The fine cartoonist Stan Sakai offers us what we've all wanted for some time now: A photo of Sergio Aragonés on a Segway.
Also on his weblog — here, in fact — Stan complains rightly about something that more and more artists are rightly complaining about. They do a free autograph drawing for an alleged fan at a convention...and it's for sale on eBay before the week is out. In this case, Stan did a lovely sketch for someone who, I suppose, swore it would be a treasured keepsake...and Stan personalized it to the guy, which you'd think would make it easier to keep, harder to sell. What the guy did was to add some clumsy lines to the art, in effect changing the drawing, in order to cover over the personalization so he could sell it. See that black scribble above Stan's name in the drawing above left? I guess it's supposed to simulate grass...but Stan didn't put it there. Someone else did to cover over the personalization.
Above right is a sketch that Sergio did at the same convention. It was offered on eBay by the same seller. What he did in this case was to crop the top of the drawing. Sergio put in a thought balloon with the name of the person who requested the piece and the seller cut it off.
This is crummy. Sergio, Stan and other professionals do not go to conventions to give people things they can turn around and sell. Another artist in a similar situation wrote me the following in a recent e-mail...
I don't know what to do about this. I like doing little sketches for my fans. The guys selling the sketches on eBay are not fans, or at least not the kind of fans I want to do sketches for. I can only do a limited number at a convention and when I'm doing a drawing for the eBay whore, I'm not doing one for someone who will treasure it and frame it and appreciate it.
I think people also don't realize that I draw for a living and that I often pay my own way to a convention. I don't always expect to make a lot of money selling sketches and art at a con but I'd like to make back what it cost me to get there. I lost money going to the last few cons and some of that was because of my generosity and doing free sketches. Even if I make money, I'd like it to go to something like The Hero Initiative or the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund instead of some eBay seller who fibbed to me to get me to do him a freebee. My wife would like the money to go to paying down our Visa bill.
So I don't know what to do. I'm torn between wanting to be nice to my fans and feeling used by the eBay whores. It's not a good feeling.
No, I'll bet it isn't...and I don't have a real answer to it except to charge everyone at least a few bucks for sketches...and if you feel mercenary about pocketing the cash, give it to The Hero Initiative or the C.B.L.D.F. or some other worthy cause. Even that only goes so far and some artists who've tried it have decided that still doesn't filter out the undeserving. Sergio and Stan are among the many who are opting to simply not do free sketches any longer...or at least to do them more sparingly. It's still kind of a lose/lose situation, especially for the fans who, but for the pirates, would go home with a lovely momento of the convention and a little piece of a favorite cartoonist.
Ken Levine, who knows his stuff, blogs about how the finale of The Sopranos might have gone if it had been on one of the major networks. He left out that they would have tried to get everyone who was ever a regular on the show to make at least a surprise cameo appearance in the last episode...and they would have shown them making those surprise cameos in all the promos.
The above photo is a frame from a Betty Boop cartoon and I'm using it as an attention-getting device for this item: Animation scholar and all-around fun guy Jerry Beck will be the guest later today on Stu's Show, which is heard on Shokus Internet Radio from 4 PM to 6 PM on the West Coast...and therefore from 7 PM to 9 PM on the East Coast. Jerry will be chatting live with your affable host, Stuart Shostak, about cartoon history and about upcoming DVDs. A lot of people write to ask me when so-and-so is coming out on home video. If you have one of these questions about anything animated, call in and ask Jerry. He'll probably know and he may even be the guy who's hammering the DVD company to do a quality job on it.
You can listen to this show or to anything on Shokus Internet Radio by going to this link and clicking on an audio browser. If you haven't sampled radio-on-the-web yet, you're missing out on something wonderful and free. As you work on your computer, writing or playing games or surfing for porn — whatever you do — you can also be listening to a station like Shokus and having a very good time.
So listen in. Call in. I'll be doing both later today.
I never saw The Wedding Singer. Never saw the Adam Sandler movie. Never saw the Broadway show based on it. But I did see this number from the latter on the 2006 Tony Awards and when I did, I thought, "Boy, that's going to sell a lot of tickets." Apparently, it did. The show opened on April 27, 2006 to not-wonderful reviews and probably would have closed rather swiftly...but it got a big boost from the Tonys, which were on June 11. It didn't win any awards that night, even though it was nominated for thirteen, including Best Musical. But this one number was so powerful that it caused a surge in ticket-buying and the show was able to last out the year. It closed on December 31 after 285 performances and I don't think it's had many (if any) productions since then.
There's no real point here other than that I think this is a great number. If the whole show had been this good, it would probably still be running.
June 14, 2007
