NYC-based Cartoonist needed for long-term comic strip

[Lil G]

I need a cartoonist for a long-term commitment for Pasghetti, a weekly comic strip. It's going to be somewhat of a parody of Family Circus' dotted-line cartoons, so you'll need to be able to match that style in your drawings. This is a brand new cartoon, so you'll be in on the ground floor. I have a lot of great ideas, you'll just need to draw them (I, of course, will welcome any input you might have). I haven't decided whether I'll give it its own web site or to take a friend up on an offer to post it on his site, which gets some good traffic.

Unfortunately, there is no pay at this time for either of us. I'm willing, though, to buy you lunch/dinner every week when we meet to discuss the comic. Fingers crossed, we'll both get some compensation down the road. In the meantime, we'll build our portfolios and get our names out there and all that yazz.

PM me with a link to your work and we'll get started. Yay!

Greg

[Jawa]

I need a cartoonist for a long-term commitment for Pasghetti, a weekly comic strip. It's going to be somewhat of a parody of Family Circus' dotted-line cartoons, so you'll need to be able to match that style in your drawings. This is a brand new cartoon, so you'll be in on the ground floor. I have a lot of great ideas, you'll just need to draw them (I, of course, will welcome any input you might have). I haven't decided whether I'll give it its own web site or to take a friend up on an offer to post it on his site, which gets some good traffic.

Unfortunately, there is no pay at this time for either of us. I'm willing, though, to buy you lunch/dinner every week when we meet to discuss the comic. Fingers crossed, we'll both get some compensation down the road. In the meantime, we'll build our portfolios and get our names out there and all that yazz.

PM me with a link to your work and we'll get started. Yay!

Greg

If you don't get any interest from people at AST, you can always try out this website:
Find Freelancers - iFreelance.com

People list their fees, etc., but perhaps you would be able to find someone agreeable to your idea.

[erechoveraker]

Or check the forums at eatpoo.com or digitalwebbing.com too. They're filled to the brim with talented comicsmiths.

[Lil G]

Thanks, guys, those look like very helpful resources!!

[Meen Bellpeppers]

Leave Family Circus alone.

[ericluxury]

Who knew that you could go outside of Craigslist > Creative Gigs to find writers looking to not pay cartoonists to do all of the work.

[Jawa]

Who knew that you could go outside of Craigslist > Creative Gigs to find writers looking to not pay cartoonists to do all of the work.

I also have an idea for a strip called "The Bitter Cartoonist", which consists of a cartoonist miserably drawing a strip beneath their abilities for no pay.

But everyone is a bunny!

Edit: Sorry for being pissy. I understand your point Eric, but it seemed a l'il obnoxious.

[ericluxury]

I also have an idea for a strip called "The Bitter Cartoonist", which consists of a cartoonist miserably drawing a strip beneath their abilities for no pay.

But everyone is a bunny!

Edit: Sorry for being pissy. I understand your point Eric, but it seemed a l'il obnoxious.

What L'il G is asking for is a drawing robot. Imagine if I posted something like 'I've got a bunch of dress designs. Anyone want to spend several hours a week sewing them together for me? No pay'. I get that these aspiring writers are trying to get things done, but they are being much more obnoxious in a subtler way.

[gigglechick]

It's going to be somewhat of a parody of Family Circus' dotted-line cartoons

no.

[TimBuktu]

Unless you're Harvey Pekar, I think a big part of doing a comic strip is drawing. You might want to find another outlet or take a drawing class.

[Adult Ed]

What L'il G is asking for is a drawing robot. Imagine if I posted something like 'I've got a bunch of dress designs. Anyone want to spend several hours a week sewing them together for me? No pay'. I get that these aspiring writers are trying to get things done, but they are being much more obnoxious in a subtler way.

Or, if you have a more charitable view, you can say "Lil G is asking for a collaborator on a project for which he is currently receiving no pay himself, and therefore can not afford to pay said collaborator."

Since Lil G is willing to take input from the cartoonist, you may want to cut him a lil slack.

[dan telfer]

Spagett..?

[ericluxury]

Or, if you have a more charitable view, you can say "Lil G is asking for a collaborator on a project for which he is currently receiving no pay himself, and therefore can not afford to pay said collaborator."

Since Lil G is willing to take input from the cartoonist, you may want to cut him a lil slack.

"Alright, let's collaborate. In this strip fake Billy is going to be running around a fake Williamsburg-like neighborhood. Here are the joke characters/places he passes... Now obviously make it look as much like a Family Circus strip as possible, but if you want the apartment buildings to be green or red, really its your choice. Go wild."

(None of this is meant as an insult to L'il G. But this view of "collaborations" with designers, cartoonists, animators is very common. As I said, see craigslist>creative gigs and you will see tons and tons of this kind of stuff. L'il G's post is pretty much exactly like them [except that he basically gave away what the strip is so if I was a cartoonist who thought that was a good idea, I could just do it])

[Lil G]

Didn't mean to rile anyone up. I'm not looking to take advantage of anyone, I'm merely wanting to collaborate with a cartoonist. I already have ideas for the strip, but I sincerely welcome any input from the person that will be drawing. I envisioned a partnership, nothing less, which is why I wanted to reach out to a common community as a first step.

Many of us write sketches for free, perform improv and stand-up for free, create videos for free, all in the hopes that it will lead to something that pays for those talents. All I'm asking for is a collaborator that will allow me to buy him/her lunch or dinner every week to work on a comic strip that some people could enjoy and maaaaaaaaaybe would lead to something that paid for those talents.

[dan telfer]

Good collaborators are harder to find than a good idea, in my humble opinion.

Might I suggest placing the meeting of your future collaborator a priority above your ideas/premise? What if you find a great collaborator who shares your enthusiasm for hunters being attacked by deer, elephant stampedes, and sharks eating surfers, but thinks Family Circus isn't worth parodying? You could be missing out on an awesome original strip about mauling by turning them off with idea-children you concieved in a previous relationship with your dream-collaborator.

Just saying.

[Kentock]

Good collaborators are harder to find than a good idea, in my humble opinion.

I like this part. And I spent a long time in a great partnership. But it's a much more personal relationship that I realized when i first started really collaborating.

Also, it clearly pays to know how to do more than write. If you know how to draw (or, more frequently, turn the right knobs on a camera), you can get more of your stuff out there much more easily.

But I don't think L'il G was out of line at all. He is making a good faith effort to collaborate. He just touched on a pet peeve of some of the more artistically inclined posters.

[ericluxury]

I will admit to being a jerk in my posts. As Kentock said, it is a pet peeve of mine the subtle ways that writers and people with ideas looking for people to execute their ideas undermine (and in my eyes, disrespect) those people. Lil G touched that pet peeve and I responded more rudely than was needed to get my point across.
I agree fully with Dan Tefler.

[scamboogah]

Reading this thread, you would think that Lil' G started it off by bragging about his Saipan sweatshop where young cartoonists are kidnapped at child birth and sent to work 20 hours a day with only a 5 minute mouth-rape break around dinner time....

[erechoveraker]

Yeah, this "artists must be paid" snobbery (not to call you a snob Eric, just that general argument I see a lot which comes off as more than a little snobby yeah?) only carries so much weight with me, and I'm right in the demographic that should be championing it the most. I certainly see what Eric is talking about on a near daily basis, and these sorta "great idea but no pay" ads are certainly risky, and those people are awful and deluded and all sorts of other wrong things usually too.

However, there are plenty of young artists out there who could use some more experience before they should be expecting to be paid for their work. To counter the awfulness of those craigslist ads (and btw Eric, who is reputably looking for/finding comic work off of that fucking site anyways? they're all mutants!), go peruse the forums at deviantart, penciljack, or digitalwebbing even. There's quite a few folks on there who have quite a bit of nerve charging or even listing a page rate for their work. I see stuff like that even on conceptart.org too, in the job areas, it's the rawest/worst people who cry foul the loudest anytime someone comes in with a low/non-existent budget. People who would it seems rather not work at all (even if for free/cheap) than maybe create something, which is just insane to me.

Not to mention insulting to guys who work regularly, the term starving artist isn't meant sarcastically. I know several top name comic artists who make less than 25k a year off their books - meanwhile my brother makes 45k as a stocker (or at least non-managerial) working at Safeway.

And on the flip side, I know regularly working comic writers who use places like digitalwebbing or whatever occasionally to find talent for projects, writers who get things published and can get people work guaranteed. But I see the replies they get, and it's the first thing out of so many of them asking how much they're gonna get paid.

Great artistic collaborations aren't built around money, and a lot of these sort of union's success should be around both sides knowing their position on the "food chain" too. Plus the fact that Greg was looking for someone local to him instead of just some boob from Idaho says to me he wants to find a partner instead of just a "hired" gun.

Or maybe he really is one of those craigslist assholes, in which case fuck him too

/dumb rant

[Lil G]

Great point, Dan. I guess I'm just too impatient in wanting to make things happen as soon as I moved up here. I should probably just settle in, keep writing, develop friendships and wait for something to click. There are enough solo projects like stand-up and columns to keep me occupied in the meantime.