Chewing Pencils

Mark Anderson is a professional, freelance cartoonist, operating out of his home in the Chicago area. He is married to Margie, with two kids and 3.5 pets. He also has a fetish for spiderman toys, but swears he doesn’t have a ‘thing’ for men in red and blue Lycra.

Recently, Mark gave his website (http://www.andertoons.com/) a major overhaul, introducing some features that have raised the bar for the cartoonists’ website. His e-commerce feature that allows clients to purchase cartoons directly from his site is, in my opinion anyway, brilliant. Mark agreed to answer a few questions for Chewing Pencils about the development of Andertoons.

Can you give us a bit of your background? How did you end up a cartoonist?

I worked the requisite day jobs for a number of years while drawing & writing cartoons before work, at lunch, and at night. Once we had our first child, it made the most sense for me to stay home, and cartooning had been going well, so we decided it was time for me to make the leap.

What are your main areas of work? (ie gag, editorial etc)

I do almost all gag stuff, although I’ve been doing more and more custom cartoons for advertising and whatnot, and some illustration here and there.

 

When did you first think about a web presence?

Almost immediately. I’ve always been excited about the web, and it just made sense to me right away.

What were some of the initial steps you took to get it together?

A lot of planning on paper. Workflow charts, design stuff, etc…

What books, websites, people or tutorials were helpful?

I found the best way was to look around the web at sites I liked, were popular and functioned well, and then I borrowed a lot of concepts.

For example, for a while I had a “if you like this, you might also like…” feature a la Amazon, but that got scrapped in the last redesign because of space restraints.

What sort of costs were involved in getting your site built and launched?

It hasn’t been cheap, but the investment has paid for itself a few times already.

What was your first website like? How has it developed with time? What motivated you to change it?

It was one I built myself with one of those “build your own site and be selling in seconds!” kinda things. It wasn’t very good, but I did get some sales. Once I saw the potential I moved toward more and more robust sites.

It is now very technical - do you do it all yourself?

Oh no, I have a team who does that for me. Honestly, I’ve never built an entire page by myself. I know enough to move and modify existing code to create new pages and make changes, but that’s about it. I’m more the big picture end of things.

Tell us about some of the more recent additions to your site.

I’ve added del.icio.us bookmarking, a number of topic-specific RSS feeds, a better daily email cartoon system, and some e-commerce.

How do you track your stats?

There’s a back end to my site that I use. Pretty standard. I also use Google Analytics.

How did you come up for the idea for your e-commerce stuff? Is it working?

It was out of necessity. We just had our second child and, come fall, I’m gonna be taking care of both kids during the day while my wife goes back to teaching. I didn’t want the business to suffer, so I had the e-commerce put in to automate my most common sales. It’ll open up more creative time for me and make it easier and faster for folks to buy my stuff.

What proportion of your income would you say is now generated through your site?

It’s growing steadily year after year, and its now a very sizable part of my income.

Why do you have a blog?

It’s a great outlet for gabbing about cartoons and letting my audience get to know me. I also like to write, and it’s nice to casually flex those muscles a bit. Not to mention it’s a great way to post goofy pictures!

What things would you like to add to your site in the future?

I’ve got a lot of neat ideas, but you’ll just have to wait and see.

What steps would you suggest an aspiring cartoonist take when building a website? What is essential and what is not?

First of all, have some content. Don’t even consider it until you have a few hundred cartoons to put up.

And have keywords, topics, etc… all ready and associated with each cartoon either in a spreadsheet or a database. Do those as you go and you’ll save yourself a ton of work down the line.

Try to figure out as many ways as you can to keep your cartoons in front of people. There’s a million ways to do it, especially with all this Web 2.0 stuff now.

I wouldn’t worry about CafePress or self-publishing books. I haven’t found a lot of money in either.

Anything else you want to add?

The web affords the modern cartoonist with all of the tools to market his or her work globally for a small investment of money and some sweat equity. You have to take advantage of that.

And I think we’re on the cusp of a time where gag cartoons will find a new respect and some legitimacy in art and writing. I’ve recently had requests for largish custom cartoons for private collections, and I can see that growing.

Tell us a joke.

Why did the melon and the honeydew have a big wedding? Because they cantaloupe.

Chewing Pencils thanks Mark for his time. Make sure you visit his site at http://www.andertoons.com