Industry Day

Today, instead of a Visiting Artist, we had Industry Day with 4 experts from different areas of the Comics Publishing field.

Tracy Hurren is an editor at Drawn & Quarterly.
Bill Boichel runs Copacetic Comics Co.
Jennifer Linnan is a literary agent at Linnan Literary Management.
Joan Hilty runs PageTurner and teaches at SVA.

It was a very interesting panel discussion followed by Q&As. I made a chart so I could record responses to various themes under each person:

I'm not sure what I would take away from the forum... maybe that publishing has changed a lot... and social media platforms are now vital, although meeting your readers and peers on a face-to-face basis (conventions, meetings, etc.) is even more important now. And self-publishing and collaboration are very good ideas.

I had a chance to talk with Jennifer Linnan in an interview/portfolio review. We talked about contracts, creating a new identity, and she said some encouraging things about my work. She was great to talk to and it got me thinking, again, about possibly finding an agent. She, and the other panelists emphasized the fact that cartoonists are not good at everything that is necessary to run a business AND create art. And even if they were, they couldn't do everything effectively (and stay sane). I agree. I need more help so I can make more art!

There is a BBQ dinner with the panelists tonight, but I'm going to head on home to Warner so I can spend an evening with the Kid. :-) I've got enough things to chew over in my head from the panel today.

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On a lighter note... the other day, we learned how to create animated gifs in Photoshop! Animated gifs are those annoying little creatures or faces that wink or jump on Facebook and emails. But we discovered how to use them in online comics.

I stayed up way too late on Tuesday night, animating one of my pages for the Non-fiction project! I was so proud that I was able to figure this out - and find a use for it. I'll put a mini-version of it here - the final will be in the finished comic (due next week!)