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Kennedy said, but that has not stopped aspiring cartoonists from sending him their efforts, good and bad. This absence of competition for popular comics among newspapers has kept prices low, Mr. Today, there are fewer than a dozen major cities with competing dailies, so papers are both less inclined to bid up the cost of a strip, since they are unlikely to be flanked with a new strip by the competition, or to risk reader wrath by dropping a comic to make room for a new one. In the days when most cities had several competing dailies, syndicators could drive up the fee of a popular comic. 18 and has already been sold to 10 papers, including The Detroit Free Press and The Denver Post.įinding papers to buy a new strip is getting harder and harder to do, syndicators say. ''The response I got from my friends amazed me, and since I wasn't really satisfied with my advertising job, I started sending out rough outlines to the syndicates,'' Mr.
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Hersh got into cartooning when he was married three years ago and drew a series of cartoons depicting his courtship and packaged them as wedding favors, with chewing gum, like baseball cards. ''Good evening, ma'am, I'm from Greenpeace,'' says the man at the door in one example. Larson's gag about Joy, her unmarried friend Verla, her husband Burl and their ''sophisticated'' - meaning, works in an office - daughter Patty. Appearing in print signals readers that a strip has passed some kind of editorial muster, which is what the syndicate hopes sales of ''The Dinette Set'' will bring to Mrs.
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''One best-selling calendar will make more money than all of the papers pay for the comic in a year, but it is the newspapers that give you legitimacy,'' Mr. ''But we can use words on line that we can't use in a newspaper.''įor a comic to make the leap from artist's daydream to the big time, it first has to make it to the daily papers. Williams said of the subjects he and his fellow on-line cartoonists use. ''Most of us don't take it real far we mostly stay pretty mainstream,'' Mr. Like so many others, he saw his cartoons - they seem to involve a lot of insects - repeatedly rejected by the syndicates before he brought them onto the Internet, where he says he at least gets more freedom to write. ''I think electronic cartoon publishing will get a lot bigger, but I don't think we'll ever make as much money as newspaper cartoonists do,'' Mr. Schulz on Forbes Magazine's list of the richest people in the entertainment industry, behind the rock group Kiss, but ahead of Bill Cosby and John Travolta. A strip that sells at a typical rate of about $20 a week per newspaper to as few as 300 papers, a fairly low number, considering that the strips are marketed worldwide, stands to earn its creator more than $200,000 a year, while ''Garfield'' has made Jim Davis very wealthy, and ''Peanuts'' has put Charles M. Half of these earnings come back to the cartoonists, who do not have to be very popular to make a very comfortable living. ''Comic strips pay the bills for syndication companies, because comics can be developed into other properties,'' said Lee Salem, vice president and editorial director for Universal Press Syndicate, which carries heavyweights like ''Doonesbury,'' ''Cathy'' and ''Garfield.'' ''Nobody ever bought a lunch box with a Bill Buckley column on it.'' or Abigail Van Buren, are far better known than, say, Bud Grace, the creator of the successful ''Ernie'' strip, or Jim Meddick, who does ''Robotman.'' This despite the fact that columnists nearly always occupy more prestigious spaces closer to the front of the daily paper, and their authors, like William F. Money from the 255 daily strips now in syndication dwarfs the revenues from their other, better known and more distinguished political columnists, personal advice, and how-to features. Syndicates do not release income figures from the sales, but they make it plain that a great deal of money is at stake in these offerings.