Apparently my amateur radio cartooning career has come full circle after almost exactly 17 years
I realized that with the apparent demise of CQ Amateur Radio Magazine (according to Redditors, the website recently went offline, which is never a good sign), I never posted what would have been the November 2023 cartoon. So here it is.
Like a lot of my cartoons, this one is based on reality. I did buy a new car last year, and I did almost immediately figure out if a radio and antenna could be installed.
In 17 years of doing cartoons for CQ and a sister magazine, Popular Communications, I never once repeated a gag, but as I was drawing this one, it dawned on me that I’d done a similar gag years earlier. So I decided to check.
In a weird bit of symmetry, my very first cartoon for Popular Communications (also now defunct) appeared in the November 2006 issue. My first cartoon was for a November issue — and so was my last one, it appears:
Look for the editor with some money in a paycheck, and they’re gone
After my last blog entry, I received — to my shock — several emails from publishers who said they were interested in using my cartoons.
As soon as I asked about payment, two of them ghosted me. (I’m waiting to hear back from the other ones, and I hope we can work together.)
This is a common problem for anyone in a creative field — musicians, artists, photographers, even radio hosts. People ask us all the time to donate our work … or worse, they don’t ask, they just assume we’ll work for free, and they get offended when we ask about compensation.
“Can’t you work for free?” Yes, I can. I work for free for myself. Not you.
“But we’re a nonprofit.” So am I, when no one pays me.
“Can’t you donate your time?” Ask your plumber if she can donate her time when your drains back up.
“But you’ll get exposure!” If I want to expose myself, I’ll buy a raincoat.
Or, they ask us to work on “spec” — meaning “speculation.” In other words, they might pay us, they say, if they make a profit.
“Might” and “if” are doing a lot of heavy lifting there. Mark Evanier explains why you should never work for “spec”: “The people asking you to submit spec work may not really be that serious — or in a position to buy anything. I can think of a dozen guys who in the last dozen years were going around trying to get folks to write and draw stories of their characters on spec … What they all had was a dream and no funding.”
Evanier says, “Think of it this way: If one of those guys had approached you about investing $1,000 in his alleged company, you would have run the other way. So why would you ever want to do $1,000 worth of free work for him?”
John Scalzi is blunter: “When I want to write for fun, then I do it. But when people come to me — especially people I don’t know — looking for writing, they’re asking for work.”
What are my prices? I ask $25 per hour. A simple black-and-white drawing probably takes me less than two hours. I’ll give you an estimate before I start and I’ll send sketches for you to approve before I finish.
I think that’s eminently reasonable. (In fact, it’s probably way too low.)
If $25 is too much for your publication to pay for an original drawing, you don’t want an artist; you want a book of clip art.
I did realize that I should probably post a portfolio of my work, which brings to mind a great scene from the Canadian sitcom “Corner Gas,” which I love. (And which is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year.)
It’s available on Amazon Prime, and you should go watch it.
“Nice. I was there for three hours and you choose to sketch the two hours I was sleeping.“
In the episode “Seeing Things,” the two small-town police officers, Davis (Lorne Cardinal) and Karen (Tara Spencer-Nairn) are considering ideas to improve the public image of the police department.
Davis wants to update the graphics on the police car. Hank (Fred Ewanuick) asks what they’re doing:
Davis: Designing a new decal for the side of the police car. Hank: Hey, cool. Xena! Karen: No! No warrior princesses! Hank: I know a guy who could airbrush that wicked-fast for ya. Karen: It’s a police car, not a make-out van. Davis: No reason why it can’t be both. Now, this airbrush guy, does he have a portfolio? Hank: Uh, no. A Camaro, I think. Davis: I mean — does he have an example of his work? Hank: Yeah, I know. It’s on his Camaro.
I don’t have a Camaro, but here’s a portfolio of my work:
Mother of mercy, is this the end of my magazine cartooning career?
For just pennies a day, you can provide a hot, nourishing meal of ink and eraser crumbs for this wretched creature
First things first: Every time I post one of my cartoons from CQ Amateur Radio Magazine, I also post a link to the page where you can buy a subscription.
If you did happen to buy a subscription on my recommendation — and you haven’t received any issues — well, I apologize. Unfortunately, you’ll have to get in line with me. I haven’t received any recently, either.
And I am hearing (unofficially) that the chances of receiving any issues, at least in the immediate future, are slim.
I have nothing but affection for the staff at CQ, from my editor, Rich Moseson, to everyone else I’ve worked with over the years. They have, as the Good Book says, “fought the good fight” and stayed the course, but it may not have been enough.
It looks like I forgot to post the August 2023 cartoon from CQ Amateur Radio Magazine. This is another one of those “it happened in real life” moments from the recent trip a friend and I made to the Dayton Amateur Radio Association’s clubhouse in Huber Heights, Ohio.
As always, a reminder that these cartoons are posted after they’ve appeared in CQ. If you want to see them when they’re new, and catch up on the amateur electronics hobby, why not subscribe today?
2007 cartoon that I posted for a small audience on a Usenet group
(Today’s trivia question: I’ll award one solid brass figlagee with bronze oak leaf palm to the first person who can tell me the significance of the names on the tombstone. Answer at the end of this post.)
We moved recently and I’ve been cleaning out some old files. I found this cartoon that I did in 2007 and thought I’d share it.
I used to spend a lot of time on Usenet, the pre-social media all-text message board service. Before there was Facebook, Twitter or Reddit, before even LiveJournal, Usenet was an international network of message boards. In the 1990s, it was mostly open only to corporations, colleges and universities. Somewhere in the late 1990s, America OnLine, Delphi and other Internet service providers enabled their users to access Usenet — the so-called “endless September” or “eternal September” — and the volume of traffic soon increased. So did spam, trolls, abusive conversations and everything else that has come to define our current social-media climate.
That’s right, kiddos, every time someone says “there was no way to predict that lack of moderation on social media would lead to an increase in Nazis and white supremacists,” I’m here to say that everyone on Usenet saw in, like, 2000 that unfettered Internet access to public opinion led directly to an increase in abuse, including a rise in hate groups and con artists, and eventually made Usenet almost unusable. (“Marge, my friend, I haven’t learned a thing.”)
Usenet, in other words, was an early victim of what Cory Doctorow calls “enshittification.”
This month’s cartoon was a tribute to the late Al Jaffee, who contributed to Mad Magazine for an incredible 65 years before his death in April at age 102.
Jaffee was the originator of a number of long-running features in the magazine, including the “Fold-In” cartoon on the back page, and “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions.”
As always, a reminder that these cartoons are posted after they’ve appeared in CQ. If you want to see them when they’re new, and catch up on the amateur electronics hobby, why not subscribe today?
The museum is located at what was once the Bethany, Ohio, shortwave radio relay station for Voice of America, beginning in 1942. It was located there because it was built by Cincinnati-based Crosley Broadcasting Corp., which had already been doing experiments in high-powered shortwave radio and AM radio broadcasting. (The Bethany station is next to the transmission tower for WLW 700 AM radio, which for a short period of time broadcast at 500,000 watts — 10 times the most powerful AM stations legally allowed today in the U.S.)
It also was located there because it was well inland from the reach of German bombers, if World War II had ever come to that. Programming never originated from Ohio; it always came from VOA studios elsewhere, including New York City and Washington, D.C.
Although Voice of America still broadcasts on shortwave radio, those transmissions come from radio stations mostly overseas in U.S. allied countries. The Bethany station was closed during Clinton administration budget cuts in 1994.
Anyway, if you’re in the Cincinnati or Dayton area, the museum is well worth your time.
As always, a reminder that these cartoons are posted after they’ve appeared in CQ. If you want to see them when they’re new, and catch up on the amateur electronics hobby, why not subscribe today?
This week, I’ll be headed to Dayton, Ohio — actually, Xenia, a little bit to the southeast — for the annual Dayton Hamvention, billed as the world’s largest gathering of amateur radio operators, or “hams.”
(My show this Saturday will be produced and broadcast from Hamvention, and I’ll be talking to some people at the convention. However, this week’s show will only be on Tube City Online Radio, because WRCT will be off the air due to a scheduled power outage on the Carnegie Mellon University campus. Plan your Saturday afternoon accordingly, ha ha.)
A lot of people think that “amateur radio” is what I do on Saturdays, but “ham radio” is not broadcasting — it’s transmitting messages from point-to-point, or from one person (or group of people) to another.
In fact, there are special frequencies set aside for amateur radio, and a license is required to use them. People with an amateur radio license are specifically prohibited from using those frequencies for “broadcasting” to the general public. (There’s nothing to stop you from listening to those transmissions, of course, but the person sending messages on those frequencies is not supposed to be sending them primarily for amusement or entertainment.)
