In His Own Words: Though I like some of Sartre, I didn't read No Exit until five or six years after I started drawing the strip. In general, I find Sartre fairly cold, a bit misanthropic and as a result more prone to ideological excess. But life is just as absurd now as it was then, and absurdity is good fodder for cartoons and philosophy. One of my favorite cartoonists of all time is B. Kliban, author of CAT, Tiny Footprints, Never Eat Anything Larger Than Your Head and many other books. He was a magazine cartoonist in the 1960s. Every panel cartoonist since has borrowed from him, including me. Gary Larson took his way of drawing people and animals. Jim Davis stole his way of drawing cats for Garfield, and Dan Pirraro incorporated some of his humor and style. I highly recommend his books, many of which are still in print. Kliban died in the late 1980s. It's hard to get syndicated. The chains are buying up a lot of the weeklies. The New Times chain owns 15 papers, including New Mass Media (owned by Tribune), Village Voice Media, and more. Chains will put one cartoonist in all of their papers, because it's cheap. But that means a cartoonist in a particular city has that much harder time getting a job at his or her local paper. Local editorial pages increasingly don't hire local political cartoonists; they use syndicated stuff instead. To survive, you have to self-syndicate to as many papers as you can. To make a decent living, I need to sell the same cartoon to at least 30 papers. In more than 10 years of doing this, I've had a maximum of 24 papers at any one time. I currently have 18. With the explosion of animation, especially on the web, I think both the public and the journalism industry are less interested in static images. But who knows? It may come full circle. There's been renewed interest in graphic novels and comic books. Maybe newspapers will wake up and start devoting more space and money to new cartoons. I think the world is likely to slide, slowly, into an ocean of deficits, terrorism and environmental collapse. A replay of the Vietnam War aftermath. The late 80's under the first Bush Administration. Where twelve years of Reaganomics left us massive homelessness and unemployment. Like Reagan, Bush is running massive deficits, pushing the debts for his policies onto today's kids and tomorrow's adults. We'll start paying for this in a few years. Bush just pissed away over 200 billion dollars in Iraq to slaughter tens of thousands, including our own. Think of what that much money could have done to jumpstart energy storage technology. It's criminal. |
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Ben
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