You guys know I do a newspaper cartoon, right?
It’s called ‘The Buckets’, and if you’d like it in YOUR newspaper, then you should contact said paper and send them HERE to THIS LINK, and they can get all the information from the syndicate about running it.
It’s funny, it’s topical, and best of all, it’s monstrously inexpensive, if my monthly royalty checks are anything to go by. Newspapers listen to their readers- a little. They check through the comment sections under their online articles anyhow. So send ’em to Universal Syndicate and let ’em know The Buckets is a comic strip you’d like them to run. Mention advertising rates. That always perks ’em up.
Or, if you want your local paper to run Hubris? They can contact me here at this site through the ‘contact’ or ’email’ buttons. And so long as they let me put ‘hubriscomics.com’ on the cartoon for the title? They can run it for free. At least until a syndicate’s willing to sell it to them for me. Then it’s money, pal.
There you go- Seven Buckets a week for a smallish pittance, or Hubris as many times a week as they care to run it until they’ve burned through the archive, for FREE. Newspapers everywhere, rejoice.
Makes me wish I were in the U.S. (or Australia) and had a local newspaper worth anything. The English papers in Japan are a joke.
That’s a shame. Of course, I’m already paying to have The Buckets translated into something or other. I wouldn’t mind adding Japanese, so far as I know.
I’m not sure how well The Buckets would work in Japanese, since a lot of the humor is cultural or topical, and doesn’t have a direct correlation to life here. But, I think Hubris would translate fine. The issue is one of distribution. I don’t have contacts to the manga magazine industry (where it would run as 2 or 3 vertical 4-panel strips per page, 2-3 pages per weekly issue). An alternative would be to translate one book at a time, and try to get a publisher like Stochastic Books to get it into the Foreign Books section of the big stores like Kinokunia (sales numbers would probably be low, though). One other option would be to have the strips part of an online pay-per-view e-reader program, which would bring us back to the manga magazine companies, which control the e-reader sites that I know of. The final option would be the guerrilla approach, setting up a Japanese Facebook page or Twitter account, and running teaser strips in Japanese to try building up a viral fan base and then selling the commercial distribution rights after that.
And the Japanese newspapers are a pain to read. Fikkin kanji, brrr!
I’ve last bought a newspaper in… uh… last decade, no, um… two decades… uh… yeah.