“Honey, I wanna be a cartoonist.” part 3
In an earlier Lab Notes I talked about our first comic strip effort “Second Nature,” our long series of rejections from the syndicates, and Anne’s idea to start a Second Nature direct mail distribution campaign.
The year was 1992, so using the internet to reach a broad audience was not an option. Heck, the only computer we had in the house was an Apple 2E with a broken space bar. So, after compiling a mailing list of a few dozen interested subscribers, (which we kept on one of those giant, black “floppy” disc things you now see in museums) we sent out the premier issue of our Free Second Nature Newsletter.
Newsletter cover
Inside page 2
Inside page 3
Back cover
The response was overwhelmingly positive. Over the course of a year, we sent out several dozen free bi-monthly postcards. We even offered Second Nature t-shirts to anyone who could add 5 new subscribers to our mailing list.Consequently, the list wound up growing to several hundred. At this point handling the mailings was becoming time consuming and costly.
Postcard front
Postcard back
So, we decided once again to try Second Nature with the syndicates.
The syndicate submission guidelines clearly state to send 8.5” x 11” copies of about 30 samples, and include a self addressed stamped envelope. Unimpressed with these rudimentary guidelines, I decided to really impress them by creating a 12” x 18” x 2” presentation box, complete with color graphics, internal compartments containing the b&w and color laser copies of the strips, a detailed character illustration with descriptions on one of the inside flaps, and a hinged, heavy lid held closed with velcro. The boxes (1 to each major syndicate) were designed to be self mailers, complete with postage, so it could be mailed back to us. If anyone was going to get their attention now, we were.
After a month or so of waiting eagerly for a response, they started showing up on our doorstep, complete with rejection letters. After another few weeks, we had received all of the boxes except the one we had sent to King Features. Perhaps Jay Kennedy was impressed with our marketing skills and was considering syndicating the strip. (Looking back, I see what a quantum leap in logic this was.) I think we waited another long month before I finally picked up the phone and gave Jay a call. As always, I was able to get right through to him, and after asking about the status of our submission, he kindly requested that I never send him something so large and cumbersome again. It turns out that the size of our presentation was slowing up its progress through the review process. No one knew what to do with it or where to put it. From then on my submissions were strictly b&w photocopies in a manila envelope.
Soon after my conversation with Jay, we decided to call it quits with “Second Nature” and move on to other things.
It would be another 18 months before I had enough material in my head to develop a new strip I called “Bill.” I’ll talk about Bill in my next post on this subject.