Neill Cameron – accidental social media WIN

I’ve known Neill Cameron for quite a while now. He’s a cartoonist whose self published comics I used to read (and probably sell) in the 90s and I’ve kept tabs on him since thanks to his blog and, now, his Twitter because I like his work and he entertains me.

Cartoonists and illustrators blogging and using Twitter isn’t at all odd. Most of them work alone and nearly all use computers these days so connecting with their peers online makes a lot of sense. But Neill’s one of the cartoonists who’s been doing some interesting stuff with his blog and Twitter lately. I don’t think he thinks it’s interesting – I think he thinks it’s just stuff he finds fun to do – but I think other artists in all sorts of disciplines could learn something from him.

The first thing to remember is this has all grown out of his blog which he uses to share the by-products of his work. Like most artists he can’t really publish the stuff he’s paid to do – that’s for the client – but he can post rejected versions of work after the fact and stuff he does for fun. (In the latter case it’s interesting to note that a few months after posting what amounts to Doctor Who fan art he’s recently done some paid work for Doctor Who…) Like most cartoonists I know he can’t help drawing so his blog provides an outlet for that.

This June, after a slight lull in his blogging, Neill announced a new project, The A-Z Of Awesomeness

Like all the best ideas it was actually a rip-off of another cartoonist’s project, Garen Ewing’s A-Z of Comic Strip Characters where Garen used a Facebook group to vote on which character he should draw each day and while I could write a whole book on what Garen’s been doing with his online presence to promote his work in this case I think Neil’s is a little more interesting because Garen was mostly preaching to the converted with his A-Z. Neill reached a new audience with his.

It’s worth revisiting how Neill announced the project:

I have been feeling the need lately to just draw some stuff that is fun, for my own amusement. And so I am going to spend the next month doing just that: drawing STUFF that is AWESOME. And the best part is – you get to tell me what.

Basically he’s doing this for a laugh and to recharge his batteries, and he knows that it’ll be more fun if people get involved. He’s not trying to reach an audience of thousands or hit certain demographics. Using the same system as Garen (Facebook group) he asks people for combinations of geeky things he can draw, which soon got out of hand: The Fantastic Four saving the Finnish Ambassador from Fred Flintstone, who’s Flinging Flaming Fajitas at his Ford Fiesta was a particular favourite.

The series started to be collected on the Comics Nexus site which widened his audience and put him on some new radars, one of which was ready to pick up on this:

That’s Joss Whedon. If you’re not aware of him he created Buffy The Vampire Slayer and is the recipient of serious hardcore fandom adoration. The people who like Joss Whedon have a rather popular website – Whedonesque – and this was soon driving traffic Neill’s way.

By the time he’d completed the series he’d amassed a pretty large readership but also some pretty large bandwidth bills due to him hosting the images himself (tip – use Flickr for this sort of thing, ala Laugh Out Loud Cats and Stormtroopers 365, and embed the images in your blog – you’ll double the audience and save yourself a bill) so he made up some posters to sell, copyright be damned. A limited edition of 250, each with a sketch, for £10 each. And he made the high resolution file available to download should anyone want to print their own (sans sketch, obviously).

He sold out pretty quickly.

Any lessons we can learn from this?

Well, the first is that established pop culture icons have a value and if you play with them you can benefit from that, to a certain extent. Neill was flirting with copyright infringement here which is potentially dangerous for a freelancer who works for the companies who would defend that very copyright. But “fan art” has long been part of comic book culture and I’ve never heard of an artist, pro or amateur, being sued for this sort of work. In fact, for all it’s many faults, the US/UK comic industry is made up of fans who understand the culture that supports it. (Slavishly serving this culture might explain the shinkage of said industry, but that’s a post for another blog…) The only problem emerged when Neill came to produce a physical object – the poster – which he’d have to sell. I think the legal loophole here is he was giving it away and charging for the sketch but I wouldn’t like to be sure.

Can other artists do this sort of thing? I think so. “Fandom” has a lot of negative connotations, and rightly so as fans of sci-fi/fantasy stuff can be quite disturbingly odd at times, but I think the basic principles can apply to most fields. Fans are basically people who like a sub-set of culture a lot and are pretty knowledgeable about it.

The chances are you don’t understand why Neill’s A-Z of Awesomeness works. It doesn’t make any sense to you. But you probably have something you’re incredibly nerdy about, be it 20th century abstract painters or Eastenders or Italian horror films or whatever your cultural Specialist Subject on Mastermind might be. And the chances are there are others who are as nerdy about it as you are. And when you talk with those people you make jokes that no-one else gets but which are fricking hilarious, seriously, no really. That’s all Neill has tapped into here – the shared humour of a niche, something Jon Bounds touches on here.

The beauty of the Internet it is allows like-minded people to connect with each other, no matter how obscure their interests. If you find something amusing the chances are there are others out there who also find it amusing. I’m pretty sure than in Oxford, where Neill lives (or did the last time I sent him something by mail…) the people who find his A-Z amusing would fit in a small room. Internationally they’d fill a football stadium. The same applies for whatever makes you smile.

The trick, I think, is whether that bunch of people is connected. Comics nerds are a digitally connected community. Joss Whedon fans are an absurdly connected community. Neill was able to ride those connections with relative ease. How connected are Rothko fans? (genuine question – I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re pretty well connected.) If you’re a painter who loves Rothko could you do something that rides that network?

The thing about the A-Z was it took up a lot of time. As he said in the introduction, he was looking for something to recharge the batteries for a month before moving on to new work so you could think of it as a sabbatical. This means it doesn’t come under my Creating Byproducts definition. His next project does though.

Hashtag Funnies really is a byproduct. Every morning, before he starts work properly, he spends an hour drawing a comic using a trending topic on Twitter as his starting point. He then posts it to Twitter. This is like an athlete sharing their exercises (although this isn’t too far fetched – Dave Harte tweets his daily runs) in that it’s part of the process. He’s not doing any extra work and, if anything, the discipline of producing something good enough to share every day will make his work better.

He doesn’t worry about what the hashtag means (and frankly no-one should worry about what trending topics on Twitter mean) – it just a parlour game. Pick a card and draw a page.

Again, this isn’t anything particularly revolutionary. Artists have been sharing their sketches and practice work for a while now. The difference is Neil has realised he could turn his warm-up into an actual things that people might want to read. (I’m resisting using the word “productize” because it’s not a word, so I won’t.) So far the stats aren’t amazing (47 views for #tellmewhy and 37 views for #chocolatemilk, not including visits to the blog) but that doesn’t really matter. If it finds its audience then great. If it doesn’t then it’s not as waste as Neill would have spent that warm-up hour drawing anyway.

Dave Shelton, another bald male glasses wearing cartoonist I have a lot of time for, has a blog which he posts sketches to. They’re fantastic sketches and I would never want him to stop, but they’re still sketches. For whatever reason Neill Cameron doesn’t post sketches that much – he posts things that are more complete, that have a story or a joke or some hook which make people smile and want to share them.

And that is why I find his online activity interesting.