AMA: Deadlines
Added 2022-10-30 17:59:02 +0000 UTCQ.: Any "up against the deadline" or "massive writer's block" horror stories you'd be willing to share from your newspaper days, or your time doing daily strips before you switched to crowdfunding?
A.: My best "up against a deadline" story happened every Thursday night for several years. I was working at the Philadelphia Daily News as a graphic artist, and two writers sent in a request for a logo to accompany a weekly sex-advice column they were launching. They wanted it to be extra larger because it was going to be the only identifying visual for the piece.
Instead, I pitched them a single-panel cartoon that would be based on one of the two questions each column would address. I had one condition: Any words/topics that appeared in the column were fair game for the cartoon. They had a condition of their own: They could only write the column on Thursday afternoons, and the column ran on Friday.
That meant that I would get the column late on Thursday afternoon, and I would only have a couple hours to come up with an idea and then pencil, ink and color it.
Mind you, that was in addition to my other responsibilities as a deadline artist at the newspaper. That included laying out pages, handling late-breaking graphics, processing wire graphics and handling corrections on visuals that had been produced earlier in the day.
Some days the ideas came flying to me, and on other days, I'd be desperate for some sort of inspiration. But the cartoon appeared alongside the column every Friday like clockwork.
