Arties announce and promote different departments on the website for an arts association or coalition or something like that in Birmingham Alabama. I lost the link. Benny can give us more info later, when the Arties are all online. There's also an Artie for THEATER, DANCE and MUSIC. Drawn by me, art directed by Benny - it's a real Benny/Pumpie Production! I can't wait to get my FREE ARTIE T-SHIRT hint hint!
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I have a question: How many people actually give a flip about labels? How many times have you actually used them, not just here but on any blog? I'm probably going to stop using them except for something that people may actually want to see as a group, like BLOGOPERA (which will return, you just wait and see!)
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15 comments:
Wow, Pumpie! Artie looks even better "online" than he does on paper or just plain ole "screen"!
Actually, Gomer. . .
I had to say that, Lou Ann Poovie style.
Actually, Pumpie, the Arties in the different disciplines are going to rotate through the section. Artie is to promote and direct users to the section of the activeculture.info site that hooks up people with artists, artists with suppliers, artists with arts companies and organizations, etc. It's a directory. But "directory" sounded so, well, so. . .BOOO---RRRR--IINNNGGGGG!
So I came up with "Ask Artie" and he'll hook you up!
By the way, I was rereading Runaway 3 this morning in g-torium South, and am yearning for more on the Monty story.
As are the other fans out there.
So whaddya gonna do?
Arties look good!
BTW, I think labels can be pretty helpful and/or interesting when they've been implemented correctly and consistently. However, on this blog they haven't been. You've just been using silly, random words or phrases that don't actually help categorize the content of the blog entry. Which is fine if that's the intent, but if you're wondering if anyone is going to find it helpful, chances are they won't.
For example, of all the blog entries where you've mentioned Brigham Martin or shown his art, there's only one single label with his name. So, in the future, if someone wanted to see how his art has improved over the years, clicking on his label will yield very incomplete results.
My anal advice when using labels would be to come up with a list of keywords important to you and the intent of this blog and use them whenever they come up in an entry, and also any people's names that you talk about.
Or don't use them at all, whichever works for you. Neither choice means the end of the world.
I, too, ache for more Monty -- but can also relate in spades to Mark's quandry over working in the damned industry, such as it is. Our generation (Mark and I are, roughly, in the same generation of cartoonists) are basically between generational shifts: our work is neither fish nor fowl, retro nor new, and I vividly recall when I witnessed an earlier generation go through the same career/life phase.
Nice as Mark was about it, Fantagraphics dropped the ball completely on promoting or even adequately handling RUNAWAY. There's no upside to this kind of situation for the cartoonist, save to do what Mark has decided to do -- apply his energies to paying work, and to what he loves that doesn't pay. Too bad his own comics series isn't in that equation, but that ain't Mark's fault (not that you were saying it was, Ben!). Sigh...
Fantagraphics has a history at being lousy at promoting certain comics. When I was there (admittedly over a decade ago), the promotions guy was this Seattle grunge rock promoter / punk art gallery curator. I can remember him expressing disdain for the fact that Fantagraphics chose to publish things like the Jules Feiffer collections, and he pretty strongly implied that he basically did nothing to promote such books because he didn't believe in them, he thought they were "square." Even though the company is relatively small, it seems like there has been (at least when I was there this was the case) a lack of follow-through between Gary or Kim choosing to publish certain quirky projects and them not bothering to convince the promotions department to believe in and fully push those products. A lot of things just seem to have been left to die on the vine, with certain comics being published that no one except the guy who signed the contract being aware of or interested in the existence of certain projects.
As for the labeling issue, I have used labels on other blogs from time to time. The only blogs I use them on, though, are blogs by people I'm not interested in personally that cover several different media, if I'm looking for specific information, like the contents of a specific episode of a podcast.
Did my long-ass comment about labeling fall through a hole in the blogosphere?
Your long-ass comment just got detoured in bloggerland. Thanks for the input on labels. I knew the answer. I'm not sure why I throw stuff like that out there. At the time it hits me I'm thinking "Hey what do you guys think?" but duh, what would anybody think? Of course my labels are useless.
I started playing around with them, seeing if they made sense. It doesn't make sense to me to just throw a bunch of labels on every post based on the content of the post. It makes sense to me to have categories and groups, and a limited number of them.
Still pondering. It doesn't surprise me that the content of my blog is random and often uncatalogable (is that a word?) but it DOES surprise me how often a post can be labeled "male sweat"
i ignore the labels.
the arties are cute, but i would have liked them to be "bennies".
i agree with benny. i also want to see more of toady boy, and i've also told you that in e-mail. don't let a small setback kill your momentum.
Speaking of which, isn't that male sweat coming off of the second Artie?
Yeah, that is something I've heard that Fantagraphics is notorious for not doing. My old publisher from Alternative Comics always said that he could have done a better job promoting Weisman, when Weisman jumped ship for Fantagraphics.
The thing is, most of my friends who do comics do hopelesslessly uncommercial ones, and the few to be picked up by Fantagraphics just thank their lucky gumdrops. Fantagraphics has serious cache among the comics snoberatzi. I think some people would rather be published by Fantagraphics and be poorly promoted, than be published by Slave Labor and have their books sell modestly well. (for the unschooled, Slave Labor a publishing operation that prints a large volume of black and white comics that don't get a lot of critical attention--often justly) It's a prestige thing. Not that that makes up entirely for their uneven PR.
Unfortunately I don't think Mark really had much to benefit from the association. Runaway was a hard book to promote because it's not clear who to promote it to.
But this has pretty much already been mulled over and talked into the ground at this point...
Anyway, let me share some more freelance fun! I've entered into the exciting world of Sports pins! A recent e-mail:
Jed,
Not really what I was looking for. This is very....flat looking, and the panther doesn't really look like a panther to me, more like a vampire lama! (no offense).
Ahhh, sweet freelance!
The critic could have at least spelled "llama" correctly.
I feel your pain, Jed. I work for someone who starts most of his emails to me with "This is not exactly what I was envisioning..."
First they tell you to do whatever you want, then suddenly you're expected to be a friggin mind reader.
What's even worse is when they tell you exactly what they want, and you do exactly that, and then they say "Oh, yeah, well, that's what I said, but not what I saw in my mind." My boss just said that to me regarding our new product website. I now have a hole in my cheek where I bit through it. Oy.
Then again, I get paid either way, so maybe it's not worse.
I've been getting a lot of this stuff lately from responding to Craigslist ads, and some of it HAS been working out, like the guy who told me after I gave him the finished art, "looks like we're well on our way, just a few changes--I'd like you to do it in a different style." But hey, he PAID for it, and is going to PAY for another finish! So, you know, life's not all bad. I don't mind so much if you're going to pay for being unreasonable.
The "lama" guy is just a dick though. That's a bridge I'd like to set serious flame to, so I think I might just tell him about his spelling error.
Oh, another favorite: "I like it, but I'm not in LOVE with it". This was a wedding reception invitation for a very wealthy newlywed who was going to invite 200 of her closest friends to a resort she rented out in Caba (sub-contracted through a designer so I didn't actually have to talk to her thank god). "Like" seemed to me to be be good enough. I wasn't aware that my illustration was supposed to invoke amorosity, and if I knew this trick, I think I would've gotten laid a lot more in art school. This also gives new meaning to the jibe, "if you love it so much, why don't you marry it!" Or something.
There's this thing that I see over and over again in these ads with the same frequency that people say, "here-we-go" before the rollercoaster starts. It's called "All I need is for someone to bring it to life!" This might be prefaced by, "I've got it all in my head, but" or "I know it's going to be really sucessful, but I haven't got any artistic talent, and", or just, "I've written a childrens book/have an idea for a line of t-shirts/I've written a comic book, but".
So I've learned that no matter what it is, if they want you to "bring it to life" it's an instant sign of flakiness even if they otherwise sound legit. Even if they're offering good money. If someone wants you to "bring it to life", run. It will never be worth it.
And everytime I read, "can't pay anything now, but you'll be welcome to a share of the profits" I can't think of anything more appealing.
My favorite question for a client to ask is, "Do YOU like it?"
And of course you want to answer, "No, it's the furthest turd I could pull from my colon, but I thought YOU might like it."
Ah, the agonies of freelance cartooning. I loathe it, by and large, and have some pip tales of clients treating one like a pair of hands sans a brain, servicing a 'vision' that isn't ever articulated. Once one is being treated like a pair of hands, it's nixville for me.
I use the labels on my blog for my own reference. In building the website, it's making it easier to find and archive the few things posted worth saving. But then again, I tend to be less anecdotal and more subject-driven day to day, treating my blog like my personal zine. Just saying.
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