Annual Convention

Annual Convention October 5-8

The AAEC and Association of Canadian Cartoonists will be joining with the Cartoon Art Museum in San Franscisco for a 3-day celebration of editorial art and political cartoonists, October 5-8, 2023.

Online registration is now open!


Following Twitter-mania

By
Michael Cavna

Sitting
expectantly at the taping of a late-night talk show, Bryan Brinkman was
a near-anonymous New Yorker — literally just another face in the crowd.
The 24-year-old cartoonist had a Web site and a day job, but he could count
on two ink-stained hands how many people officially followed his work.

By the next
morning, as he checked his Twitter account, he no longer had seven followers.
He had more than 10,000. And within 24 
hours of the show, even that
doubled.

This sudden
explosion was tallied by Twitter's metrics — and rallied by Jimmy Fallon,
who on his new NBC “Late Night” show last month conducted a stunt: He urged
viewers to sign up as “followers” of Brinkman's Twitter account. As a result,
Brinkman also saw his professional animation Web site draw thousands of
page views in the days that followed, he says. The Bryan Brinkman Experiment
had tapped the power of Twitter for professionals.

As Twitter,
the social micro-blogging service that lets people share 140-character
posts, passes its third anniversary — and as many cartoonists are hit by
the tough economic times in print publishing — the Brinkman Experiment
spotlights a cartooning-career question that grows ever louder:

To tweet
or not to tweet?

For some
cartoonists in need of new readers, that is the connection.

As newspaper
comics sections shrink or vanish, as alt-weekly papers slash their cartoons,
as political cartoonists see their ranks reduced almost weekly, social
networking looms large as a way to reach fans during this dauntingly uncertain
time for cartooning. “Dilbert's” creator Scott Adams led the way for mainstream
cartoonists to use e-mail; many comic artists use Facebook — but are cartoonists
atwitter over Twitter?

Garry Trudeau's “Doonesbury” comic
strip recently satirized journalists such as NBC's David Gregory who famously
tweet about the play-by-play minutiae of their day. Trudeau, like Jon Stewart's “Daily
Show,” has characterized Twitter as mere gimmick.

Twitter
is “usefully applied in some hands, pointlessly so in others,”
says Trudeau, who won a Pulitzer for “Doonesbury.” His use for it? He employs
Twitter itself to satirize Twitter. And so on the site's account for Roland
Hedley, his comic strip's fictional Fox News reporter tweets Trudeau's cutting
witticisms.

For Daryl
Cagle, who runs the cartooning Web site/syndicate Cagle.com, Twitter helps
build his business and alert his readers to industry news. With more than
25,000 followers, Cagle is consistently among the “Top 300” most popular
micro-bloggers in the Twitterverse, according to measurement site Twitterholic.com.

“I don't
do a lot of 'What are you doing?' trivial personal posts,” says the Southern
California-based Cagle. “I mostly link cartoons and things I see on the
Web that interest me. My followers know who I am and what to expect from
me.

“People
who think Twitter is trivial aren't using it productively,” says Cagle,
whose site features the work of about 200 editorial cartoonists. Cagle
says he also uses Twitter for creative purposes, sometimes bouncing ideas
off his followers.

Darrin Bell,
who draws the strip “Candorville,” likewise finds that Twitter helps him
at the drawing board. “For some reason, Twitter has become a muse,” he
says. “I can't tell you how many tweets I've posted and then immediately
deleted because I realized they'd make good cartoons.”

Bell, whose
strip this week spoofs Twitter, notes: “We cartoonists already spend most
of our time creating brief tweetlike musings about our day; only instead
of 'tweets,' we call them 'cartoons.'”

Mike Thompson
of the Detroit Free Press recently drew a cartoon that mocked obsessively
self-involved Twitterers. Posting the cartoon on his blog for the newspaper,
Thompson wrote: “Twitter is a blessing . . . and a curse.”
So does that mean Thompson, a veteran of the “old media,” has been seduced
by the power of Twitter? “My attitude is: Evolve or die,” says Thompson,
acknowledging the popularity of the site.

Thompson
notes that relatively few newspaper political cartoonists maximize Twitter.
Mike Luckovich, for example doesn't tweet. “If one of my editors thought
it would be a good idea, I would look into it,” Luckovich says.
“But I really don't know why it would be of benefit.”

Some cartoonists
cite its growth. MySpace and Facebook continue to be the social networks
with the widest reach in the United States, according to Nielsen Online,
with 59 million and 39 million users, respectively. Twitter, however, is
catching up — and fast: In the year since February 2008, the site's membership
has grown more than 1,300 percent, to more than 7 million users.

Most big-name
comic-strip creators, though, are not flocking to Twitter. Lisa Wilson,
senior vice president at United Media, says that of her syndicate's nearly
150 comic artists (print and online), only two use Twitter for professional
purposes

“Relatively
few are doing it — and the ones who do are mostly younger,”
Wilson says of syndicated cartoonists. “I do think it works nicely to communicate
and it's hot as a trend, but it could quickly be overused. It will probably
burn out.”

One of the
big names at Wilson's syndicate, “Dilbert's” Scott Adams, is such an avid
blogger that he says he has little use for micro-blogging. “I don't use
Twitter,” Adams says. “My life is enough of an open book.”

Jen Sorenson,
a Charlottesville cartoonist who draws the alt-political cartoon “Slowpoke
Comics,” has supplemented Facebook by adding Twitter. Says Sorenson: “The
answer that I gave my Facebook fans who were shocked that I joined Twitter:
I embody the paradox of scoffing at silly forms of technology while actually
succumbing to them. I don't expect it to perform any miracles, but in these
tough economic times, a cartoonist needs to try everything.”

Trudeau,
meanwhile, suggests tweeting is a fad. “After we get through the pet-rock
stage, I think you'll see a lot of people abandoning it.”

—Washington
Post April 1, 2009

[To
follow Comic Riffs blogger Michael Cavna, go to Twitter.com/comicriffs.]

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