Cartoonist Tales
Skip to comments
Mark Schultz and Xenzoic Tales; the Tony Auth archives; comic strip writer Tom Sims honored; Jan Eliot interviewed about Stone Soup; and making a living at cartooning isn’t necessarily a pretty picture.
Mark Schultz and Xenozoic Tales
Prince Valiant writer Mark Schultz in interviewed about his early career when he created the Xenozoic Tales (aka Cadillacs and Dinosaurs) comic book that he wrote and drew beginning in the last half of the 1980s. Mark discusses quitting his advertising job and diving into comic books and his influences (most obvious was Frank Frazetta, Al Williamson, and Wally Wood).
The interview linked above, with Shane Patrick White and Lance Laspina at Beyond the Process, is the first twenty minutes of an hour and a half interview which is behind a paywall.
Earning a Living with Current Comic Book Page Rates
Comic book creator Colleen Doran recently posted about independent comic book page rates:
Indie presses like to make much ado of how successful they are about sticking it to the man, and a couple out there also make a point of what generous page rates they pay. Why, they have successful Kickstarters that bring in The Dough, and LOOK! They pay a whopping $125 a page to contributors! And sell thousands of copies! Look how successful they are!
But I like to do the math.
But that’s $125 per page for writing, pencils, inks, lettering and full color.
$125 per page is what a quality colorist gets at a mainstream company. For colors ALONE.
It takes roughly two days working VERY quickly to turn around a fully written and print ready color comic book page. ( So your $125 per page breaks down to all of $7.81 per hour assuming you only worked 8 hour days on that job.
But, hey Artist, you get to keep your rights, right? No work for hire, here! We indie presses are so generous!
That’s nice. Except it is highly likely there will be no market for those rights after that Kickstarter anthology comes out, and since the contract keeps those rights for X number of years after the book goes out of print, you’re talking, maybe, 5-10 years before you can do anything else with that work. Maybe.
The entire post is a stunning look at comic book artists trying to survive doing what they love.
Colleen’s article, in part, inspired Heidi MacDonald at The Beat to revisit the same subject.
Says Heidi:
Will typical comic book page rates ever go up for “journeyperson” creators – not the superstars but the regular folks who get the work done well but aren’t “household names”. Possibly? There’s a pretty strong correlation between high quality work and strong fan support. It’s so obvious that I feel stupid pointing this out. Yet it’s well known that Marvel cut its rates a few years back, and a lot of established creators left because they wouldn’t take pay cuts. These creators have been slowly coming back, hopefully with better rates.
But as long as talented people will take crappy rates….publishers will keep offering them. I dunno, it’s all a big complicated system of pulleys and chains, like a Rube Goldberg drawing.
And Heidi links to David Harper‘s has a recent feature on the state of the comic strip.
Annenberg School Receives Tony Auth Archive
Ariel Zhang, for The Daily Pennsylvanian, reports on the Tony Auth archives held by his family:
The Annenberg School for Communication has received an extensive archive of work by Pulitzer-winning political cartoonist Tony Auth.
The gift, which was recently donated by Auth’s family, includes more than 10,000 original editorial cartoons, letters in exchange with colleagues and readers, ink and watercolor illustrations, and teaching cartoons. The collection is held in Annenberg’s library archives and will be shared with the public through exhibitions, programming, and classes at the School.
Auth served a long career in media, working as a political cartoonist for The Philadelphia Inquirer from 1971 to 2012, as well as a children’s book illustrator. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1976, was a finalist for that award on two other occasions, and was awarded the Herblock Prize in 2005.
Tom Sims Gets Legends & Lore Marker
Sherry Kughn, for The Annistan Star, reports that Tom Sims, the Popeye comic strip writer from at least 1943 to 1959, has been honored with an historical marker (or here):
OHATCHEE – The Alabama Folklife Association has honored the late Ohatchee resident, Tom Sims, who wrote the dialogue for the famous old comic strip character, Popeye the Sailor Man. He was a prolific writer for many publications and became a syndicated columnist as well.
Sims also wrote the Sunflower Street panel for Tom Little and the syndicated Ohatchee U.S.A. column.
Jan Eliot and Stone Soup – 30 Years on
[Last] Thursday, Nov. 20, [marked] 30 years since the syndication debut of Jan Eliot’s “Stone Soup,” a daily comic strip focused on a widowed single mom, her divorced sister, and their messy, multigenerational, blended families.
At the GoComics Blog Christina Duzan celebrated the 30 years since Jan Eliot’s Stone Soup debuted.
While “Stone Soup” launched officially in 1995, Eliot had published the strip as “Sister City” in the Eugene, Oregon, newspaper, The Register-Guard for five years prior. She retired in June 2020 after scaling back to Sundays-only for the previous five years. The final strip ran on July 26, 2020, and “Stone Soup” now runs in reruns on GoComics.
Here’s what Eliot had to say about the strip’s 25-year run…
Comments 2
Comments are closed.