I’m in Los Angeles writing this after a weekend in Boston, at the National Cartoonist Society’s annual Reuben Awards. Both John Glynn and (as I understand it) Rick Stromoski both had a hand in permitting non-member webcartoonists to attend, and Sandra Boynton organized a panel featuring Dave, Randall Munroe and Kate Beaton. I think it was the first time this was permitted.
The last time I wrote about the NCS, I said it was “an honorable, storied organization that eventually will have to expand to reflect [the changes in the profession], or die. It is a difficult thing to manage. Let everyone in regardless of merit? Clearly that’s not the solution. But I don’t know what is.”
I still don’t know what it is. I do know that I had felt the NCS was primarily an organization around for legacy purposes, with the Reubens weekend a convention for a prior generation of artists who never attend conventions. I worried that in trying to attain the honor of inclusion, online cartoonists would be sidetracked. I worried that honorific would take the place of function.
The most formative part of the weekend for me was seeing Lucy Caswell receive a Silver T-Square Award for her guidance of the Cartoon Research Library at OSU, a six-month project that became a thirty-year quest. I teared up a little at it, even though I didn’t know that story until that night. Some of my Webcomics Weekly associates and I have balked at the term “webcomics community” for its attempt to unify a fundamentally fragmented concept. I mean, that’s ultimately the strength of the web, right? To deliver specific content to specific niches that are ultra-receptive to it? In a lot of ways it’s no more a community than I am in a community with my neighbors who I never talk to.
But in the NCS, it really felt like a true community. These are people to whom the craft means everything, who swam deep in unknown oceans we online cartoonists only skate on the surface of. To drive the metaphor into the ground, we don’t have the gills for it, and it isn’t as elegant out here on land. Fish.
I come at cartooning from an outsider angle, as do many online artists who never really had dreams of being published in newspapers. I can name my favorite cartoonists on one — well, maybe two hands, but I don’t know much about them beyond their work which I pored over. I don’t know how they started, what frameworks did or didn’t exist for them, how easy or hard it was for them to move up the ranks. But to spend time in the company of the NCS, all that didn’t seem so distant.
I’ll be honest with you. I think the one disconnect that remains for syndicate and online cartoonists is understanding of how online cartooning works. I got the sense this weekend that it was like trying to describe what strawberries taste like to someone who’d never eaten them. And I don’t understand why that’s the case. It seems so straightforward!
I’m tired of the income discussion, and the confusion that arises from it. Online cartooning is identical to syndicate, except it cuts out the middlemen. On the down side, the cartoonist in turn must become all of the middlemen. On the up side, the cartoonist now gets to keep everything.
I overheard one member remarking that a popular webcomic had been linked to by a number of others, and that it must have required a lot of time to meet and greet that many others and cajole a link out of them. I didn’t know the divide was that great. I suspect that unfamiliar cartoonists don’t realize how passive that part is. If you produce good work, you just make it visible to social networking and let the crowd do everything.
Mapping the old syndicate/newspaper model onto the online model would be a good thing to do. Maybe I will make that chart. If we could move beyond whether or not online cartoonists are actually lying when they say they’re making $60-120K with their webcomics, we would be leaps and bounds ahead of the game. The discourse needs to move beyond whether or not the discourse should exist. There is so much to learn from one another.
This weekend felt like a big first step in a lot of ways. I’m very grateful I had the chance to attend.
