Hired pen

I've been toying with doing commission work. People have asked me occasionally over the years, and I've done a few things--illustrations for a newspaper article, posters--but when I began this comic strip odyssey, the plan was to just do the strip. It's not that I don't like to draw to serve other people's ideas; it's just that I have a hard time coming up with cartoons for a particular subject. The stuff I do comes from various places: a road sign I see, a funny cartoon by someone else that inspires a new idea, misreading an ad and getting a joke out of what-if-it actually-said-what-I-thought-it-said; but it's almost never based on a premeditated subject: "now I will come up with a strip about babies," for example.

I did come up with an idea for next Sunday's comic which will be based on the show I'm currently rehearsing with a community theater group. I'd been brainstorming for a couple of months, and finally found one that works. I still don't know if it's as funny as some that I've just pulled out the air, but it is a good idea that came from working hard to do something on a particular subject.

Someone wrote me recently that I should ask readers what they do, what they watch, and what they'd like to see in a cartoon. This smacks of cartoons-for-hire to me and goes against my inherently lazy nature, but it would set up a nice challenge. I'd like to see how well I can directly serve the desires of my readers. So go ahead and send me your occupations, your hobbies, your advertising needs, and I'll see what, if anything, I come up with. You can e-mail me at dsmith-weiss@qlowntown.com, or reply in the Comments section of this blog.

I have every strip planned through May 2010, but when I get an idea I really like, I bump some planned strip to May and put the new one in earlier. I've also found that ideas that I wrote down months ago might not seem funny enough when they finally come up in the rotation, so they get dumped for a new concept...so your subject may appear sooner than that.