I'm Trying to Birth A Comic Strip Here

Trying to get pregnant, well not pregnant in the normal sense, boy meets girl, sperm meets egg, TAADAA 9 month later life has changed forever.

but in the sense I'm really thinking about trying to give birth to a regular comic strip. It is about time. I've been reading and studying about this for nearly 40 years. Not that I haven't done anything before, I have, I took a year or so leave from my normal career, and worked on it, but mostly individual small markets: local press, editorial for county papers, couple of books, self promoted card line, some mural and sign work. I've sold a lot more than a lot of cartoonist wanna be. I made a couple of weak passes at the syndication, but in the end, we got pregnant again and I had to go back to work that generated the kind of income I needed. No more starving artist with two kids. Over time my markets fell to the side and I was doing nothing more than annual Christmas cards.

Recently in my particularly predictable way, I've been doing some internet searches, researching some recent start ups and found their stories pretty similar to mine. They knew they wanted to be a cartoonist from the earliest years. They used to draw all the time. They got stuck in a job that just doesn't get their juices flowing. They constantly were doodling. And then one day they made the leap or commitment. Admittedly I'm anal. I've got a real issue with not being prepared. I say I can stumble forward, but the one thing I've just never been able to truly stumble forward with is not having the money. Right now I already work in a career where my income is random. Yea 100% commish. It sucks, especially if you also have the personality that I do where I'd do what I do for free, cause I'm just a nice guy and don't mind helping people. So with the idea in mind that I need to make some money from cartooning, to offset the time or brain power I'd have to allocate away from my other work, it dawned on my I have over 200 cartoons in files that I could re-purpose and try to sell. It's not like I'm starting from scratch. So I scanned them all in this weekend. Now I need to get my marketing/mailing machine going again. This is really the perfect time. Other than work there isn't anything vying for my time. I banged out about 8 pages of doodles, ideas and drawings this weekend. I'm not going to bore you with them all at once. Maybe over time I'll load them up. This is just one page. A complete visual cacophony.

Beside sharing doodles I guess I'm going to have to start sharing the actual inked and finished products. It sure would be nice to have a following so I could get some feed back. I learned yesterday of a new strip on GoComics that started last year on the internet. They seemed to pick up a lot of press and attention quick and now are on GoComics. Their notoriety may be attributed to their previous gigs as writer and editorial cartoonist for a major city paper. Well, as with everything else in my life, hard work is all I know. So hard work will have to be what it takes.