Nice interview with Gary Panter, contributor to the Seminal Raw and a designer of Pee Wee's playhouse.
KELLY: You mentioned Mark Beyer a few moments ago. I always find it kind of disappointing that you stop seeing his stuff after a while.
PANTER: The weird thing about cartooning is — and I compare it to poetry and short-story writing — is that the rewards are similar. There's just not many rewards for doing it. There's the personal satisfaction and the meeting people, and that's cool. But financially, it's extremely hard to do comics and justify it in any way. Anything I do in comics just totally puts me at risk of going under financially. It takes hundreds of hours to do. It's hard and takes a lot of time, and I'm sure that's what happened with Mark. I imagine he's out there drawing cartoons somewhere or painting paintings, but no one's beating his door down lauding him as the great artist that he is. And there's a lot of great artists like that. One needs to be a kind of salesman as well as a business man, and very few sensitive artists are.
