Somebody mentioned to me recently that my Wikipedia entry is not exactly up-to-date and boy were they right — judging from my Wiki page, my career stopped in 2009 and before that mostly consisted of some deals that fell through. My understanding is that it’s poor form to edit your own entry, but if anyone wants to take it on, in whole or part, here’s a (not so) short list of omissions and errors:
(UPDATE: continues below the fold. Many of these suggestions have been incorporated; the ones that haven’t are marked in boldface.)
— am listed as comics curator for Daily Kos. In reality, I stepped back from day-to-day operations several years ago and am currently just a contributor.
— says I run on CREDO comics section, which hasn’t existed in a decade, and has no mention of running each week on The Nation, The Nib, Truthout and Alternet.
— no mention in Awards section first place AAN award for cartooning in 2015
— no mention in Awards section of being a Pulitzer finalist in 2015 (Pulitzer site link here)
— no mention in Awards section of 2015 Society of Illustrators Silver Medal
— paper count “as of 2006” could be updated to “appears in approximately 80 papers as of 2015” (using the most recent cite that I can find that’s probably acceptable to the Wiki guardians, here.)
— mentions the online animated series but no link to the actual animations, here.
— Entire career section basically consists of (1) the fact that I ran in US News for 6 months in 1998, (2) once worked on a movie idea with Michael Moore (the entry could definitely lose that long, irrelevant quote from me about a 16 year old project that didn’t get made), (3) had a bit on Keith Olberman’s old show once, and (4) got dropped by Village Voice Media in 2009. All of these things happened, of course, but it’s a strange way to summarize a career lasting a quarter century and going strong. And the Pearl Jam collaboration seems slightly buried, given what a high-profile experience that was.
A few more points that an actual career summary might include:
— early versions of TMW first appeared in Processed World in the mid 1980s.
— began running in the SF Examiner (on the op-ed page and in the Sunday supplement Image magazine) in 1991.
— Subsequently moved the cartoon to the SF Bay Guardian where it ran until the paper folded in October 2015.
— no mention in career section of the newsmaking Kickstarter campaign that raised the initial $87K goal in 24 hours and eventually landed at a bit over $310K (original Kickstarter page here, two Virtual Memory podcasts here and here)
— no mention of last year’s successful campaign to crowdfund an Italian compilation
— no mention of my current publishing deal with IDW, or the fact that they are publishing a second edition of my Kickstarter career retrospective, which will be available soon in bookstores.
— no mention of Sparky’s List subscription service, founded in 2012.
— no external link to Twitter account.
— I’m not sure why there’s a “further reading†section whose sole entry is an out of print anthology from 2002. This doesn’t seem to be a standard part of the Wikipedia format, and since the book is unavailable and not online, adds nothing to the entry.
UPDATE: many thanks to people who have helped update the page — looks like many (but not all) of these changes are starting to show up. Given that the Wikipedia entry is one of the first things that shows up in a Google search, it’s nice to have remotely close to accurate there.