Rejected strip ideas

In an interview Bill Holbrook, the creator of Kevin and Kell, one of the oldest still existing webcomics, gave the following answer to the question “What would you say to a young person out to follow in your footsteps?”:

When I was 23, Charles Schulz gave me the following advice: Sit down and draw fifty strips. Of those, maybe five will be funny. Build on those and throw out the rest. Do fifty more. Now perhaps ten will be usable. Repeat this process again and again.

Other cartoonists have said similar things which surprises me because I follow a completely different approach. I prefer to work on a particular idea until it’s good enough for publication. My ratio of rejected strip ideas, which are then moved to a document called Sandra and Woo Trash.odt, is rather one third instead of nine tenths. I’m often working a long time on details like the exact phrasing of the punchline, but I stick to the general idea. I guess there isn’t just one way of doing it and working together with an artist forces you to pay great attention to detail from the start.

– Novil


Click here to see the comments!
Look!