About a week ago we introduced a Twitter button to toonpool.com. You can now tweet cartoons by clicking on that little blue button located below the image.T his seemed like a good opportunity to take a closer look at cartoonists on Twitter.
There are about 2350 artists who post cartoons on toonpool.com. When we did some research for this article we found something like 50 Twitter accounts by toonpool members. Even if we missed another 100 this still shows that not too many cartoonists are using Twitter. When I asked some of the ones who do about how long they had been using the service, answers ranged between 1,5 years and six months. So, cartoonists aren’t exactly early adopters either. At times the fascination with the new technology gets old pretty fast. Back in 2009 German cartoonist Til Mette set up a Twitter account, tweeted three times between 3:37 and 4:10 and then was all like “Meh.”
Looking at my timeline I have to admit that it is pretty easy to be all like “Meh.”. Even if you are following less than a hundred people there are a lot of new messages per hour. Content-wise, tweets by cartoonists oscillate between the banal ["It is urgent. Need bacon." (@ericHews)], the matter-of-factly ["Un Dragofante by Arghoost Toons. http://t.co/m7TkXRg" (@arghoost_toons)] and the cryptic ["http://bit.ly/mPlnkh #TimThomas#caricature #Bruins #bostonbruins #bruinscartoons #TimThomasMVP #TimThomasVez… (cont) http://deck.ly/~J8hbF" (@spicertoon)].
I asked Canadian artist Mike Spicer – author of the hashtag-heavy tweet above – about his motivation for using Twitter. “I think through the #FF, etc. one hopes to cast a wide net and build a solid following with the vastness,” he replied. “New-age word of mouth.” That’s how a lot of artists seem to use Twitter and, if they are any good, I am sure they will get the occasional new follower. And, yes, I think that such straightforward advertising tweets are boring and perhaps even counter-productive. Gustavo Rodriguez aka Garrincha describes the phenomenon as follows: “What you do on Twitter is showing at your doorstep with a bullhorn and shouting whatever the 140 characters and your brain allow at that moment.” No wonder that a lot of people stay away from that neighborhood.
That is, however, not all there is to Twitter. Things get a lot more interesting when people start shouting back. In fact, as soon as there is some interaction it feels more like an overcrowded bar than like Garrincha’s shouty suburb. As Tjeerd Royards, cartoonist and editor of a digital cartoon magazine, points out, it is easier to reach out to people informally in a tweet than writing them an email or even a message on Facebook. This can allow for new interactions between artists and fans and colleagues – if tweets actually allow for comments and transcend being 140-character billboards, that is. One cartoonist that I think does a particularly good job is BECK . Mr. Beck not only shares slices of his life and interacts with followers but also turns tweets he likes into cartoons.
The question is: Are you willing to invest the amont of time and creativity it takes to run a varied Twitter account and – even more important – do you feel comfortable with constantly making your own thoughts and personality public? If you don’t, there are lots of other ways of promoting your cartoons on the Internet and missing out on one probably won’t hurt too much. If you do, you should go on there, make your art known and help to fight the “Meh.”
Paul Hellmich with additional research by Battlestar
PS: Here’s a collection of Twitter cartoons and, of course, you can (and maybe should) follow @toonpool
