As a child, I learned to read from comic strips. Peanuts being the original and lasting favorite. I loved the marriage of words and pictures. The simplicity of few lines creating an emotion, whether it was sadness or laughter. I was hooked at an early age. I read everything I could on the man who created the strip, Charles Schulz, and eventually expanded the strips I read and the creators I admired. I knew as early as 5-years-old that I wanted to be a syndicated cartoonist.
In high school and college I tried to put together strip packages to send off to syndicates to have my own strip in the paper. To be honest, most were pedestrian and formulaic. I was imitating what had come before. I was still learning and, of course, each submission was rejected.
As I wrote previously, the comic, Desperate Times, almost made it to the top, but fell a bit short at the end. But then an interesting thing happened.
As I looked at the marketplace, newspapers were dying. The dream job I had always wanted seemed to no longer be a viable option. I still wanted to do a strip…if nothing else, for my own sanity, my own creative outlet. That’s when I considered what was called a “webcomic.” A number of people I knew were offering up their comic strip online for free. The model included advertising on the page and selling products based on the strip for loyal readers and to earn a living for the creator. The best part is you weren’t bound by newspaper or syndicate rules. You could do anything you wanted.
So, what did I do? I did a very vanilla family-friendly comic strip that tried to appeal to everyone and offend no one. Not the best move.
It was about a boy Sherman who lived at home with his parents, mean sister and 2 aliens. In all honesty, I was repeating what Schulz did. He started off rather simply and figured out the characters as he went. I thought I had a base I could jump off of and also build on. I would filter my thoughts and concerns in my life in this strip. Sometimes in a very obvious way, sometimes not. But I would act like this was a job. I would come out with a strip every weekday no matter what.
While I wasn’t making any money doing this, it did help me. There’s an old saying that if you do something every day, you can’t help but get better and I was improving. My writing improves, my cartooning improved. I was enjoying the world I was building. The only issue was, I had paying work I needed to do and a family to take care of, so the strip was always the one thing left to suffer. I wound up working on it at night or weekends not taking enough time to write, so I didn’t rewrite or edit much and I think the strip suffered for it.
I wasn’t getting a lot of views, either. Maybe it was the mainstream style of the strip or maybe it was bad. I think, in the end, it was something that I figured out later. Online there is no real wide-reaching entertainment. Everything is atomized. The best online strips find a very specific market or demographic and then sink deep into that. Like, a “divorced mother who runs marathons and loves wine.” You can’t reach everyone with this type of entertainment, but I tried by being as generic as possible.
But then I introduced a new character. Mort.
I was hitting my midlife crisis and thinking about death a lot. So, that came out in the strip. I introduced a full-size grim reaper into the strip, but found it hard to draw the size differences in characters without it looking awkward, so I shrunk him. And…the strip started to take off. It seems a lot of other people found Death to be an interesting subject and character. The numbers went up and people started asking for a printed collection of the strip.
That’s when everything went wrong.
I did a week’s worth of strips where the alien character, Zort, creates Mort plushies. Readers started asking for them. Like, a bunch. So, I decided I would start my online store. I would print up a book collection and a plushie keychain and sell them online. I did all the legwork, paid for the printing and plush creation up front, put them up online and…nothing.
All the people who said they’d buy, just didn’t. I’ve read a statistic that 10% of readers will actually buy something from an online creator, and that was my case. So, I would up having a lot of leftover product. I still have a bunch of plushies around here.
Fun, side story. I took the books and plushies to the New York Comic Con one year to sell at my table. It was Kids Day and a father came walking by with a kid in a stroller. He picked up the plush and asked what it was. My friend told him it was the living embodiment of death in plush form. The man got upset and started cursing at me for offering that on Kids Day…in front of his kid. I was bad for selling this plush, but he was using every 4-letter word in front of his kid. Then a cosplayer wearing a VERY revealing costume came walking by and he started ogling her and saying some really creepy stuff. So much for Kids Day.
Needless to say, I kept the strip going because it was a great outlet for me and it was my own form of therapy. What was an interesting lesson to me was that I offered the books for $10, then a year later offered a PDF version of that book online for $2 and it sold more than the printed version and paid off the printing costs. Weird.
But, as time went on, my paying work was increasing and I had less and less time for Sherman and crew and decided to pull the plug. I figured some day I’d get back to it and I’d really like to. I read the old strips and, with years of distance, I actually enjoy them. But if I were to go back, I would definitely push boundaries, pick a specific demographic and dig deep instead of wide.
I’ve since posted a link to the entire series as a PDF for free if anyone wants to read it. Just click this LINK to get it.
One of the other things I started doing at the time that took me away from Sherman was a book I worked on with my pal, Nate Cosby, called Cow Boy.
But that’s a story for another time.