Alittle while ago I sent a letter to Tim Krieder to ask for some critiques on my work and advice about getting my name out there, this was his responds.

Ben,

Ms. C.-H. passed your message on to me, feeling it was something I should reply to personally. I do like to offer what aid and encouragement I can to younger colleagues since I never got any myself and it's generally such an unrewarding field. I'm not sure whether you're asking for feedback on your own cartoon or general advice for someone considering such a foolhardy career, so I'll try to give you a little of both.

My favorite things in your work are the visual gags, like George's cowboy bed (I've also drawn him in pajamas with little boots and ten-gallon hats and lariats on them), Osama hiding under his podium, etc. The punchlines seem a little too formulaic at times--you know, setup/ sudden obvious ironic reversal--but perhaps I am not the best person to give advice about this, as this is what most family daily newspaper strips are like and I'm published in only one alternative weekly. You should really double-check your spellings, like "guarantee" and "ingenious." (Misspellings can easily slip by you when you're concentrating on drawing lettering as opposed to just writing or typing--last week I misspelled "wield," fucking up the old well-known "i before e" rule, but I thought it was one of those weird words like, well, "weird.") Also, this is similarly nitpicky, but make sure your lettering is clear and well-spaced and easy to read, not all cramped together. It's worth penciling out beforehand.

As for cartooning in general, well, as I mentioned, it is an unrewarding pursuit. Do not underestimate the demoralizing effect of this. Money doesn't buy happiness but it doesn't seem to make most people very sad, either. I personally know nobody who earns a living from cartooning, except maybe Ted Rall. Most of my colleagues have day jobs or are supported by spouses. I myself live off an inheritance. I make twenty dollars a week for my cartooon. If this figure shocks you, it should. It is insultingly low. If I were syndicated more widely I'd be making more, but not a whole lot more--certainly not enough to live on. I've given up on getting my strip into more alternative weeklies because they're all already running Ted Rall or Tom Tomorrow and they really aren't looking for another political cartoonist to fill that particular niche. (Of course, I am more easily demoralized than a cartoonist should be. At this point I am running on habit and sheer cantankerousness: I am not going to quit before George Bush does.) If you're aiming to get into alternative weeklies, regularly sending postcards of your work to editors is supposed to be a good way of reminding them that you're out there reliably producing work, although frankly this has never worked for me. The only way I've ever gotten into a new paper has been when a new editor who already liked my work took over. My experience is that editors are quick to respond to e-mails, which are less easily ignored than letters and less intrusive than phone calls.

If you want to get into family dailies, however, I do occasionally have beers with a guy who's in some fairly high position at King Features Syndicates, which syndicates all the comic strips to newspapers in the U.S. So maybe I can be of some use there by giving you contact information, guidelines, etc, or mentioning your work to him. He's a friend of a friend, not a friend of mine, so I'm not promising anything, but I'm happy to do what I can.

I hesitate even to mention this since it's the sort of topic that I, as someone with no claim to minority outside of left-handedness, should probably not touch with a ten-foot pole, but if you are in fact black, as your focus on racial issues and e-mail address suggest, this might give you some slight initial advantage in getting your work looked at, for the same reason that being a female cartoonist garners at least some initial notice: there are so few of them. I'm certainly not suggesting you ought to play it up as an issue in your art any more than it naturally is one in your life and opinions, but advantages of any kind are rare enough in cartooning and if this one were mine I would take it the same way I'd exploit being a beautiful girl if I were lucky enough to be one. I offer this advice in the same tentative, embarassed, and highly ambivalent spirit that I once told a female friend of mine who was doing some autobiographical cartoons about having had breast cancer that if she really wanted to market herself as the Breast Cancer Cartoonist, she'd probably do pretty well for herself. She declined. Recently some talentless New Yorker cartoonist did a book about breast cancer which was a best-seller and was immediately optioned by Hollywood for one kajillion dollars.

If you are not black, never mind.

What else can I tell you? My experience in cartooning has been frustrating. I don't make any money at it and I'm not as well-known as I think I should be. I secretly kind of think I should be as rich and famous as Jon Stewart, and have as many groupies. On the other hand, I get a steady stream of e-mails and letters from people around the world who tell me that my work makes them laugh and helps them to get through these dark times. That's worth a lot, although frankly I've never been much impressed by intangible rewards (which is one reason I don't have children). It's kind of a fun thing to be able to tell people you do at parties. I have had one groupie, who was excellent.

In my experience, it's important for an artist to have talent and to work very hard and consistently at what they do. (I am talented but undisciplined. By contrast, my friend Myla Goldberg, author of the novel Bee Season, writes nine to five, Monday through Friday.) Self-promotion is frankly repulsive but it is, regrettably, at least as indispensable to success as these other twol qualities. (I'm sure you can think of way more successful artists who are mediocre but relentless self-promoters than are reclusive geniuses who happened to be discovered.) But perhaps more important than any of these is luck. I wish you plenty.

Tim

Shit. I almost forgot the most important thing to tell you. Since you're never ever going to make any money or a name for yoursself or get any women from being a cartoonist, it had better goddamn well be fun. Always draw the cartoon you want to draw, not the one you think you should (the one that makes the important political point you think needs to be made, the one that'll get you fan mail, that you think will win the Pulitzer, whatever). I just saw a friend of mine last night, Alex Robinson, author of the graphic novels "Box Office Poison" and "Tricked," and he showed me a new story he's working on that consists entirely of A HOT BARBARIAN CHICK KILLING ONE MONSTER AFTER ANOTHER. No dialogue: she kills one monster, there's another monster. In one panel her dwarf companion gets set on fire and you see his skeleton showing through a mass of flames. Late rshe brings him back to life with a healing potion in a bottle that has a little death's head with an X over it on the label. Alex says it's the most fun he's had drawing since he was twelve.

Sorry I was such a bringdown earlier. That's my real advice: have a fucking blast.