning, isn’t it? Yes it is! Cartoonists are businesspeople again. That didn’t suit the Baby Boomers, and they no longer had any advice for Gen X. But those of us caught between? Those of us who know that computers mimic the analog skills we were taught? We who know why Photoshop tools like ‘dodge’ and ‘burn’ are named dodge and burn can, if we work really hard, stay in the pack long enough to see what these Cartoonists Nowadays are going to replace their syndicate income with. We have a foot in either place. I still draw a newspaper comic strip (The Buckets) for which newspaper income is declining and web income is, slowly, increasing. But in a panic that I’d be left behind, sweatily poking a gnarled finger on whatever will replace the iPad and swearing “Gol-darn” and “Dagnabbit”, I started a webcomic (hubriscomics.com) so I’d HAVE to learn to keep up. I think I might even be a Cartoonist Nowadays.
I hope the kids that take over the National Cartoonist Society one day soon will respect that.
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