1) Make sure you promise an unreasonable deadline you think the client wants, and then deliver late. Over-promise and under-deliver. Nice!
2) Take the tiniest germ of humor you can find and squeeze a cartoon out of it by writing an excessively long caption to explain why this is so funny. Brevity is wit my arse.
3) Ask for other cartoonists’ markets and contacts. Nothing endears you to a professional more than asking to see their books.
4) Argue print vs. web and refuse to consider other points of view. You know you’re right – make sure we all know it too.
5) Beg for criticism, and then explain why it’s wrong. Classy!
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I'm sure I could think of more than five. I'd only need to check my To Do List for the day.
Sometimes someone who I don't know who wants to be a cartoonist will ask for contact information (a magazine market address, a cartoon editor's name, an agent's phone number, etc.) from time to time.
A couple of times a year, I'll get a request for, well, really, EVERYTHING; a complete Xerox of my Rolodex would be good. And these few people do not see anything wrong with asking.
Most jerks don't know they're jerks.
Sorry if this was a tad snarky, but sometimes you just gotta blow off some steam.
Now, for my teapot dance…
lol!
Had one too many phone calls from a kid wanting to do work experience have we?!
Hope you're doing really well!
MG
"2) Take the tiniest germ of humor you can find and squeeze a cartoon out of it by writing an excessively long caption to explain why this is so funny. Brevity is wit my arse."
This one has me curious. Were you speaking in general, or of anyone/thing in particular? Henry Martin was famous for his very long captions, but I know you don't mean him.
Martin's long captions are great, and, of course, we all occasionally do longer captions for effect, but often I'll see (and I'm not gonna name names) something like this:
Pig to nearby cow – "Well, according to my iPhone's GPS, we're in a county in the northwest corner of Oregon, so, technically, I could say that I'm a pig in a Polk."
See what I mean? Not a great germ of an idea to begin with, and to make it work, you gots some 'splainin' to do.
I see this sort of thing all the time and it always strikes me as lazy writing. That's an idea that should have been thrown out almost immediately.
Not to say that we aren't all guilty of the "this is a great idea!" that turns out to be "what was I thinking?", but you try to shoot for as small a percentage of those as you can.
Does that help illustrate #2?
I remember my deputy editor once rejected an editorial cartoon becos he noticed it had too long a caption for an editorial stuff. since then I have learnt to keep to as few captions as are necessary to convey the message and still retain the humour.
LOL.
It's official! I am a jerk!
I like when people think there is a fast way to success that by asking for contact information they can then use your name to say how they got there. Yea posers!
Not to bring everything back to Legos, but lately I've been reading and looking at a lot of different Lego building techniques to use in my own stuff. But I don't think I could ever contact any of those builders and say "Hey, show me all of your tricks!"