“If I’ve learned one thing in the 14 years I’ve been a full-time cartoonist, it’s that you can not let anyone else define your professionalism. It has to be a personal ethos to which you adhere despite third party influence or acceptance. The old measuring sticks for professionalism are going away and now more than ever it’s time for independent creatives to set the bar. Set it high.”
As a professional freelance writer who thinks he has a creative side to him, I’ve learned many a profound life lesson from cartoonists and comic strip creators, whether I’m shaking a snow globe with Gary Larson (The Far Side), getting influenced with Lynn Johnston (For Better or For Worse), or creating problems with Scott Adams (Dilbert). Even before I embarked on this career as an independent small business owner, I felt like I wanted to take a more unconventional path.
Looking back, I can see how the career of a traditional cartoonist would not be all that different from that of a freelance writer. You create your content and then you hope to sell that content for a profit. The key difference is that the three individuals I named above came from more a traditional print perspective. Their comics got syndicated in newspapers across the country and around the world.
Today’s industry is different. Web comics dominate the space.
And so we turn our attention to one Scott Kurtz. You may not know him by name, but Scott Kurtz is the man behind PvP (Player vs Player), a popular online comic strip that originally launched in 1998. Cartoonists, even before there was such a thing as the Internet, have always been a different breed of people. They typically work in relative isolation out of their studios, concocting funny ideas and likely laughing at themselves.
Even so, the very notion of what it means to “be professional” has changed dramatically in the last couple of decades, just as the nature of cartooning has changed so much. Even if you work in your pajamas at home, you’re still expected to conduct yourself in a professional manner when you attend a business meeting. You’re still expected to interact with colleagues, clients and associates with a certain level of tact. And it used to be that you’d be expected to dress the part too.
However, take a quick glance at the typical dress code at an Internet startup or game development studio, and you’ll see an entirely different picture. As the Oatmeal points out, wearing a suit on the west coast could mean you work at JCPenney, not at a big shot Wall Street firm. Scott Kurtz echoes this sentiment, reminding us that the “old measuring sticks” no longer apply. The onus falls on us as “independent creatives” to live up to our own high standards.
You could be the slob. You could treat this business as nothing more than a hobby. You could let those numbers slide. Or, you could take yourself and your business far more seriously, giving yourself the respect that you deserve rather than working to adhere to some outside standard.
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