Bad Choice!

Wasted time, paint, and paper

THIS WEEK:

• When procrastination is a sign that you should move on

• WHERE ARE THEY NOW? Teacher Appreciation Week

• WHAT DO YOU RECOMMEND? Selling Superman?

• BEHIND THE PAY WALL: Tortured artist cartoons and “Back to the Drawing Board”

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Last week, I told readers I was in the midst of writing and drawing a new humor article. That night, when it was time to set to work on it, I gave up on the whole thing.

Then the next morning (Thursday), I talked myself into it being a good idea and that it was worth pursuing again. At night, I gave up. I stayed away from the idea on Friday and felt like a failure.

But on Saturday, I picked myself up by my bootstraps and got to work, pulled a few late nights, finished it and submitted it to a large publication before I went to bed!

Almost immediately, I realized I was 200 words over the acceptable word limit posted on the submission page. My excitement turned to dread and I awaited rejection, which arrived in my inbox a few hours later, mid-morning.

The rejection had nothing to do with the word count. My angst about this whole thing has nothing to do with getting a rejection. We get them all the time (or we get radio silence but it’s lucky to get a rejection notice) and then I just send the work somewhere else to try again. The rejection I received for this article was prompt, gracious, complimentary, and personal (many editors send boiler plate but closure is closure). I’m grateful to the editor for his time, consideration, and kind words.

My dismay comes from ever having written and drawn it in the first place. It’s going in the bin/my flat file drawers/the depths of my hard drive.

I’m proud of the illustrations and I think the concept and writing are really funny. So did the editor. They just don’t publish personal narratives. I realized a separate, obvious issue, which is the reason I’m dropping the whole thing. It’s an illustrated humor piece about Star Wars — a corporate intellectual property not worth possibly getting into trouble over. I can’t publish/get paid for drawing someone else’s characters and writing about someone else’s world. Obvious, in hindsight.

I think it speaks to how exhausted I am that it didn’t occur to me that devoting a week of creative time to shining a spotlight on someone else’s work wasn’t a good use of my time and skill.

Multiple things can be true. I’m proud of the work but it’s not worth publishing and then facing potential copyright fallout or, at the very least, living day to day anxiously (about this). I don’t know the rules for how cartoonists and illustrators put Disney, Marvel, DC, and Star Wars characters into published work all the time and maybe it’s fine; but how could it be? and I don’t know how it works. So that’s the end of it.

Better off playing alone in my own sandbox.

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Hey! It’s Teacher Appreciation Week! Frega and I are both high school teachers! We’re exhausted! It’s AP exam week!

That’s probably the root of a lot of this self doubt too. CollegeBoard is explicit regarding plagiarism, copyright infringement, and image appropriation in AP Art & Design, and since I’ve been living and breathing the C.E.D. for the last month (well, every school year for the last 17 years, but especially every March through May), it seems an obvious example of everything I’m instructing my students to avoid.

First published in Kappan

This cartoon wrote itself because it actually happened a few years ago. He won the raffle…but we got paid for the cartoon.

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This looks good:

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