There are some things I literally fear about my cartooning. I am always afraid of putting out a strip with a typo. Or I’m always afraid that I’m going overboard with the facial expressions. Or I get really wound up about whether I put Steve’s fork and spoon on the right side.
But my biggest, hugest, smelliest fear of them all is that a strip will bomb. I mean, hell, it happens to most of us. I won’t say ALL because there are cartoonists out there that have aparently sold their souls to the devil and never put out a bad strip. But the MAJORITY of us artists out there, whether you’re a cartoonist or a musician or a comedian, have bombed.
Am I being overly dramatic when I say this? I mean, I can’t be the only guy out there who is afraid to bomb, right? Maybe the Sudafed has gone to the sector of my brain that controls rational thought. Who knows! All I know is that there are some days when I write a strip and draft it out and it makes perfect sense to me. Then it goes in the can and a few days later I see the strip again when it goes live. Only this time as I read it, I get this little tinge of doubt. This nagging little bastard of a voice that says “people are gonna be confused.” And sure enough, bam, the comment comes into my mailbox and drills that suspicion home. Sure, for some folks the joke lands. Heck, maybe even a large portion of the audience gets it. But it’s always that one less-than-beautiful comment that just makes the rest of your day suck ass.
Am I ringing any bells for you artists out there. Can I get an a’men?
But to be perfectly honest, as damaging as the bombs are, I really learned to appreciate them. It’s THAT sort of reader responses that brings you back to your senses. Makes you start checking yourself a little more before wrecking yourself.
As both a cartoonist AND a musician, I’m doubly screwed in this department. But it sure makes the high notes feel a whole hell of a lot higher.
I’m hearing you on that B-Word. I personally feel I’m mediocre at cartooning. Musician wise though (Toot own horn here) I refuse to give a mediocre performance. If I could cartoon as well as my music skills I believe I’d be in crazy money. I try to make my comments on cartoon strips honest in my opinion. Even though they are usually or generally consistantly the same. But I will tell a fellow cartoonist personally if I didn’t like something they did. Seriously it is a bad flaw of mine to always be brutally honest. I enjoy reading, and looking at Pinkerton. As well as the previous 44UA strips. Great material. always anticipate seeing what’s new in the park grounds. Don’t even recall anything I didn’t get with your material yet. Keep on tooning!
Oops there’s one of those typos right there. Another flaw of mine not using spell check on blog posts. I knew I should of used my trusty Websters. Silly Cartoonist!
Consider Stage Fright as your friend.
It means you are doing something important to you and you care. Professionals practice until it is ingrained. Amateurs ride their passions like a roller coaster.
Being 100% perfect?!? What are you crazy? Look at the beginning Pinkerton strips. Compare them to now. Aren’t you glad you are here now and not earlier then there?
It’s sort of like when you’re braising meat or slow simmering a chili or stew. Then you have to run to the store for a last minute item, and when you walk in the house, you get a whiff of that food cooking that is unlike anything you smelled up to this point.
See, you’ve built up the smell profile of that dish, adding one ingredient after another, and your brain had time to get accustomed to and downplay each component of that final smell. You don’t get the full impact until you leave, give your brain time to focus on something else, and came back again.
The cartoon in the can is the stew after you’ve been slaving over the stove. The cartoon in print is the stew you’re smelling like it’s the first time.
That’s why a lot of artists recommend taking any piece of art you create and putting it in a closet for a month, maybe more. You need distance from it so you can experience it from a fresh perspective.
One of the reasons I’m limiting myself to a chapter a week in the publishing of my novel on my blog is so I can work ahead. Any new chapter gets finished a week or more before it goes live so I can let it sit a few days and give it a more honest and brutal edit before publishing it.
And some chapters were written 13-14 years ago, haven’t been re-read in at least 6. Hopefully those ones will come out very nicely.
No one can ever please everyone, all you can do is try to please yourself first and hope that you are also entertaining your audience. Feedback is so important, try driving a car with your eyes closed. And constructive feedback even negative feedback is critical to making adjustments. Ultimately you have to strive for consistency and gradual improvement. The best feedback is the continued growth of your audience and fan base. Will every attempt be a winner? Of course not, but if you can bat above .300 consistently you can make good money in baseball. Based on your current track record you far exceed that, so keep them coming.
Hey guys, I really love the kind words. But it wasn’t my intentions with this post. I was more curious to see how YOU dealt with handling work that bombed. I re-read this post and it sounded like a whine fest. I need to get off the Sudafed. It’s making me bitchy.
There’s also a flipside to this: I’ve done strips for Pinkerton that I thought were sub par, only to find out that people loved them. It’s all subjective I guess.
Dude, I feel you on the B-Word. I don’t handle it well when I do it — AT ALL. And I do it at least three times a week!
Let’s just say when I feel REALLY bad about a strip, or if I’m in doubt about a strip after it’s done and it’s waiting to be posted, I have a WHOLE bunch of apology gags sitting around — just in case.
I think I would feel better about my work, and less worried about it bombing, if I was able to work on it during the day, when I’m actually awake instead of waiting for the house to go silent. Meaning, I’d feel more confident in my writing/drawing if I was able to give it the time it deserves. Dare to dream…
Does that make sense? Probably not. I need some caffeine.
Wit – yep, nearly every strip I’ve done, I’ve run the whole gamut of emotions you mention. Part of the reason I’m in a holding pattern now. My problem is, I constantly compare my work with the folks I admire – Schultz, Watterson, etc. What a surprise that my work never matches up to theirs… D’oh! I just need to learn that it should be FUN – if I’m not having a good time with it, my readers won’t either.
One thing to remember about the (apparent) failures – you learn way more from them than you do from successes.
I did the comparison thing with 44UA and I think that’s what finally killed that strip for me. So with Pinkerton it’s not so much that I’m holding it up against my heroes work. It’s more like I am worried about disappointing people.
Bombing… try going on stage in a comedy club. When I was 20, I dropped out of college and tried my hand at stand-up. I didn’t drop out to become a comic, but the two seemed to happen around the same time.
I had this three minute bit I wrote about the legend that Napoleon’s confessor priest cut the penis off Napoleon’s corpse and kept it in a box which went up for auction in the 1960s. I thought this was the most absurd thing I’d ever heard and HAD to share it with an audience.
You ever seen in a movie or TV show when some guy tells a joke, and the audience doesn’t boo or hiss? You just hear silence, maybe a few crickets chirping in the background? That’s how this routine went over.
After my set, the MC at the comedy club said “never do that Napoleon thing again.”
The next week I came back with a new bit, an impression of an auctioneer picking up a woman in a bar, and that killed.
I learned through a very instantaneous and sometimes brutal feedback process that you just have to roll with the punches, because it takes years of trying out material to fine tune your sense of what will work. And bombing, while a nerve wracking experience, was also a learning experience.
It’s sort of like dating. You are going to have a psycho ex. Everybody has at least one psycho ex, because it takes dating at least one psycho (if not more) to learn how to spot the nutcases. Even your psycho ex has a psycho ex.
Bombing is no different than falling on your butt while learning to skate. Some people can’t handle the number of times its going to happen to them and quit. Others consider the pain a cost of doing business that diminishes with time, and whatever activity they’re doing that’s knocking them on their butts gives them enough joy that it’s worth the pain to do it well.
Just my $.02.
Remember, you will always hear from the one guy who didn’t get it and may hear nothing from the multitudes who did and enjoyed it. I’m in an unusual situation with my comics….my buffer is around 1 & 1/2 to 2 years ahead on drawing and I have more written that needs to be drawn. The cool thing about this is I will read some of the strip scripts waiting to be drawn right before I go to writing again. sometimes it’s months to a year since I’ve seen them. They almost seem like someone else work by then. It gives me a unique perspective when re reading them. I get to laughing out loud at a bunch of them. Sometime I wonder how I came up with some of my ideas. Of course they all can’t be gold but I don’t get rid of them unless they really stink and luckily that’s usually before I draw them. I usually check my spelling pretty well before inking in but some things tend to slip thru….spelling is the bane of my existence. I tend to not let it worry me…there’s even one strip in the archives where i repeated a word and spelled it different each time. I figured one of the times would at least be right. Of course I could also be a raving lunatic. The plus side to being a raving lunatic is the hours are good.
I’m with you on that, although I am lucky in that I have an editor who looks over my roughs and pulls me up on the ones that don’t make the grade. But even then, when some of them appear in print a couple of months later I sometimes question “What was I thinking?”. It’s tough when you have to do this 365 days a year, but you just gotta try!