Synchronicity

What a coincidence! Mark Parisi, who draws "Off the Mark", did a cartoon today about the Mona Lisa, the same day I did one! Different punchlines, and I think both were very funny, so no harm done.

What I find happens more often is that another cartoonist will draw the same idea I'm planning to do later. Mike Peters has been an especially frustrating guy in this respect. He did about a half dozen strips that I had planned on over the months that I was waiting for the site to launch. "The Hatchback of Notre Dame;" a puppet complaining that his parents/puppeteer were "too manipulative;" and the list goes on. It's no one's fault; two people just come up with the same brilliant idea at the same time! (For awhile, however, I harbored a secret suspicion that someone was finding out about my ideas and sending them to Mike...even though I've never met him.)

As I've said here before, I have every day's cartoon planned through the beginning of next May. I figure that one or two of those ideas, of which I may have conceived a year or more earlier, will appear in a similar form in someone else's strip before I get to use them. So goes the cartoon world. I did manage to convert the "manipulation" cartoon into one where the puppet says, "I've had it up to here"---which was funny, but not as good as the manipulation gag. Sometimes reworking the original idea can be funnier, though--today's cartoon was supposed to feature Leonardo da Vinci with his shirt sticking out of his zipper. While I pondered how to draw that without making it look obscene (I was thinking a plaid or checked shirt), I decided to check online to see what he would have worn. "Flowing robes" was the answer, so I switched to toilet paper stuck to his shoe, which I think is funnier anyway--especially since they didn't have toilets back then. At least not the white porcelain type I show in the next room.

I have a Picasso cartoon planned, and every time I see a Picasso appear in the comics (which isn't often), I think I should get going and put mine out quick. But then some other idea might get bumped and be done by someone else first, so I can't really stress about it. There are enough jokes to go around--I just hate it when one of the really good ones gets snapped up by someone else first. Today, we did 'em at the same time, and they were different takes on the subject--proof that create(ive) minds think alike.

Airlines

I got back from a trip to California a couple of weeks ago, and was struck, as I always am when I fly, by how impractical the off-loading procedure is on an airplane. Obviously, first class gets off first--that's a given. But why is it that the masses at the back of Coach have to wait as each row, one-by-one, gets their carry-ons down from the overhead bins, working from front to back? I would propose several steps to improve getting off the plane.

1) Anyone who has a connecting flight for which they only have, say, a half an hour to meet, would be allowed off first. This could be verified by the flight attendants so no one cheats--the rest of the passengers could spend the extra time this might take getting their luggage down. It's the airline's fault that these people have a tight schedule anyway, so they should be responsible for making it easier for those passengers. I have actually missed a connecting flight because I had to wait for the plane to unload, and I'm annoyed that the airlines don't inform their flight attendants when someone has a short layover and have them call those people to the front of the plane first.

2) Anyone who had no carry-ons or has their luggage already in hand would be allowed off next. Again, no cheating: if you have to get it out of the overhead, you don't get in on this round--even if you're quick.

3) Next, anyone who gets their luggage down during the previous two steps would be allowed off. These would generally be people on the aisle, but they might be traveling with others whose luggage they could also retrieve. And no standing in the aisle while you gather your belongings; remember, this is a courtesy system, and you should stay the hell out of the way.

4) Last would be the remaining passengers: this group would not be delaying people who were in a hurry or were more organized than they. There is invariably a jam where someone who has sat in their seat for the first several minutes of unloading sees that it is his or her row's "turn" and finally gets out, moves into the aisle, blocking the way, and proceeds to get his/her overhead stuff down while the rest of the passengers wait.

I suspect that plane disembarkations that take twenty minutes to a half an hour could be reduced to fifteen minutes or less via this method. Why no one at any airline has ever instituted this is a mystery. They must know that travelers experience a lot of frustration with air travel. Wouldn't this be a simple, no cost way to improve that experience? And in doing so, an airline would help to foment good manners and create a positive public image in the process; sort of a Please-treat-each-other-with-respect-because-we-do" message.

I have no power to change this. The one means at my disposal to perhaps spread the word a little, besides this blog, is that I can do a cartoon about it. I don't have one in mind yet, but there will be one. Oh yeah, count on it.

And if nothing ever changes, at least I can say I got a strip out of my frustration. Maybe, when that comic comes out, you could print copies and leave them all over airplanes. Sort of a change-by-cartoon campaign.

New things

Wow! What an exciting phone call! I just got off the phone with my new net guru, Sarah. She and I will be making lots of changes, big and small, to QlownTown in the coming months. And QlownTown will be living on its third server in less than a year soon, but it takes time to move an entire town.

One idea Sarah threw out was: do I put photos or cartoons of myself on the website and/or blog, instead of the cartoon character who now appears there? (We're planning to put up more than one image of me.) I said that one possible advantage of cartoons is that no one can see how old I am, or what color, orientation, weight, show size or astrological sign I am. (Okay, I admit you can't tell a person's astrological sign from a photo--unless they're wearing a big "Leo" medallion.) You can believe that I'm whatever you'd like: a twenty-two-year-old bearded artist type, or a fat, nearsighted old man with a kindly demeanor, or a voluptuous Lithuanian woman who happens to have a man's name and would be the perfect life partner for you. Whatever category suits your idea of someone you'd like.

A photo, of course, puts a human face to the person who appears sometimes erudite, sometimes offbeat, and occasionally just silly/stupid through the comics he writes and draws. And, I could take a bunch of photos at once and be done with it, in less time than it takes to draw multiple cartoons.

There's also the option of posting a photo, but changing it every few months to a photo of someone else so you never know who's the real I*...but that would just be messing with people with whom I want to make a connection. There's a part of me that wants to do the strip with no boundaries, to say "damn" when the cartoon character is saying "damn", instead of writing #%@!...but I really like the idea of welcoming almost everyone and alienating almost no one. I hope to do it while avoiding cutesy, heartwarming, gee-life-is-really-like-that-isn't-it cartoons (names will not be named here, but there are daily strips that require no clever thought to conceive that are getting too much space in newspapers); but I want to build a community of people who visit the strip, or whom the strip visits via email, on a regular basis. People who like the strip will generally assume they'd like me if they met me, so what do I present to them?

I ask you: as a reader of the strip [if you're not, go check out the website right now; I can wait while you do], what do you think you'd prefer?

* That's the erudite part of me, not using "me".

New things Happening

I began the process of switching servers yesterday. This will allow me to update stuff on the site more quickly and make some relatively big changes on the format of the site. I have plans to expand the offerings in the store, including more items on which the cartoons will be available and some altogether new media; to add a guide so you can look up old cartoons by subject---now that we're six months into the site being online, there are enough cartoons to do that, and I've been cataloging them for that very reason; and to eventually offer forums for reader input, in the form of "write-your-own" captions, comments on the daily cartoon and more.

This will be made possible by my hiring of an old friend, Sarah Dopp, who is much more internet-savvy than I and does this stuff for a living. I don't know why it took so many months of reading her online comments to realize that she might have better insights into web marketing. She and I had a wonderful adventure together years ago and I've always enjoyed and respected her. The coolest thing is that she's as excited about the strip as I am, and excited people bring more to a project!

I'm also working on the 2010 calendar, which is, predictably, behind schedule. I'm trying to find a program that will let me lay out a calendar month with the month, dates and day names in whatever font I want, and allow me to do it forever, rather than starting with someone else's template each year. Suggestions are welcome--but I use a Mac, so no Windows or Word, please!

I accidentally wrote over one cartoon that I thought I might use for the calendar; it was in a high-res, color-separated format, but after I messed that up, I had to pull a lower-quality version from another file to save in the "high res" file. It'll be fine for a book, but blowing it up to calendar size would really require rescanning and recoloring the whole thing, which had already taken the better part of a day. Grrr!!

Still, it's nice to be at a point where I can look at what's been happening the past six months and decide what I want to change or add based on that. I originally envisioned this whole thing as me just drawing my cartoons and the website being a simple means to present them, but the site now seems to have the potential to grow and do a lot more. We'll see where we are six months from now. I expect there'll be a book by then, but who knows what the site will include?

Ahead of schedule

I now have every cartoon written till the middle of March 2010. Not drawn, but scripted. I know what cartoon will appear every day till then. (I actually have more ideas sketched, but they haven't been assigned dates yet.) I came up with a Valentine's Day joke which is already scheduled for February 14th, for example. There are several Halloween strips planned for October. A week or more of Christmas cartoons for December.

It feels good to know what will appear when, although I continue to juggle them. There was a recession joke that I was going to plug into March 2010, but then I realized that maybe the economy will have recovered sufficiently by then (hey, it could happen) to make the punchline dated, so I moved it to September of this year. I'm not worried about that fast a recovery!

Sometimes when I'm drawing, I'll come upon an idea that seemed funny when I entered it a month or so earlier, but when faced with drawing it out, I decide that it doesn't work as well as I initially thought...so I either bump it to a later date when I hope to revisit it and find a way to make it funnier, or jettison the idea altogether and put another one in its place. This is a big advantage of planning 'way in advance. Of course, there are always the Six Stages of Idea Development that come into play:

1. Initial Idea is conceived and quickly sketched or written down. I actually prefer some of these quick scribbles to the more laboriously-drawn final versions. At this time, I generally find the idea hilarious, a sure-fire winner, and give myself many kudos.

2. Revisiting the Idea: a week, a month or however much later the idea is again encountered as I open my list prepare to draw it. This is a second chance to decide if it's really funny, or if the seed is there but needs development, or if I was stupid to originally believe the idea had any promise at all.

3. Penciling: The concept has passed muster, and the initial pencil drawing is executed. Here is where I may begin to seriously doubt the hilarity of the concept.

4. Inking: More doubt arises, as I've lived with the idea for several hours, and it's not funny to me at all any more. Here I remind myself that I'm too close, too far into it, to realize that it really is good. (Occasionally, I'm still happy with the idea at this point. Then it's a real keeper!)

5. Scanning and coloring: Now it begins to seem funny again. It may just be coloring someone's nose red or their hair purple or their shoes yellow that makes me smile, but I begin to feel good as the final product takes shape.

6. Uploading to the site: At this point, I'm either going to have to wait, hopefully, for someone to write to assure me that it was indeed a comic masterpiece, or I'm satisfied with the end result already and hate to move on to the next one, where I have to repeat the whole process.

It can also be called Six Degrees of Exasperation.

But there's never the pressure of not knowing what I'll be drawing two or three weeks from now. I hope I can always be several months ahead, because it takes a lot of stress out of the process. The only stress this does cause is when I have what I think is a boffo cartoon and it isn't scheduled for a couple of months. I want people to see it now! Sometimes I'll switch a couple of strips for that very reason. Kind of like a little kid who can't wait to show his new toy in Show and Tell.

I hope I always feel like I'm a kid doing Show and Tell.

Why Q?

Dave P. emailed me, asking why QlownTown is spelled with a Q. There are several answers: some legitimate, some whimsical. At the time I conceived of the idea, there was already a website called Clowntown: it featured games for kids. It has since disappeared, but the name is still owned by someone else. Consequently, I began looking at other names: Clown Acres, Clown City, Circus World. But Clowntown still appealed to me the most. I've always disliked the misspelling of "C" words with "K"--it just seems Korny to me. But "Q"--ah, Q. No one uses Q much. It would place my strip or site in a more distinctive place if someone were searching sites alphabetically, or looking for a strip on a site that listed them that way. And, once I dropped the anticipated "U" after the Q, it became even more distinctive.

Pronunciation didn't worry me. The Beatles took a common word and made their spelling the dominant version: at least to people of certain ages, if you say "beetles", they'll think of the band first. People will learn the spelling and pronunciation of a word if they see it often enough. Besides, "Iraq" ends in Q and no one thinks it's pronounced "Irack-qway" or "Irack-qwuh".

QlownTown could be trademarked, and so I did. That was important, because as word gets out, evil claim-jumpers can steal a title. If someone with a "Clowntown" or "Clown Town" or other, similar business name complains at some point, my feature has now been established. Besides, there's room for multiple companies named "Acme", as long as they don't create confusion among the products. Businesses in Maine" using the term "Mainely" number in the dozens, at least.

It's also memorable. Once you know how to pronounce it, you're likely to remember it with the Q. It's easier than Albuquerque, certainly. English has never been known as a language devoid of odd or inexplicable spellings.

The original version of the "Origin of QlownTown" essay on the website---which ran to about eight pages and was therefore severely edited---explained that the native people in the area which became settled by clowns was "QlownTown," a term that translated as "place where silly people live". While this is of course made up (there isn't really a QlownTown, folks--they're cartoon characters), it's nonetheless a sensible explanation in the reality of the characters' world.

I also wanted an offbeat spelling because the strip is offbeat. I hope it's closer to The Far Side than to, say, Family Circus. I'm not interested in cute. Witty, clever, literate perhaps (as literate as one can be while drawing clowns). Acerbic, occasionally. I'd rather have someone say "I don't get it" or have to look something up than say "Awww, that was so sweeeeet". I'm actually working on a Family Circus parody. Oddly, Family Circus was the most popular strip in one survey, suggesting that I'm barking up the wrong tent--but one does what one believes in. (Note to those who are as grammatically anal as I: I know the previous sentence should end with "one does that in which one believes", but sometimes, you gotta say it without too much pretension.)

Anyway, back to the why of Q: once I settled on Q, I liked the wacky spelling. It looks normal to me now, and that's the real goal of the strip: to create a world in which the offbeat seems normal. Except for occasional strips, the daily jokes are not about them being clowns; they're about the characters being wrong, or mistaken, or hapless--just like real life for the rest of us.

Funny, though--it's gotta be funny. And I think Q is funny.

Ah, the wonder of the internet

When I began on the journey that has resulted in QlownTown, my simple goal was to draw cartoons every day, post them on the internet, and make enough money at it to feel comfortable. I have since realized that I really need to set up an RSS option, a Twitter feed, and a bunch of other things that I still haven't done yet. You can, however, subscribe to this blog by clicking on the Subscribe option at the bottom of the page. If enough people subscribe, I'll make sure I blog more often.

I'm also tied up right now choosing cartoons for submitting to newspapers. I will of course refer them to the website, but they want 4-6 weeks of strips printed on paper (just like the old days!). I'm taking ideas from people now about what their favorite QlownTown cartoons have been. Based on feedback so far, I know the Sunday strip, Imminent Collision, will be in there, along with Evolvolation; Bottles of Beer; Alien, the QlownTown version; and (one of my personal favorites) the Ash and Elmo twins. Looking at the descriptions of other strips, I've found "offbeat" to be a frequently-used word which also describes what I try to achieve. Thirty years ago, there were no offbeat strips...now they're everywhere. But only mine features clowns!

Composing the cover letter to go with these collections is always a challenge; I don't want to send out a dozen packets, then realize I left out the word "wry" or whatever word seems to communicate something distinctive I was trying to get through to the editors reading the letter.

So the ongoing struggle is always the same: get things done that aren't Drawing Cartoons. I know that the more successful the strip becomes, the less time I'll be able to dedicate to just doing that, but the alternatives are much less attractive.