I’ve still been messing around with the site. I found some more cool features and have been playing around with them. So now most of the comics have been separated into their different sections, but I’ve also added an archive where people can go through all my old cartoons. You can also now search for a specific cartoon without having to browse through hundreds of comics. I’ve also added tags so you can search the cartoons by keywords, like, I dunno, death. Quite a few things have died in my comics. Anyway, I think it’s a handy feature.
So what now? Well, I’ve got to come up with 6 new cartoons for my editor for Tuesday, so today I’ll be writing some ideas down and then over the weekend I’ll sketch a few and send them off. I’ve got 3 cartoons that I need to colour for Monday, I’ll finish those today. And then it’s back to working on Daveman. I haven’t worked on it as much as I would have liked this week, but that’s because I was playing around with the website. It’s funny, like I’ve always wanted to fix up the site but it’s such an annoying job, so I kept putting it off, but then as soon as working on Daveman gets a little tough, the website work doesn’t seem so bad. So that’s the trick to being productive, whenever there is something you really don’t want to do, start doing something that’s worse than that thing. Suddenly it doesn’t feel so bad. Like I never want to do the dishes, but as soon as I have to sit down and plan layouts, those dishes seem really important.
So yeah, I didn’t get much Daveman drawing done. I did test out a cover idea. It still needs a lot of work, but it’s an idea.
Oh and while I was going through updating the site and fixing things, I stumbled across so many cartoons that I had forgotten about. I thought maybe I could fill up the blog posts a bit by sharing some of the old stuff and telling you what I remember about making the comic. Now this is quite hard for me, I do have some memory issues after being hit by a car as a kid. Some things are a blur and some things I remember perfectly. But we’ll see how it goes.
This comic I remember well because it was the first comic I ever got paid for. I think I had only drawn 20 comics when I was asked to make this. Very Very early on, way before I ever thought about becoming a cartoonist.
So when I started making comics, I was posting on Facebook. I had created an Instagram account but I never used it. I then got an email from someone saying “Post stuff on Instagram”. Nothing else, that was the message. So I started posting there but never really looked at the app much. I noticed the app had this red dot on it, like when you have a message, but I couldn’t see where the message was. A few weeks passed and I got an email from this comedian guy saying check “bro, don’t you even read your messages?” Anyway, I went and found the message on Instagram and this Comedian guy had sent me a lot of messages asking if I would like to make comics for his Podcast and Beer magazine. I said no because I’m just doing this for fun. In truth I didn’t want to because I couldn’t draw but I didn’t want to tell him that.
Anyway, he invited me to this beer festival to meet his editor and some of the people who worked at the magazine. The editor was a real ass, like proper drunk mess. Reminded me of my dad. Anyway, they wanted me to make comics for their magazine which would come out 4 times a year. Now, I don’t like beer and I don’t drink. I’m not against drinking, I just don’t enjoy it. I also don’t like the smell of beer because it reminds me of my dad. I didn’t mind making cartoons about beer, but they wanted to pay me in beer. I didn’t want that, but the other problem, and this was why I was ok to turn it down, the comedian guy wanted to write the comics and then have me draw them. Now I’m sure you can see by this comic, I couldn’t draw. The only reason my cartoons were popular was because they were funny or had a twist, it definitely wasn’t because of the drawings. Also, I was drawing comics because I wanted to make comics, I had no intention of becoming a cartoonist, and at the time, drawing someone else’s idea sounded like the worst thing in the world to me.
So this comic was the first comic I was asked to make, and the first comic I got paid for. I wasn’t paid in money, they gave me tickets to a beer festival and free beers for my friends and a Fanta for me. I may have also received a chocolate.
Anyway, that’s the story of that comic. I’ll be back next week with another old cartoon next week.
Have a good weekend!
