The Round-up
August 12, 2014 in Events, General, Links, News
Cartoon © Bill Stott. Click to enlarge
It’s the summer lull. So we offer you a short round-up of cartooning news before we hit the beach with a very large book that will never be finished. Normal service will be resumed in September.
The Edinburgh International Book Festival has a series of events called Stripped 2014, celebrating comics and graphic novels and the artists who create them. And if you’re in the city for the various festivals, Procartoonists.org member Martin Rowson is speaking at the Fringe today.
When is a conference not a conference? When it’s the Comics Unconference, which takes place in Glasgow in February. Meanwhile, a website called Comic Soapbox Scotland is showcasing politically engaged comics created in Scotland. The site wants to hear from all parties, on the subject of the looming referendum or not.
The Observer has an interview with Roger Law of Spitting Image fame. There’s a gallery here. Law has since moved on to other forms of art, which can be seen at Sladmore Contemporary.
This is nicely done, an interactive version of William Hogarth’s Gin Lane, from the BBC website.
First World War Commemorations continue, and a set of satirical cartoons from the time have gone on display in Camberley, Surrey.
Finally, we said we wouldn’t go on about it again, but the Cartoonists Beside the Surrealside event in Herne Bay got a rather nice write-up in the local Herne Bay Gazette. Click image to enlarge.
Latest Blog
by Alex Hughes
After Gin Lane: Giving it all away
September 6, 2012 in Comment, General
Following From Gin Lane to the Information Superhighway we see that there are cartoonists who are positively embracing this new era of social media and sharing.
Hairy Steve © Steve Bright @ Procartoonists.org
Webcomics and viral cartoons are a couple of the ways that you can effectively give your work away to the web but get paid back by other means. Successful webcomics work on a business model based on the idea that you give away a regularly updated cartoon on your website and build a following of readers who come back day after day. British examples include John Allison‘s Bad Machinery or Jamie Smart‘s Corporate Skull.
© Peter Steiner @ Procartoonists.org
The profit comes from selling merchandise to the more loyal fans – bound compilations, prints, sketches, T-shirts, toys and so forth. Similarly, viral cartoons can drive lots of new readers to your website. How much money can be directly attributed to virals is arguable, although, for example, the well-known New Yorker cartoon “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog” is said to have earned its creator, Peter Steiner, more than $50,000.
The website Kickstarter has recently become one of the biggest publishers of comic books in the USA, from independent cartoonists using the crowd-funding model to raise money directly from their fan-base. Here in the UK, Procartoonists.org‘s very own Adrian Teal (The Gin Lane Gazette) and Steve Bright (Hairy Steve – in collaboration with Jamie Smart) have developed their own crowd-funded projects.
We’ll be considering another aspect of the communication change – After Gin Lane – and what it means for cartoonists next week
Tags: Adrian Teal, Bad Machinery, Corporate Skull, crowd-funding, dog, Gin Lane, Hairy Steve, Jamie Smart, John Allison, Kickstarter, Peter Steiner, social media, Steve Bright, The Gin Lane Gazette, The New Yorker, viral, webcomics No Comments »