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AMA — "Did you have a fallback career in mind?"
🕑 Added 2022-09-18 18:00:03 +0000 UTCQ.: If you hadn't become a cartoonist/artist, did you have a fallback career in mind?
This is a wonderful question. In terms of cartooning in general: No, I never had a fallback career. Being a cartoonist was my One Thing. It’s the only thing I wanted to do — for as long as I can remember. The dream took many forms as I grew up — comic strips, comic books, political cartoons, etc. But being a cartoonist was my only goal in life.
In fact, my 20-year career in newspapers was based on a strategy to become a professional cartoonist. Bill Day, a political cartoonist for The Detroit Free Press at the time, visited my senior thesis show at Alma College, (photos below) and I took him to dinner to pick his brain.
That evening, he gave me advice that changed my life. He told me to get a job as a newspaper graphic artist — in the newsroom — and submit my comics separately. I got a good job at a mid-sized daily newspaper — The (Canton, Ohio) Repository, and I submitted political cartoons that I worked on at home. My newspaper career paid the bills for the next two decades while I honed my craft as a cartoonist.
There was only one point in my life that cartooning took a back seat. It was the late 90s, and my newspaper career was doing so well that I nearly forgot about cartooning entirely. I had been head-hunted away from Ohio to work at the Philadelphia Daily News, and now I was going to be given a big promotion — a leadership position. I was going to change how newspapers communicated information visually. (And I had a plan to do it.) If that would have happened, I would have probably thrown everything into newspaper graphics and forgotten about comics entirely.
I was given the promotion informally on Friday, as I was leaving work. On Monday, my boss met me in the parking lot to tell me that a higher-up had nixed my promotion because they had someone else in mind — someone they were bringing in from outside the company.
The very next week, I dusted off an old syndicate submission that I had been puttering around with and started posting it on the Internet. It was called Greystone Inn, and when I had posted the nine-week submission on my own website, I started working on Week Ten. And then Week Eleven. I would go on to post a daily comic strip — with no pauses — for the next four-and-a-half years.
I did quiet quitting long before it was a hashtag.
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Comments
Mr. Nobody
Somewhere in the Multiverse, Brad is sitting at his desk at the Canton Rep, doing his umpteenth cartoon about the latest round of layoffs at the Firestone factory in Akron, cursing the day he ever met Bill Day.
Brad Guigar
I can. I have a back-up on a CD somewhere in my studio. It may take me some time, but I'll dig it up!
Jim Sharkey
Will no one take that nerd's lunch money? 😁
Batts
Can we get a more readable view of the Big G chart, Please?
