Jeff Zugale: Cartoonists... Your Product is Worthless, and I Can Prove It

This post was kindly submitted by Jeff Zugale.

Now that I have your attention...

Let me preface this by letting you know that I’m a cartoonist and professional illustrator, making my entire living from making artwork for various clients in games, television, film, animation, advertising, and other industries that hire commercial artists. Artwork is, in fact, valuable, and a professional artist can make a nice living at it.

When I say “worthless,” I’m talking about a specific context and case here, concerning cartooning and comic strips, which until the advent of the Web were primarily published in newspapers and magazines. For a long time, both syndicated and independent strip and political cartoonists were able to make a pretty good living, but we’ve all heard what’s been going on recently. Newspapers are losing circulation or closing entirely, syndicated cartoonists are seeing major drops in their incomes, political cartoonists are being laid off left and right.

All of these cartoonists are finding it very difficult to make a living with their cartoons on the Internet. Some are trying to sell cartoons of various types directly to their reading audiences, either piecemeal or via subscriptions or smartphone and e-reader apps, and finding it far more difficult than expected.

Many express dismay that the readers don’t seem to want to pay for their cartoons anymore, and don’t understand it. Weren’t they paying to read them before? Why don’t they want to pay now? There’s a lot of blame being thrown at the Internet, at Apple Computer, and at stingy readers who don’t understand the value of art.

There’s been endless arguing for years about the “webcomics business model” vs. the “print publishing business model,” about giving a comic strip away for free vs. people paying for it. We’re all tired of it, aren’t we? You’d think there’d be some way to settle it, wouldn’t you?

With this article, I intend to show using hard numbers that the two “opposing” business models are not so different as most people think; that it’s time to stop wasting all that energy arguing; that there are clear and definitive answers that should quell all debate, and that these answers have been right there in front of everyone’s faces the whole time. I’m then going to offer some thoughts on what cartoonists can do about it now and in the future.

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