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Here's a week of strips from Wabbit, the weekly newspaper comic that I wrote a whole bunch of, but never got around to drawing them. So far. This is one of the zillion unfinished projects that I had to choose between when I decided to get serious about a project and finally chose Runaway Comic.

My logic was thus:

chances of getting Wabbit in enough newspapers to succeed - slim

chances of getting Runaway Comic published - fat

deadline pressure of daily comic - enormous

deadline pressure of alternative comic book - not too bad

Wabbit is copyright 2006 Mark Martin! I mean it now!
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question #5 (cont'd from this)

what are some of your favorite comic books?

MAD, Panic, Raggedy Ann & Andy, Eightball, Frank, Tales of Toad, Binky Brown, POGO, Punch & Judy, Melvin Monster, Not Brand Ecch, and all of the hundreds I don't have time to list.

3 comments:

eeTeeD said...

go out and buy 3 different newspapers. open them to the comics section and take a good look at the comic strips.
one thing you will notice is that there are no funny animal comic strips. you will see strips about animals like snoopy and Garfield, but no strips with anthropomorphic characters.
your chances of getting a funny animal comic strip published are zero. no matter how good it is.
the people who run the comic strip industry are perhaps the most evil and most stupid of all three branches of the cartoon industry (comic books and animation being the other two branches). every year the comic strip industry gets tens of thousands of comic strip submissions, but each year under one hundred new comic strips are debuted.
the comic strip editors search for comic strips that will appeal to certain GROUPS of people. dog lovers, cat lovers, single moms, typical middle class families, grandparents, office workers, etc. therefore if you want a chance to get a comic strip published it MUST appeal to a certain group of people, specifically a group of people with large amounts of disposable income.
the comic strip editors look at their comic strips and see which have the lowest sales. they also look at charts and hope to find some group of people that their strips aren’t targeting. so if their chris the cat strip is not doing as well as garfield, they might decide it’s time to try a new cat strip, or if they find out that tv show american idol is earning 12 billion dollars per year and the bulk of those profits are from single white females ages 15-27, they will look through their submissions and use their INCREDIBLE editorial talents to chose a strip that will also appeal to this group.
further, since the inception of the comic strip, newspapers and comic strip syndicates have been destroying this unique form of art. there was a time when comic strips were given 1/2 of a newspaper page for the daily strip, and a full page for the color sunday strip. later this was cut down to 1/4 page for daily, and 1/2 page for sunday. today’s comic strips are so small in size that it is impossible to create anything of artistic worth within them.
when a person comes along who is able to create something of worth within these ridiculous restrictions, the syndicates not only refuse to give their work support, but actively interfere and destroy the work. two major examples of this are contemporary comic strips “top of the world” and “liberty meadows”. perhaps the 2 best NEW comic strips published in the past 10 years. please note that both are no longer published.
take a good look at CATHY, and at ZIGGY. both of these strips are utter garbage. do you honestly believe that either strip would be published without their syndicates putting major backing behind them? tom wilson (of ziggy) was once art director of a major greeting card company. he was able to make important connections that helped him get a nice juicy piece of the comic strip pie. i have no idea how cathy guiseweite got cathy published. i can guess, but discretion prevents me from sharing my guess.
perhaps my biggest question is WHY would you ever want to get involved in the comic strip industry? as i said earlier, “...he people who run the comic strip industry are perhaps the most evil and most stupid of all three branches of the cartoon industry...” why would you want to prostitute your work just to make these evil pimps rich? there are people out there today in 2006 earning as little as $50 per comic strip. can you live on that? can you live with yourself supporting an industry who treats its creators like that? if you want to do comic strips fine, but please don’t offer them to the comic strip industry.

Mark Martin said...

eeTeed, take the Zoloft!

I like Mutts.
I liked Calvin & Hobbes.
I would be happy and fulfilled and not feel like a dirty rotten prostitute if I got rich doing something decent.
That is why I do not entirely share your dismal outlook.
I only agree with you that the odds are overwhelming.

slatts said...

oh, I remember Wabbit!

I thought it was funny and something I would really enjoy seeing in my daily read...

but reasons number one and three seemed like they might "change your mind" when push came to shove...