CSotD: Corey reveals the trick
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In today's Elderberries, Corey Pandolph continues a story arc about a new resident at the retirement community. It doesn't break the fourth wall by having them reflect on themselves as cartoon characters, but it is a bit of an insider rumination on the current state of comic strips and on their future.
Corey is an interesting person to be having this discussion, because he came along just before the ship started taking on water. He's old enough to know how the old system worked, and young enough to understand the shifting world around him.
Corey grew up in Saranac Lake, which is about an hour from my old home town, though I had left for college before he appeared on the scene.
Still, when his first strip, Barkeater Lake, appeared on-line under a syndicate contract, I happened to be in a position to get it into the Post-Star in Glens Falls, which is right on the edge of the Adirondacks — a word that means, in Algonquin, "barkeaters."It was a perfect strip for our readers.
Or would have been. But, at the last minute, the syndicate decided they weren't set up to do that after all and there followed a three-way thing of everybody being pissed off at everybody else which I bring up not to air dirty laundry but to note that, a few years earlier, they wouldn't have put the thing out there at all until they were ready to have it in newspapers. And, a few years later, they'd have already been through the process enough times to say, "We're not going to release it in print, but let's get it up on your website!"
An accident of timing which left Corey at the crossroads of the Good Old Days and the Brave New World, like Rick Blaine, "standing on a station platform in the rain with a comical look on his face because his insides had just been kicked out."
That wasn't the crowning blow or anything — just one more pie in the face, and an indicator of how things weren't quite working out. I have no idea what else happened along the way, but at some point he parted ways with them and later ended the strip.
However, he didn't take any of it as a death sentence, and he rebounded by not going away, by continuing to throw mud at the wall and by continuing to be a presence in the industry, which included taking over the Elderberries upon the retirement and death of its creator, Phil Frank.
I'm generally in favor of retiring strips with their original creators, but this is one of a handful of cases where The New Guy has done a nice job of preserving the strip but also taking it in new and funnier directions.
But all cartoonists are now looking at the web and wondering what the next decade or so is going to bring. I've used this analogy before, but they are like stage actors in the early 20th century looking at the brand new film industry: Some scoff while others peek at it in fear and some hardy souls embrace it.
And the truth that emerged in that Broadway/Hollywood melding was that, no, film wasn't just a mediocre medium for mediocre actors who couldn't make it on the legitimate stage, but it also turned out that some people who had terrific stage careers just couldn't make it on the silver screen.
What I'm trying to say is that some really successful syndicated cartoonists wouldn't have a prayer on the web, not because they aren't "good" but because they aren't "right" for the medium.
The story arc, which started here, has been riffing on the bad art of this fellow's web strip with recurring puzzlement over his main character, a platypus who apparently looks more like a duck, and the relentless marketing that is part of the game, including a book on how to be a web cartoonist. And whether Corey knows Dave Kellett or not, and whether it's a direct spoof on his success, his how-to book and his duck named Arthur or not, it's very funny stuff.
But here's the part that resonated with me, and which I think shows that Corey Pandolph gets it: Self-employment is a lot of hard work, and the people who make it as web cartoonists are really, really driven.
I remember the feeling back in 1987, when I put aside several years of four-digit freelancing income and took a job as a reporter at a newspaper, and, not only was I making enough to live on, but every two weeks, I got a check. I didn't have to send out invoices, I didn't have to remind anyone, I didn't get told some fairy tale about their billing cycle. I got a check. And, two weeks, later, I got another one and it was just the same size as the one before and the one that came two weeks after that was the same size, too.
Which I guess you might not appreciate if you didn't know that, in January, 1987, I had $3,000 in gross income as a freelancer. In February, 1987, I had $150 in gross income as a freelancer. And it wasn't because January was three days longer, either.
When I started getting regular checks in June of that year, it was a welcome change, because, while it would be several years before I grossed three grand a month as a newsroom hack, I never had to look at $150 again and wonder what hole that was supposed to plug.
And I only had to apply for the job once. That's the difference: As a freelancer, you have to apply for the job all over again every freaking day. It's exhausting, and you have to really want it, because if you put that kind of relentless effort into selling cars or real estate, you'd make one helluva lot more money.
As an actress friend once told me, "A lot of people want it, but not many people have to have it. You have to have to have it."
The idea that good work will find a market is nonsense. We have no idea how much good work is sitting in attics and basements, or being carted away to the dump along with some dead guy's underwear and old umbrellas. And it's easy to look at the stuff that is successful and say, "I could do that," or even, "My stuff is better than that."
But you have to have to have it, and not many people have to have it.
Vincent Van Gogh died penniless. Thomas Kinkade lives like a king.
The ideal would be to paint like Van Gogh and market like Kinkade.
Or to be retired and live near a bar.
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