Cartoonists | Cartooning | Syndication News | Magazine Cartoons
Cartoonists
Cartoonists were making a lot of news in the world of syndication in 1990. Look at this article from over a quarter of a century ago that appeared in Editor & Publisher magazine’s ‘Syndicates / News Services‘ section. Ann Landers column had been running for 35 years already and Charles M. Schulz was over the 40 year mark for drawing his Peanuts comic strip.
Famous cartoonist syndication attorney-agent Arnold Schwartzman was finalizing and dealing with felony charges leveled against him by some big syndicates for misrepresenting various cartoonists.
There seemed to be so much hoopla in the cartoonist career news back then, probably because so many newspapers were around and the newspaper business was flourishing. Even many smaller syndicates were representing some well known magazine cartoonists that were getting some notoriety. 
These were good times! Mind you, this was just prior to the internet coming into the equation and the influence of cartoonist software programs like Photoshop and so much more.
I promoted my own cartooning services as a cartoonist for hire which gave me a lot of visibility through faxing cartoons directly to clients and also using faxes to locate new potential publishers and clients. With the explosion of the web came a new era, and that also affected newspapers too.
This old article doesn’t mean to infer the syndication business is no less worthy of news. A lot of things are percolating in the world of comic strips, syndicates and cartooning in general. Especially with 
all of the advancements that have taken place concerning the internet, technology and publishing in general. It is an exciting and interesting time and it’s difficult to say what can be on the horizon for cartoonists and cartooning in general.
The day of the fax machine being the useful tool it once was for cartoonists (at least for me!), has passed and as I write this, and I anticipate greater things are about to happen in the world of cartooning!
