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On writing a comic strip

August 17th, 2009

I believe most readers think that I’m coming up with all main parts of a new strip at once. That is that an idea pops up in my head and all I have to do after that is to think about some details in the background and to polish the dialog. And if I were a reader of Sandra and Woo instead of its writer, I would think the same.

But this notion is completely wrong! How not to Deal with the Devil was probably the only strip that didn’t require any kind of additional work after I had the basic idea. If you’re taking for example today’s strip High risk of infection, I was struggling for quite some time until I had an idea what Richard could actually say in the last panel. I thought that it would be funny if Sandra would change her clothes in record time after Richard has answered Cloud’s call, but I had no idea what Richard could say to Cloud until “Cooties!” popped up in my head.

Unrelated to this, but worth mentioning nonetheless, is the fact that I usually have no idea if the reaction to a new strip will be particularly positive or rather not. I was surprised several times about the positive feedback that some strips got which got nearly cancelled during the planning stage.

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[0087] There Are No Stupid Answers, Only Stupid Questions

August 20th, 2009

Comic Strip Superfool

August 20th, 2009

I guess the Calvin and Hobbes anthologies sell less units like they used to. Because of this, Andrews McMeel Publishing (aka Universal Press Syndicate) has now resorted to screwing aspiring cartoonists as an additional source of revenue. They and their partner Amazon (Shame on them, too!) have recently announced a new contest called Comic Strip Superstar. The winner gets a $5000 advance for a future book deal. This sounds good at first, but there are more catches in the contract than in your average baseball season. In the end, the “winner” (or rather loser) would end in a lousily paid part time job for Universal while signing away a large portion of his precious rights.

If you’re interested in more details you should read the following article and the comments on Webcomics.com: Comic Strip Superstar contest announced. There is also a large discussion about the subject at The Daily Cartoonist with Tony Piro (the creator of the webcomic Calamities of Nature) making several well-informed remarks.

I think it’s funny that Powree already makes significantly more money of Sandra and Woo for significantly less work. At the very least she does not have to write all those strips on top of drawing them.

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