Writing Cartoon Gags

Six years before I began writing short stories and novels, I had a hobby of writing cartoon gags. I learned about this from an article in the Smithsonian Magazine—cartoonists accepted gag copy from people and payed them a percentage of their take when they sold a cartoon to a publication. I then subscripted to a magazine that listed cartoonists, how to contact them and what types of gags they were looking for.

In my free time, I began thinking up gags and writing then down. In this era of the mid-1990s before everything had moved to the Internet and email, the procedure was to put the gags on a 3 inch by 5 inch index card with a unique identification number and my address on the other side of the card. I would mail these in batches of five to the cartoonist with a stamped and self-address envelope included. If the cartoonist liked a gag, he would keep the card and return the ones he didn’t want. Then if he sold the cartoon, he’d pay me a percentage usually about twenty-five percent of what he received.

I did this for several years, had a number of gags accepted and some of these sold. If was fun but probably didn’t pay for the postage.