Studies of Comic Strips

Sam the Reader

I had this piece of Bristol board sitting on my drawing board and it was begging for ink.
So I decided to just draw on it and see what happened ... no planning, just making up as I went along.
It was fun.

Ink on bristol board

Calvin and (Steve) Jobs

Hat tip to Daily Cartoonist and Gizmodo and MAD Magazine.

Coloring Daily Comic Strips

Lots of differing opinions among cartoonists about whether daily comic strips should be colored.

The cartoonist gets paid no more for the extra work. If they want any control over how their work looks, they take on the extra work anyway.

Reed-Brennan, the main proponent of colored dailies, used to advertise that color sells more papers... until Rick Kirkman (Baby Blues) called them on it and they had no evidence for the claim. R-B does charge newspapers extra for colorized dailies, though... a hundred dollars a page or so.

But here's a pretty good argument against the practice:

I only allowed one paper to color Spooner, in Ft. Worth, Texas. They only ran strips in color on Wednesdays, so I compromised. I recently saw this on someone's T-bird website. State of the art printing technology!

Spooner Color Guides

I thought it might be interesting to post the color guides that I would send to American Color when I was doing Spooner. I sent instructions and they would do the actual coloring.
They charged a fair rate to do the coloring, but the fees they charge for "handling" Sunday comics files are just plain unethical. Those fees, which go into the thousands, were definitely part of my consideration when deciding whether to retire Spooner.

Spooner Boxed Set

I've been playing around with the idea of publishing a complete set of the Spooner comic strips. If nothing else, I would just like to be able to have them all in one spot so I can read them. (I'm vain that way.) I guess it would be the poor man's equivalent of the boxed sets they did for Far Side and Calvin & Hobbes. What to do with it beyond that, I'm not sure.