An unusual service!
Rick Jones, the founder of Absolute Graphix, once earned a living as a cartoonist. It's true! It was something of a career diversion for a short while but during the 1990s Rick spent his days doodling cartoons and getting paid for it by magazine editors, advertising managers, and publishers. It was a tough living, but a fun job. Now, Rick has dusted off those old pens and pencils and is offering a cartoon illustration service via Absolute Graphix.
But what possible use is a cartoon to a business?
The answer to this is that a well-drawn cartoon image attracts the right sort of attention, it presents a sense of fun and simplicity, it follows an age-old tradition in advertising, and most importantly, cartoons offer a truly outstanding communication technique that everybody instantly understands. This is one of the reasons why so many advertisers still use them - they deliver their message with aggressive efficiency, while keeping the mood light and informal. So, the answer is that cartoons can really be useful in real business applications! And don't forget - it's an original piece of art that no other business will have. It's not clip-art! This means that it can provide a real mark of distinction in your advertising or graphics.
How do you order a cartoon?
Chances are you may have never ordered a cartoon before, but it's very easy. Just call us with your thoughts and ideas, telling us what you'd like to achieve, and we'll give you advice on how best to proceed and what the costs are likely to be. Prices can be as low as £50.00 plus VAT for a simple illustration; a small investment for what could be a pretty decent return.
Wanna see some old work? Of course you do...
Be warned - some of this work is pretty old - I will endeavour to get more work scanned and on display as time allows, plus any new work that comes along will be added.
| Commecial / Advertising Cartoons |
The Car Clinic was doodled for a small garage in Byfleet and was used on all of their leaflets and business cards. |
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The Little Computers were commissioned and paid for by King Features, London, but I never saw what it ended up being used for. Shame really, this was quite a common outcome, and it was actually quite rare for me to see my cartoons in their final published format. |
This set of simple cartoon doodles was commissioned and paid for by Total Marketing Concepts in Canterbury and was used for one of their client's advertising campaigns in magazines and local newspapers. The mammoth even ended up on a TV advert. |
Siegi's Comics and Bags was a comic shop in Canterbury, now long since gone. I was commissioned to create a whole series of comic book style adverts featuring popular characters such as Batman. |
Tenant's Handbook, for Maidstone Council. This booklet was designed and printed by White Horse Press, and I was asked to provide around 20 cartoons of characters that were basically hands. It was a "handbook" - get it? The cartoons were used for all chapters and supplementary illustrations. This was an unusual and fun commission. |
Some basic cartoon doodles used in Maidstone Council's waste information leaflets. |
Pencil cases. This was a pretty good job for me, as the work (which was commissioned by a printing company in Thanet, whose name I have unfortunately forgotten) ended up being printed onto kid's pencil cases and sold in WHSmith, among other places. |
| Panto Work |
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New World Productions, famous for their amazing pantos and Christmas shows, have commissioned several high spec cartoon illustrations to use on programme covers, posters, advertising flyers, magazine ads, and so on. Their work was always great fun to do and gave me a good excuse to lock myself away watching cartoons - for research purposes of course! |
| Newspapers and magazines |
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These snowmen gags are, personally, among the most significant work I did. Why? Well, I was always determined to get at least one cartoon in the Sun newspaper's SUN FUN cartoon column. It tooks many hundreds of submissions, rejection blues, and determination, then one Christmas it all finally paid off. They only paid (at the time) £25 per cartoon but it was the sweetest fifty quid I ever earned! Having a cartoon published in a national newspaper also somehow legitimizes you as a cartoonist. After these, I started getting work published in The Jester, a renowned "trade magazine" for cartoonists. |
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Gags! I was never the best gag writer in the world but I gave it a good go and managed to make a few people smile. Drone magazine published quite a few of my gags (I've only shown a few here but I did hundreds of them) and they seemed to go down well. I even got a few fan letters which was nice! |
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Strip cartoons were always a good way to earn a few extra quid each month. The unfortunate reality is that you tended to draw far more than actually got published (editors can be ruthless people) but I did have a lot of strips published in magazines such as Drone, Modeler's Resource, Forean Times, UFO Magazine, Star Voyager, Around Canterbury, The Dover Express, Your Cat, Digital Photo User, and many others. This was my "bread and butter" work which kept the fridge full. |
| Greeting Cards |
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Sadly, I never quite made it into the greeting card market despite a few good efforts, but I did end up drawing and making my own cards for people out of the work I did. |
| Signs and Graphics |
I've even doodled cartoons that ended up on vans! |
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