Ten years ago next month, you could walk along the streets of Manchester, NH and see my cover and interview in the free newspaper
The Hippo. Yes, silly name. But The Hippo has been around for years and I thought that I would revisit the interview and see what's changed.
Skip past the "I'm not cleaning this up" illustration and you can read the whole thing there.
For those who are interested: here are a few notes about the things that have changed:
The Markets are going, going gone. I don't spend as much time coming up with gag cartoons simply because they do not generate the kind of income that they used to. With the demise of markets like Barron's and Harvard Business Review, it's not viable to spend my resources that way. I am working on other projects. One just came out this summer. You can order an autographed book of cartoons I contributed to and edited
here.
I still teach cartooning and the classes are more female than male. Most kids are interested in gaming and animation careers.
Anyway, I have to finish some financial stuff relating to the business of cartooning. Ugh. I wish drawing cartoons was just that: drawing cartoons. It's figuring out markets, promoting yourself and keeping up with the business paperwork.
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Below is the text of my interview in this week's free New Hampshire paper THE HIPPO,
with some cartoons and comments by me. The only correction I see is
that the organization I belong to is called the National Cartoonists
Society, not the National Cartooning Society. Maybe I was mumbling when I
mentioned the group! The article is written by Heidi Masak, who is an
old fashioned reporter who takes notes with a pen and paper, she says.
My thanks to her and editor Amy Diaz for all the time and effort it must
have took -- not only with me, but with all of the other cartoonists
interviewed.
New Hampshire’s cartoonists
Who’s behind the funnies
For
some, it’s the first section of the newspaper they look for. For
others, it’s a wry joke on a text-heavy magazine page. Then there are
comic books.
A lot of work goes into cartooning,
and not many people make a career of it. Here’s a look at some of New
Hampshire’s top comic creators.
Mike Lynch
“Cartooning
has always been the one constant in my life,” said Mike Lynch of
Milton. The Wall Street Journal, New York Daily News, Harvard Business
Review, Playboy and Reader’s Digest are among his clients for
single-panel magazine cartoons.
As a kid, he drew
on the wall. At first he was yelled at. Then his mother started putting
paper up on the wall and inviting other kids over for drawing parties.
“I
tried to get away from it, but I was unhappy,” Lynch said. Ten years
ago, he quit “real jobs” to be a full-time cartoonist, he said. He
worked as an education administrator for a music conservatory in
Manhattan for seven years, and in computer graphics for Wall Street
companies for five.
Lynch
took a few drawing classes at Parsons School of Design when he moved to
New York about 21 years ago. Born in Iowa, he went to college in Ohio
where his father taught.
When people say, “I am a cartoonist,” it can many anything from drawing Dilbert to animating Sponge Bob, Lynch said.
Lynch
referenced playwright and screenwriter Martin McDonagh when he
explained how he ended up focusing on single-panels for magazines.
McDonagh got a book on writing and the first chapter was on writing
plays. He wrote one, and it was produced. The second chapter was on
writing for TV, but that didn’t work out. Lynch has tried to sell comic
strips, but the longer form didn’t seem to work out.
Lynch
said he writes about 30 “gags” per week. “Ten or 15, I’ll throw out.”
He’ll “draw up” 10 or 15 and mail them to the Wall Street Journal. Next
he sends them to the Harvard Business Review, then Reader’s Digest, etc.
When cartoons are rejected, he repackages appropriate material to send
to another market. At a given time, he’ll have hundreds of cartoons
sitting on desks where people are hopefully looking at them, he said.
“I
try to stay away from, certainly, overly familiar cartoons — the dumb
secretary and dopey boss — and try to be more clever. Because your
editors have seen all that and they’re looking for something fresh,”
Lynch said.
At the same time, “I love cartoon
clichés ... I still remember when I sold my first desert island cartoon.
That was so exciting,” Lynch said. A cruise ship floats by a dozen
people on a desert island, and someone on the ship points out “the most
sequestered jury in the world,” Lynch said.
You
can instill an element of surprise in cartoons, he said. In one of his, a
woman walks in to find her other half in bed with another woman. The
man says casually that she would have seen it coming if she followed his
blog, Lynch said.
“I do find that sometimes
racier cartoons or more confrontational cartoons don’t find markets
here, but thankfully there’s a big English-speaking market in Europe,”
Lynch said.
Another example is a guy knocking on a door who says, “Excuse me, have you heard what may or may not be the word?” He’s a proselytizing agnostic.
Lynch
is currently the National Representative for the National Cartooning
Society [sic]. That means his job is to “organize the unorganizable”
cartoonists, he said.
He’s lived in New Hampshire
for more than a year now. He and his wife vacationed in northern New
England and Lynch met some cartoonists, and his wife, who plays Irish
fiddle, met musicians. She still does graphic design for a company in
Manhattan and performs two or three nights per week.
“There’s probably less than a thousand people in this country who are making their living by cartooning,” Lynch said.
“Everyone
gets along and everyone tends to be interested in what the other person
is doing,” he said. Lynch said he knows most of his competitors, and
some of his best friends are the artists whose work is seen regularly in
the New Yorker or Wall Street Journal.
Much of
Lynch’s bread and butter is in cartoons tailored for business topics.
“It’s very easy to make fun of these guys,” Lynch said, citing Goldman
Sachs as an example. As long as you are generally aware of what’s going
on, you don’t need a special background in the industry, he said.
Cartooning
might be unique in that it merges visual art and writing. “That’s why I
never like the caption contests that are very big,” Lynch said. There’s
a world of people who can draw and paint, and a world of people who can
write, but it’s rare that people do both, he said.
Lynch
started a blog noting what’s going on in the cartooning community,
which offers him a way to promote his work (along with his site,
heykidscomics.com). At
mikelynchcartoons.blogspot.com,
he’s posted various cartoons that look like he pretty much draws what
he sees (which is pretty darn hilarious when he’s making fun of
strangers in airports).
"Oh yeah. It's over. She just sent an obscene emoticon."
“I’ve never been into style. A lot of cartoonists and artists really worry about it,” Lynch said. Edinburgh-based cartoonist
Rod McKie remarked to Lynch that Lynch’s work looks “so contemporary” because Lynch draws people he actually sees, Lynch recalled.
“I think that regardless of what you do ... you have to be observant to a degree,” Lynch said.
“I
also find that I don’t spend eight hours a day watching television,”
Lynch said. He’s lucky to watch it 90 minutes a week, and that’s mostly
just because he works a lot. “Cartooning is a job, but it’s a job that I
love,” Lynch said. The finished product might look simple, “but there’s
a lot of choices behind the scenes,” he said.
Lynch can usually tell within five minutes if someone is a part-time cartoonist, he said.
Among
their other concerns, full-timers are self-employed and need to cover
the business end of things, like managing their taxes, billing and
contracts. The average cartoonist lasts six months and throws in the
towel, he said. Part of the reason is that there’s not really a template
for the job. That’s also why he started the blog, Lynch said. People
have questions about how to deal with rejection, why things aren’t
anything selling, where to find markets and “what do these people want?”
It took Lynch six months to make a sale, he said.
Throughout that time, he was sending out 15 cartoons per week. One of
the things editors are looking for is reliability, Lynch said. Perhaps
his persistence demonstrated that because after six months of nothing,
he made seven or eight sales in one day, amounting to a couple thousand
dollars. As an independent artist, Lynch owns his cartoons, which puts
him in a position to control how they are used, he said.
Lynch has fallen into teaching cartooning and now teaches kids and adults in New York and New Hampshire.
“Despite
how visually bombarded every kid is,” Lynch said, he’s found that many
have never seen anyone draw in front of them. On the other hand, he was
teaching in a museum in New York this summer and by the third day his
students were drawing almost as fast as he was. It makes him wonder how
he’ll compete 10 years from now, he said.
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