Toon time

Here's a baker's dozen

The latest collection of the stuff from LGOP.

You could see it on their website, but it won’t be as nice-looking as it will look here.

Lately I’ve been going back in time and bringing out cartoons from under the stairs (the archives), and will be more or less coasting until April when the feature will be officially ten years drawn. What happens after that, I haven’t decided yet: keep it going and resume my every-other-day deadlines, or let it fade into reruns. Or keep searching the archives—they are vast and may contain more cartoons that would be appropriate for a family comics page—and print more oldies for my C-note per month until year’s end.

Yep, that’s the basic amount for an online comic strip with 7K+ subscribers. Not a lot of return on the investment. A cartoonist is nothing if not a glutton for punishment in trying to reach for that golden chalice of ink-slinging success. Our heroes have shown us that it is possible to become rich and famous if only we work hard enough and for a job that’s not supposed to be real work; we sure do a lot of it.

I further monetize the comic with e-book sales, but even with that it is hard to keep the morale up for a job that takes up a lot of time. I love it; it’s my baby, and that is the real reason it has continued this long.

At this time last year I was getting somewhat depressed about the whole thing and seriously thinking then of cutting the comic’s cord. An editor from an on-line group of newspapers contacted me around that time about putting the strip in their family of papers, but I’m afraid in my state of mind I had no interest in being obliged to produce more work at what I am certain wasn’t any better of a bargain—just more work for less.

That was an odd situation; the papers he represented were created as local online news outlets, which is something that is certainly needed now more than ever, but they give things a slant for their particular political persuasion. In this instance, it is left-leaning, which I have no objection to, but these types of ventures have a name, “pink slime papers”.

I have a lot of experience working for pink slime Publications for Larry Flynt, and I asked myself, do I really want to be connected to that god-awful color again? I ultimately let the offer pass. I kept the strip going after regaining my creative enthusiasm, so maybe I should have taken him up on his offer. Here’s hoping for all my fans, that I get my mojo back this time, just like last year but the lure of retirement is getting stronger all the time.

For you Substack subscribers, I plan on doing this newsletter for some time so don’t get too concerned that CbC will be going away any time soon.

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For those who don’t wish to subscribe—you’re missing a lot of laughs!