Freelancing in the Bighouse

(Big apologies to those who stopped by this blog in recent weeks only to find it stagnant. Due to legal minutia with my snowman book, juicy details I unfortunately cannot share publicly which involve a late Beatle and a certain female superhero, I'm not kidding, I’ve been out of commission the past two weeks. )

Over the next couple of weeks I will post a multi-part series on freelancing and how prison can help. In the meantime, I wanted to mention that there have been break-outs where jailbirds greased their naked bodies from head to toe and squeezed through the cell bars to escape. This is a real story (and not a Paris Hilton video).

Back to work…unfortunately. For more me I am on page 68 in the current issue of The New Yorker and will be in the sports section of this Sunday’s NY Times. For more stamps go here. Thanks.

One last item. I have been receiving many requests asking where one can learn more about moist towelettes. A good place to start is The Moist Towelette Museum. In all due respect, I won't be spending more time on this subject or personal hygiene...on this blog anyway.

Today's Homework

Everyone gets cornered at family and friends gatherings and subjected to jokes but when someone finds out what I do for a living all of a sudden it becomes The Last Comic Standing.

But I do enjoy the occassional one word joke and it's usually bearable enough to get through. None of this, "So a rabbi, a foot-massanger and a penguin go into a bar" stuff. No, the one word joke gets straight to the punch. The good people of The Trinidadian Ministry of Computers tell a good one word joke with the help of visual aids. All you need to do is type in the word sauerkraut.

The only other one word jokes I know is apparatus and (the much less funny) hibachi (as in, My ass feels like a hibachi.). Yak is not a one word joke.

Lawyers, Accountants and Everyone Else

This new post is in response to a comment left on the last;

That's exactly right. The expenses are mine to pay for, which have amounted to about $8,000 if you include photo rights. My publisher has a legal department that's even hard to reach by phone nevermind addressing some of the problems I faced (for a newcomer, no less).

Thank you, cartoonist Mike Lynch, for sending me your link to your post on Will Eisner. Of course your blog I visit regularly (as I continue to learn how to be a gag cartoonist). That snowwoman was pretty interesting!

Will Eisner, of course, is the godfather of graphic novels, and as his website states "before Crumb, before American Splendor." (I have been working on another book in secret on the side, a graphic novel called The Sea Below Us, a comedy about the horrors of Arctic exploration in the 18th century which at the same time tells the story of global warming today. When I started that project 6 years ago I referred to the books by Will Eisner as a standard and tried to digest his ways and learn from it.)

All Things Must Pass...Legal

The past two weeks have been spent obtaining permission rights to the over twenty quotes used in my book (The History of the Snowman). I've heard from alot of interesting people like the renown P. K. Page, who graciously helped and granted me permission to use her snowman poem. "The book sounds fascinating," the 91 yr-old Canadian poet wrote me in an e-mail, a common sentiment I got from people...unless they were dead. That includes the following group, made up of some of the world's most important writers: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Dylan Thomas, Kenneth Koch, Wallace Stevens, George Santayana, and Michael Gold. I didn't receive any e-mails from them but I have already received clearance through their family and/or publisher.

The costs? One publisher wanted $50 for a two-line excerpt from their book. Everyone wanted free copies. One family estate wanted a trade; a quote for an original drawing of mine of their famous relative.

I'm awaiting response from Jack Handey (Deep Thoughts, Saturday Night Live) and George Harrison's widow and estate. Even to use one lyric from Harrison's Here Comes the Sun requires a contract. All things must pass legal.

Frantic Pace

Haven't had a break to write – things have been a bit frantic (working on a rewrite on my snowman book and labor intensive jobs from Sports Illustrated, Consumer Reports, and Trader). But the big time consumer has been relearning to draw – without the computer. That's going horrible because I was so used to being able to type command + Z to undo something, allowing me previously to draw with reckless abandon. One can argue no great artists ever used a Wacom tablet. Oh well.

New Yorker Cartoonist

Above is my first official New Yorker cartoon reject.

There was a great article recently in The New York Times by New Yorker cartoonist Caroline H. Dworin which triggered my interest in trying to get into the New Yorker. I've since had a chance to meet this writer/cartoonist and thank her in person for this new career path. There's an interesting interview with Sam Gross and Matthew Diffee online. Sam Gross is the cartoonist I'm indebted to for getting me started doing gag cartoons (as of last week). Matthew Diffee is a young cartoonist who came out with the best-selling book The Rejected Collection (incidentally, published by the same people currently working on my book). I actually did the same idea five years earlier in Details magazine.

The Newest Freelancer

Having finished the art production of my upcoming book two weeks ago, I was able to return to other "interests": cartooning, restoring friendships, the Lacawac Sanctuary (where I am now in charge the old Lodge's restoration. Last week; lighting.) and this blog.

I decided to try gag cartoons and hit the pavement. I went to The New Yorker first (a couple of days ago) and it was pointed out by the editor how much I did wrong in my submissions – mainly executing the cartoons on the computer. Nevertheless, luckily, they bought a cartoon of mine and I will be meeting with them weekly to pitch more. But I will have to start drawing with a pen on paper...for the first time in over five years! (Pretty pathetic for an artist to say.)

Like most "readers," I was a big fan of Kurt Vonnegut, who just passed away. In light of the fact that I recently made a statement at my local town meeting in protest to the building of a super McMansion next door to me, here is a far more interesting statement Kurt Vonnegut gave in 1998 at a Southampton town meeting to stop a super McMansion going up next to him;

"I'm a novelist. I have lived in a house in Sagaponack for twenty-two years. The house appears on the map in 1739. I restored the house. When I moved here, I had no idea how pliable the town government was. And how humorless, that it would look at a plan for a dwelling this huge, just visually, obviously not a one-family house and call it a one-family house. It will destroy Sagaponack for me, where I have worked and lived very happily. It will cut off use of the waterfront. Such an enormous establishment does not belong between us and the water. And so I'll be leaving. Thank you. One more thing. I'm not a human being. I'm a kangaroo."