by Ron Coleman
When I was in Junior High School I saw an ad in Popular Mechanics magazine which said, "Make Big Money Drawing Simple Cartoons". I wrote away for their free report and it was basically a pitch to sell a correspondence course in cartooning. The course cost $50.00 and I paid for it with payments of $3 per month from earnings on my paper route. A year after I completed the course I sold my first cartoon to The Optical Journal and Review of Optometry for $5.00. I was in the eighth grade at the time.
To be honest about it, when I finished the course I still couldn't draw that well. The course gave me the basics and with practice I improved. It also gave me the encouragement to try to sell my work. I've been at cartooning now for over 40 years and have lost track of all the magazines I've sold to. Although I never made my full time living this way cartooning has been a fun and profitable sideline.
Most of my sales have been to small trade journals, but I have made some sales to major publications. One of my cartoons was used as an illustration in a Chicken Soup for the Souls book, and that brought me $300. Other well-known publications to which I've sold include the Saturday Evening Post, Medical Economics, and Official Detective.
The internet and modern technologies have brought a whole new dimension to cartooning. In the past few years I've done quite a bit of cartooning for websites and some animations in Macromedia Flash. I think the internet has opened up vast new opportunities for cartoonists which didn't exist when I started out. It's a great business for the person who likes to work at home.
