My fundraiser to get enough money to buy an iMac is now at $1870 out of $2500 needed. Thanks everyone!
I’ve received a few comments and emails from people who wonder if, I can’t figure out how to make a living anymore doing cartoons and columns, I shouldn’t just quit. It’s a valid question. I’ve asked it myself. I would ask it of others.
And I don’t have a good answer.
All I can say is that there are a lot of things that seem to require donations from the public in order to go on: poetry, a lot of art, NPR. These are all things that people seem to want. If they didn’t; there wouldn’t be any donations, right?
Until recently cartooning and writing was a difficult living, but a living nonetheless. Now they’re not. But people obviously still seem to want them. So the way I look at it is: I’m giving you, my readers, the option of keeping me doing this. If you don’t want to or can’t contribute to the cause, then obviously I will fail and try to go back into banking or maybe find a professorship at a college or become an Afghan warlord. That’s the free market. If I succeed, then maybe we’re showing that there’s a market for this sort of thing.
An obscure webcartoonist recently raised $1.2 million through Kickstarter. It was just a gift from his fans, a thank you for his work, since all he really needed was $2,000 or $3,000 to reprint an old book (he asked for $25,000). He didn’t even draw a single new cartoon for that $1.2 million.
If people don’t kick in for left-wing editorial cartooning but do kick in for comix about role-playing games, guess what kind of cartooning will be left online?
So I guess I do have an answer after all.
