how to earn a million bucks a year drawing cartoons.......

[ISPYSHHHGUY]

Drawing for 'DANDY' will win you respect and status within the comics/cartoon community,------

----and it sure beats toiling down at the local milk-bottling plant------ but, as one DC THOMSON editor [very memorably ] pointed out to me: 'we dinna throw money aroond here.' [name withheld]......even if you work as a cartoonist for for DISNEY, you'll get an OK paycheque, but not enough to fund that luxury lifestyle, enjoyed by the top movie execs....

-----------so, HOW do you go about getting that BEVERLY HILLS mansion, that dream ticket to all those shallow PALM SPRINGS champagne party sets, the 'mingling' with back-stabbing silicone starlets and other desirable trappings of luxury, simply by drawing cartoons?


------well, it's already been done, by the select lucky/tenacious few, the extreme example being 'PEANUTS' creator CHARLES SCHULZ, who, at his earning peak, raked in a staggering 30 million dollars a year courtesy of SNOOPY and the gang. I'm not especially a 'GARFIELD' fan, but creator JIM DAVIS shelled out for a spanking new LEAR JET courtesy of his pen-and-ink feline creation .

All this, of course, is the rare stories of success, and competition in this field [COMICS SYNDICATION, which pays royalty rates similar to those enjoyed by rock stars]: the vast majority of cartoonists are unable to crack this lucrative market; however, if any of you have an original idea for characters, with your own brand of humour , that is unlike anything else out there----- and could anticipate the next trend in public taste----ready to greet a waiting world, and you desire global fame and true fortune, -----


-----------this is the only way you get to earn megabucks:

[felneymike]

Some webcomic forums i have been a member of have had people occasionally stumble in, planning on quitting thier job and starting up a webcomic site to make thier fortune because "Penny Arcade did it! how hard can it be?". A lot of idiots, for want of a better word, offer them encouragement, i just bite my tounge and know they won't be posting much longer because they will have to sell thier computer for baked beans

Viz where another lot who managed to make loads of money off comics, because they got a book publishing deal not a comic publishing deal, where (to start with) the only people in the country doing that sort of thing, which had never been done before, and where consistently excellent. And even then after a few years i get the impression they actually hated doing it.

I think the bottom line is, if you want to make loads of money from comics... you wont! (then again i suspect the printers pocket quite a bit, especially in the small press world)

[Muffy]

You have to admire those artists that have done well in the past:

Dave Gibbons with 'Watchmen' after many years at IPC doing projects like Dan Dare (and UK marvel's Dr Who)

I imagine Alan Davis (Capt Britain and Excalibur) must have done well

And praise to the US artists like Jim Lee and Todd McFarlane.

[David]

I'm going to submit some strips - I have some ideas and prefer to script them myself.
I don't hold out much hope, though I won't know unless I try.

Although, how would I go about the SAE if I live in England - surely English postage stamps wouldn't be accepted?

[Lew Stringer]

I'm going to submit some strips - I have some ideas and prefer to script them myself.
I don't hold out much hope, though I won't know unless I try.

Although, how would I go about the SAE if I live in England - surely English postage stamps wouldn't be accepted?

I'd check the submission address first. Those guidelines seem to be several years old.

Lew

[kevf]

I know a few people who make a good living from comics. A couple make a fortune, from book royalties and trade paperbacks, and a recent conversation with Neil Gaiman about how much money he had to spend to fight a court case demonstrated to me he is very very very well off indeed.

But that handful of creators of top line American books aside, most comic creators I know are just getting by. Even at the peak of my Beano work it only ever made up a quarter of my earnings.

At one point in the 1990s I was making my money almost 100% from comics, then suddenly every comic I'd ever worked for went tits up and I was self-unemployed. Since then I have not dared put all my eggs in one basket.

The daily strip is a nice idea. And how many new daily strips have emerged in the last, ooh, 50 years? Not very many to my eyes. Nemi is the last new, succesful, strip I've seen. And it's been running for 10 years now.

Oh, just remembered... I actually had a daily strip, in the Daily Sport, for about a year. I wrote and drew Battler Britten, a comedy strip. It was totally inappropriate for that paper, and probably wasn't as good as I thought it was. But I actually ran a small studio system, including guest writers and inkers, to produce it. So, to totally contradict my own argument, it IS possible. Go for it.

[ISPYSHHHGUY]

David: if you're still interested in trying the US markets, send IRC coupons which are acceptable anywhere on the planet: if it costs say, 6 quid to mail your stuff off [it's cheaper by surface, though it takes weeks] put in 6 quid of IRCS [avaiable from any decent-sized post office] to cover return cost.

I only ever tried this idea once [about 10 years ago] and all I got was a form rejection letter: I made the mistake of putting in a FAR SIDE clone [which even turn up in print NOW!] Better to take time and come up with something unique and novel. Lew has pointed out that these guidelines are possibly out-of-date: anyone keen on pursuing this is best to consult KING FEATURES SYNDICATEwebsite.

Other US syndicates include CREATORS SYNDICATE, UNITED FEATURES SYNDICATE, UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE -----there are a couple of others, too.

Competition is fierce, however, with only a couple of strips taken on each year out of thousands of yearly sumissions. On the other hand, BRITAIN'S GOT TALENTundoubtedly attracts ten times more hopefuls.



On the subject of megabucks-to-be-made-out-of-cartooning, anyone remember TRACEY ULLMAN?




our TRACE, above.


TRACEY is seldom seen on our screens today apparantly......she need not worry however: according to yesterday's TIMES,she's been resident in the US for 25 years, and has amassed a personal fortune of 75 million bucks, the core of which came through a deal in which she gets comission for airing early SIMPSONS snippets on her show [before the animated series went 'ballistic'.] Who says you can't make a killing out of cartooning.......[?]

[STARBOY]

I think the bottom line in making mega bucks in comics (as in most walks of life) are a slice of luck a good idea and a lottsa talent. Folk like Bill Waterman (Calvin & Hobbes) Mort Walker (Beetle Baily, Hagar etc) Johnny Hart (BC) Davis (Garfiled) etc can churn out great quality art and funnies that appeal to the masses day in day out a fantastic skill that's not easy and their characters are recognisable and success means marketingopps etc. Comic artists like Jack Kirby, Neal Adams, John Buscema etc do/done pretty well (although they must have worked 24 / 7 to produce so much art or in Adams case such quality art) . I have a few Odhams file copies of 60s Whams, Pows etc and on it are the page rates for the likes of Ken Reid , Leo Baxendale etc and for the time those lads made a heck of a lot of money (again they had to produce lots of pages to a tight schedule in most cases to make big money) I asked my mum and dad at the time what they earned a week in 1965-1967 (the time period of the comics) and it was nothing near their single page rate (although I think Odhmas were the exception on the rates they paid rather than the rule) - I imagine its nothing like that now and its a much tougher & smaller market - but you gotta try if its in your blood.

[ISPYSHHHGUY]

things like BEETLE BAILY , HAGAR the HORRIBLE and B.C. look easy, but just try doing it! In common with say, today's BEANO, the artwork in these syndicated daily strips is of the almost-postage-stamp-variety, the trend of which ironically was started in US newspaper strips.

One of the reasons that PEANUTS done so well was it was concieved as small-scale and was so [apparantly] simplistic in execution, it still 'read' well when shrunk down, something more accomplished work couldn't compete with.........PEANUTS also ran for a long time in which the format consisted of four identically-sized frames, which could even be shown vertcally in some newspapers. This strip still appears in over 2000 papers worldwide, but apparantly if you can get a strip syndicated in 100 [decent-sized circulation] US newspapers, you can make a good living.

Ironic that this sort of cartooning is very different to vintage BEANO-type stuff: BAXENDALE or REID likely would not have flourished under this system.

[AndyB]

At the time when Peanuts was reduced to three columns, Schulz started playing with the boundaries - I think the deal was that he reduced the width, but he could do whatever he liked within that space, and so it could no longer be rearranged vertically or as a block.

[Digifiend]

I'd check the submission address first. Those guidelines seem to be several years old.

Yeah, I'm sure I can make out ©1993 down the sides of the character pics. The address has indeed changed. Here's the current guidelines: http://www.kingfeatures.com/subg_comic.htm

[ISPYSHHHGUY]

that's right, Andy; 'Charlie Brown' in the later years had more flexible framing. I was never especially a PEANUTS fan, but there's no denying that Schulz was the most commercial and possibly critically-acclaimed cartoonist in comics history.

[STARBOY]

Have any of the traditional DCT/IPC comic artists had successful newspaper type strips? I know Reid started of with Fudge the Elf which appeared in a Manchester newspaper and was very successful at the time and Leo Baxendale did a strip (not sure if it was a success though) any others? Re newspaper artists the latest issue of the (US) Comic Journal has a long article on Mort Walker and his characters ie Beetle Baily etc if anyones interested (although its about £8 a copy but a lovely book)

[ISPYSHHHGUY]

ROBERT NIXON and TREVOR METCALFE did a collaborative strip around 1973 called 'GEMS' in the SUN that was in the PEANUTS mould-----this strip never lasted long however.

Also from the SUN was a HUGH MORREN [of SMASHER fame ]strip called WACK from the early 70s.

JOHN GEERING done a mid-90s strip called TARGET for the DAILY SPORT and he also contributed editorial gags for the notorious SUNDAY edition.

there must be more examples than these, though, surely?

[Peter Gray]

Love to see examples of these up here at comicsuk forum..
The Gems I've never seen before for example..