Thank you to everyone who has already contributed! I’ll be in touch soon about your sketches and other schwag.
Someone emailed me with a good question: If I can’t make enough money drawing cartoons and writing columns to earn a living, why should anyone support you? It’s a valid question.
The simple answer to a complicated question is: This is the reality under neo-feudalism. Old media gatekeepers are no longer willing or able to compensate content providers. But the Internet brings our content to more people than ever before. In many ways, this is positive and democratizing. It used to be that you couldn’t see my cartoons unless your local newspaper carried it. And even they didn’t run all of them.
The old gatekeepers sucked. Not only did they exclude a lot of good content for political and judgment reasons, they weren’t very good at knowing what people wanted to read. So let’s not mourn them.
Now all the money is going to aggregators like Arianna Huffington. So if you like a cartoonist, a band, a poet or whatever, you don’t have to spend more money than you did in the old days to support them (by buying concert tix, magazines, T-shirts, etc.). You actually spend less, and you can direct your donations directly to the creators you like best. It’s going to be better in the long run.
First, however, we have to get used to shelling out for art in a different, more direct way. Otherwise the artists we care about will be forced to quit. That’s simple economic reality.
Anyway, if you’re game for donating, please do so! I actually lowballed this funraiser since I have no friggin’ idea how I’m going to buy Photoshop…can’t use GIMP since it doesn’t allow CMYK…
