By Darren Johnson
You read a lot of stories about people who start a business in their garage that makes millions. And you hear tons of stories – especially during this pandemic – about businesses that fail.
But you don’t really hear about businesses that kind of survive, barely, for a decade or more.
Here – this web site you’re looking at – is one of those businesses. Actually, I started making newspapers in Greenwich 11 years ago with my print publication, Campus News.
I’ve been getting nostalgic as the holidays approach. What are we looking forward to, really? Thanksgivings of old – with drunk Uncle Al yelling and slobbering about election conspiracies – will be Covid petri dishes. I mean, the cranberry sauce, shaped like a can, was already suspect before all of this plague and misery.
All of the parades, the Santa Clauses, the tree lightings, the Rockettes – gone, gone, gone, gone.
They even cancelled Charlie Brown’s holiday shows. Good grief!
I remembered one Thanksgiving where, when I was young, I had declared I wanted to be a cartoonist when I grow up. My mother was aghast at this idea, and pulled me aside to speak with a different uncle – the one in a suit with a corporate gig who unwittingly married into this crazy family – to tell me to toe the line, kid. Cartooning’s for losers!
(Uncle Al would spell that “loosers,” by the way.)
(Hypocritically, Uncle Corporate retired a few years ago and now pens cartoon books, selling them on Amazon.)
In any case, I cut down on the cartooning after that, and instead focused on the writing aspect of newspaper work.
Still, when I started publishing newspapers 11 years ago – after working at other publications – I imagined that a cartoonist would be important to this hoped-for media empire.
For the pilot edition of Campus News, I had gotten four advertisers to sign on. However, I had told them the ads would be 15 inches. It turns out, the paper size at the old printer I was using at that time was 17 inches, so there were two inches of white space left on those four ad pages.
Rather than seem unprofessional and go back to the advertisers, asking for bigger ads, I decided to fill those white spaces with comics.
I did an Internet search and found a young fellow, Bill Charbonneau, in Canada, doing sports-related strips titled “Small Market Sports.” They looked professional – better than I could do myself – so I ran them at the bottom of the ad pages to fill space.
(The reason why I have lasted so long in this newspaper game is because I know how to find gig workers and be a friend to to people with closeted creative dreams.)
A couple of years later, after I had been running his strip regularly, Bill wrote me. He said he couldn’t do it anymore. See, he’d met a woman. They were going to get married – on the condition that he quit his dream. So he did.
It’s tough out there for cartoonists.
I then found Les Taha who had a really good cartoon called “Off My Meds,” and he was trying to break into newspapers, sending his work to several dozen of them. His toons are every bit as good as “The Far Side,” and in the same style, but he could never get the business model to work.
A couple of years ago, he wrote us newspapers and said “no more.” He was going to put his cartoon book on Amazon and try to make a living doing that. That didn’t work out, apparently, and last year he started sending out his toons again to newspapers. But then this summer he sent another email announcing his retirement along with five toons about Satan and hell.
Message received, Les.
At least we still have “Filbert.”
Have a great Thanksgiving, everyone, and don’t let anybody dash your dreams!
Darren Johnson is Publisher of this paper and teaches college Journalism courses part-time. He lives in the Town of Greenwich, N.Y.
Bonus: The Comics (Click on Other Stories to See More Comics)
“Filbert” by LA Bonté. In agreement with the artist. Click to Expand.
Facebook Comments