Full cartoon at The Nib!
My first seven jobs
It’s a hashtag that’s trending on Twitter, but I find it hard to capture my own experiences in #140. I might be forgetting a couple here.
Hamburger cook. Worked the lunch shift at a local Arkansas fast food place which featured charcoal-grilled burgers. Unfortunately they were too cheap to have me come in early enough to get the grill up to an appropriate heat, so there were always more angry customers than cooked burgers. Lasted a few months at that one. Apologies to anyone who was served an undercooked burger, I did the best I could under the circumstances.
Dairy Queen server. As it turns out, it is definitely possible to get tired of free ice cream.
Busboy at Perkins Cake and Steak in Coralville, Iowa. By the end of a shift, I was literally covered in other people’s leftovers. Also, many amusing jokes were frequently made regarding my last name.
The late lamented Iowa Theatre. It was Iowa City’s art house, back in the days before VCR, let alone Netflix. Started there in the concession stand, worked my way up to doorman. I loved that job, in contrast to my previous three.
Paste up artist, writer, general gopher, The Comic Times. A short-lived startup magazine in New York City, launched by a comic shop owner hoping to compete with the Comics Journal. I was 19 and fresh off the Greyhound bus, had a friend who worked there. Worked out of an office down on lower Broadway, went to press conferences at Marvel and DC, met a lot of artists and writers and comics industry people (including Tom Orzechowski, who later later let me sleep on his couch when I moved to San Francisco, and Dean Mullaney, who recently connected me with my new publisher, IDW). It was a pretty great job, but unfortunately the magazine only lasted a handful of issues.
Picture framer, in the back of the old Sam Flax down on Park Row. I once framed a document that had been signed by Abraham Lincoln.
Diazo operator. This was a machine that developed architectural blueprints using some toxic brew of chemicals including ammonia. I literally sat there eight hours a day (or night–I often had to work the late, late shift) feeding large sheets of blueprint paper into this foul machine, then went home with paper cuts all over my hands and the stink of ammonia caught in the back of my throat.
After that: copy shop employee (where the earliest, collage-centric versions of This Modern World were created), art supply store clerk, word processor/temp, rock and roll t-shirt layout artist, magazine paste-up person, bookstore window display artist, and since about 1990, full time cartoonist.
A small request
I used to earn a little extra cash as an Amazon associate — if you buy something you were going to buy anyway, but do it through this site, I make a percentage. They cut me off for awhile because they were battling with my home state of Connecticut about whether or not they would have to pay taxes. They lost that one, and I’m eligible again for the FREE MONEY, and re-applied a few months ago. However they’ve just informed me that if I don’t start actually using the links, they’ll cut me off again. So if you’re planning to buy any small thing from Amazon, if you do it through this link
RNC recap
Some pretty awesome news
As you know if you’ve been following me on Twitter or even on this rarely-updated blog, I had a very successful Kickstarter last summer. Thanks to the support of my backers, I was able to raise the money to publish a two-volume hardcover compilation of All the Cartoons. We met our initial goal within 24 hours, and achieved every stretch goal as well (and I’ve got the tattoo to prove it). Clocking in at over a thousand pages and weighing about fifteen pounds, this was definitely the most unlikely book I’ve ever put out.
The books were printed and distributed to the KS backers, with a relatively small stock available on my online store at TopatoCo. We still have some available there, but probably not for much longer — I’m not sure of exact numbers at the moment, due to some accounting and distribution mishaps that they’re still sorting out at the warehouse, but it’s safe to say there are fewer than 100 copies left.
So that would have pretty much been the end of the story for 25 Years of Tomorrow. And it would have been a great story — my dream project made real in the world thanks to my readers! — but that would have been it. If you didn’t get the books while they were available, there weren’t going to be any more.
Except that’s when I was approached by the highly regarded comics publisher IDW, who were interested in putting out a second printing of TMW25, and distributing it in bookstores and comic book shops. So not only did I manage to make these these books real in the world — now their lifespan will be extended, and they’ll reach a wider audience than I had any hope of ever reaching through the KS alone.
(The second edition will be the essentially the same as the first, though without the various bonus inserts — those are going to remain exclusive to my initial backers. The remaining stock at TopatoCo does still include the diecut cardstock DIY Sparkymobile, so if you want one of those, act quickly.)
On top of this, IDW asked if they could simultaneously publish a new trade paperback collection of the last three years worth of strips. I thought it was a great idea to make this material available to readers who might not have the desire or the budget to shell out more than $70 for the hardcover set. That compilation, Crazy is the New Normal, should be out around October.
I was wandering in the publishing wilderness for several years. I had a couple unfortunate experiences with publishers who did some damage to my sales record, which is something new publishers consider when they’re thinking about taking you on. There also seemed to be a widespread consensus that no one was interested in cartoon compilations in the internet age. There was certainly no one who would have published the massive TMW25 set prior to the Kickstarter. The success of that campaign really turned everything around. IDW is a fantastic publisher, widely known for the quality of their books. They’ve been amazing to work with so far — when I was in San Francisco in February, my new editor took a day off to fly up from San Diego, just to hang out for the day so that we’d have a chance to know each other beyond email and phone. That’s a good way to do business. I’m really excited to have them publishing my books, and honestly, I owe it all to those of you who backed the Kickstarter with such enthusiasm.