I Mix Dry Humor With Sharp Observations In My 20 One Panel Comics

After I retired from my job as a packaging design engineer, I found that I missed that creative challenge. But, thanks to my having attended the Kenosha Festival of Cartooning for the previous four years, I found the desire to reboot my cartooning career. Not wanting any form of hard commitment that was typically associated with syndicating a newspaper comic strip, I looked into drawing and selling gag cartoons to various magazines and newspapers.

I had previously been gifted a used Wacom Cintiq drawing tablet and was using it for sketching various packaging designs. To get used to using the tablet and learn the software for drawing cartoons (I use Autodesk Sketchbook Pro 7), I came up with a fun exercise. I chose an old gag idea of mine as the target and drew cartoons in the styles of some of my favorite cartoonists. (Note: if interested, the results can be found here).

I’m all about efficiency, so I was very pleased to find that drawing digitally had cut my production in half. To that point, I also developed an Excel spreadsheet to track my cartoons – each of which has a unique serial number. I added columns of searchable and sortable data such as keywords, due dates, who they were submitted to, whether the cartoon is available as a line drawing/gray tone/color, and whether it has been sold/posted on social media, etc.

Like most cartoonists, I only sell about 10% of my cartoons. So, rather than let them just take up space on my hard drive, I regularly seek out candidates that, by tweaking their drawings and/or captions, might be good fits for other publications. By adding due dates to the spreadsheet, I’m able to import them into my Outlook calendar.

Very seldom am I doing nothing but thinking of gag ideas. Typically, they pop up while doing a workout, going out for a walk, driving in my car, or most commonly while I’m taking a shower. I’ve even dreamed of ideas while sleeping. Unfortunately, my biggest struggle is the amount of time it takes to develop the perfect caption.

My very first gag cartoon sale came in October of 2018, ten months after I had started to submit. My wife and I were visiting my uncle in Columbus, Ohio. At the time, he subscribed to over a dozen magazines and newspapers. I had always told him to keep an eye out for one of my cartoons. Then, on that October day, I was scrolling through emails on my phone when I saw the sale notification to Alta – a popular magazine out of California. I was elated, and my wife was overjoyed, but my 90-year-old uncle was probably the happiest of all. At that point, I figured if such a prestigious publication like Alta had interest in my cartoons, others would follow. So, I wrote down a series of realistic sales goals and related achievements. As of today, I’ve met all of them except for two: sell a cartoon to editor Bob Mankoff and sell a cartoon to The New Yorker.

I also don’t advertise, so I don’t actively seek freelance jobs. Instead, I let clients knock on my door if someone needs a logo, greeting card, spot political cartoon, or special requests for friends. As a result, I’m always able to work these jobs into my schedule without disrupting my monthly submissions.