Soon you too can own proof of a cartoonist’s suffering
I have a question. For you.
Seeing as I am slated for a migration south come February, I have of late been reviewing the state of my personal effects — that is, I’ve been crouching under the stairs of a cold, sooty basement digging through boxes, awash in five dreamy flavors of bittersweet nostalgia.
Among these dusty boxes I have uncovered literally hundreds of original pages of my comics, which I am none too eager to lug through two states and at least that many piles of dog poo on my way to my new residence. And so I set to thinking — as would any poor, desperate fool struggling to free his foot from the jaws of the world’s largest, shiniest, most ruthless capitalist regime: How can I make some money getting rid of these things?
Of course, from this question springs the inevitable corollary: Who would buy them?
And so I put it to you, dear readers; dear lovers of Fine Comics; you Patrons of the Arts and True Believers and Generous Souls, ever searching for the latest, obscurest repository for your cherished munificence: If I were to traffic pages of my own Comic Art on this very website, are there any among them that you would particularly hanker to fondle?
I can assure you that, debased and stricken by indigence, I am determined to set my fees well within the range of what any Art Lover deems affordable.
I will begin scanning particularly juicy pages this week, and will soon unveil an entire digital forum, in stunning HTML, to assist you in selecting your purchases. However, now is a rare chance for you to become the very invisible hand guiding the flow of commerce, and request a peek at any particularly poignant pages which I have penned! Such requests imply absolutely no obligation to buy; I merely want to know how better to entertain and service your whims, oh shahib. (Translation: I wanna know which of these stacks of pages to start scanning first.)
Here is a sample of one juicy nugget with which to titillate your whimsy (it’s NSFW — click to make big only if you don’t mind dildos in people’s brains):
In all seriousness, I will be selling original art soon — including many pages from Monsters — and I’d love to hear it if there are any in particular you’d like to peruse. I won’t even be insulted if you don’t end up buying them; it would just help me to spend less time feeding this damn scanner.
A note: Due to my increasing infatuation with Photoshop, some of my more recent pages are somewhat different in appearance “IRL” than they are in the books. In such cases I will, for a slight fee, be more than happy to manually engineer it so that it appears somewhat similar to this Platonic form you envision in your brain. Other pages have all sorts of cool/odd/embarrassing/psychopathic marks in the margins, which I will gladly keep intact for your amusement.
Hey, it’s snowing outside…
I would like to peruse the seventh page of “A Colossal Waste of Time”, the ninth page of “Gordon Smalls Hurts Himself”, and ‘The Full “Stick”‘
All fine selections sir! I can see you are a man of taste.
It turns out that “The Full Stick” has already been sold to the estate of another noted gentleman of leisure, and is at this time, unavailable! However we will be more than happy to accommodate your desire to view these other excellent objects d’Art!
I would love a page from Monsters but I won’t tease you by telling you which ones and leading you to believe I might actually have money to buy one. Though other people who do have money might enjoy one of the herpes-screaming pages or the educational ones where you’re floating around in herpes land spewing factoids. I also really like the ones where you have a giant hole in your chest after (spoiler alert) having been a jerk. Or the one at that party that shows all those crazy face and dancing. I always thought that was a particularly perfect interpretation of a party.
The Monsters “herpes 101″ pages do seem to be the obvious first choice, don’t they? Frustratingly, they are also some of the most heavily edited pages of the book — in part because a lot of the data had to be updated mere days before the book went to press (due largely to an awkwardly timed release date on a new, amazingly helpful and fact-packed book about herpes called The Good News About the Bad News: Herpes, Everything You Need to Know by Terri Warren).
I will see what I can do!
i would also be interested in at least one or two pages from Monsters. hard to choose.. but page 97 and 98?
oo, yeah, those are a couple nice pages. There is a catch though — I drew the stars in black on a white sky, and then inverted it in Pshop. I’m not sure how to remedy stuff like this for selling the originals. Just leave it? Black out the sky and white-in new stars on top of it? What do The People want?
yeah, that’s a tough one. hell, i dunno. i guess on that page it’d be better inked in and dabbed with whiteout?
i’ve had to redraw art i’d sold a few times, what a pain. one because i manipulated it so much in photoshop, and another i flat-out lost the damn art. at the time, i ended up using my computer monitor as a table, which actually worked pretty well. ghe-tto.
that’s great news, I ranked Monsters #1 on my top 10 comics list for 2009! I really love pages 4 and 33-34 of the third issue, for example. And I’ll definitely look in my other Dahl-material for ideas…
Thanks man. I’ll let you know when those Monsters pages are finally up for sale.
Create an online store, and I’m sure they will sell Gabby. There are plenty of other avenues for making money off your original art, but most of them require you hang on to the pages and lug em’ around a bit more. I’d hate to see you lose an opportunity to cash in on your recent success some more however!
i’d LOVE to get some…artwork, i mean.
how much a page?
Ah yes, a man of immeasurable taste! Please, if you would walk this way into our showroom… Felicity will take your hat and gloves.