Convalescing
Lame duck; FOMO; wasting time; or whatever you want to call it
THIS WEEK:
Buddy and Romeo are under the weather
WHERE ARE THEY NOW? Covid cartoons on CartoonStock
BEHIND THE PAY WALL: Buddy and Romeo try to heal
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Covid!
But just for one of us — me! So I’ve been in exile for three days.
Sunday was the worst of it but I’m on the mend.
I’ve watched a few movies and shows that I’ve had bookmarked on streaming for years (The Electric Life of Louis Wain and 1994’s The Paper. They were okay. Lots to enjoy and appreciate about both films but there was also two different weirdness factors that left neither film sitting well with me. As always, Seinfeld made for a welcomed pallet cleanse). I just want to get back to living — being with my family, going to work, doing chores….
I have excellent hygiene, sometimes showering twice a day, sometimes three or four. I thought that the pandemic would bring with it a hand washing revolution and men all over the world would finally get the message. Alas, men are still men, and no matter how many showers or vitamins I take, I’m still still susceptible to getting sick too.
Frega suggests that maybe I should stop burning the candle at both ends. I agree since she’s always right. Hope she dodges this bout of sickness.
Here are a handful of pandemic era cartoons — most of which were never published.
Things were moving quickly and there were times when publishers thought that the pandemic would be over and whichever cartoon they were interested in would be obsolete by the time it were to feature in a print issue (this was the case for one quarterly publication that declined a cartoon that they “loved” on those grounds. It was only fall 2020 so the cartoon still had over a year and a half to still be perfectly relevant. Nobody knew). For this reason, I rushed many of these cartoons straight to CartoonStock figuring that would create a wider reach for sales as the situation changed so quickly. In hindsight, I should have held them and shopped them around longer but that probably wouldn’t have made a difference due to either a.) whether or not the cartoon is even funny and b.) concerns that the cartoon would become irrelevant in a fluid and uncertain time.
These pandemic cartoons, for the most part, were a waste of time.
Early in the pandemic, a magazine was putting out daily quarantine emails with cartoons to lift the spirits of everyone at home. This cartoon was rejected there and subsequently everywhere else before being dumped unceremoniously onto CartoonStock.
Annoyingly, a New Yorker cartoonist did essentially the exact same cartoon and got it published (I forget if it was in The New Yorker or in one of the other big names we haven’t cracked yet). This happens all the time to all cartoonists where similar ideas are generated independently. It just always ends up being the easily accessible vehicle for which me to spiral down the rabbit hole of feeling like persona non grata and never being good enough.
This cartoon got the attention of CartoonStock owner and cartoon editor Bob Mankoff (current: Airmail; former: The New Yorker, Esquire). He included it a February 2021 CartoonStock newsletter.
This is one of the only Covid cartoons from us that was sold. It was published in Please See Me in the Spring of 2021.
This cartoon, a sequel to the previous one that came nearly a year later, didn’t sell anywhere. Surprise surprise. I bitterly drew it during my first bout of Covid.
I still like this cartoon but it never sold either.
Enjoy more failed Frega DiPerri magazine cartoons and some best sellers here.
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