Changing the Rules of Syndication
Lazarus spoke as a freeman. In 1957, he’d taken Miss Peach to the old Herald-Tribune Syndicate and been offered the usual terms: a long-term contract with automatic rollover provisions binding the cartoonist to the syndicate essentially forever. And the syndicate would own the strip. “I picked up the drawings and went home,” says Lazarus. “I constitutionally couldn’t do such a thing.”
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“I started out with a Radio Shack telephone, a Rolodex, a one-room office, and two actors helping me out part-time,” Newcombe told us the other day. What he needed now was talent. He quickly signed up an old friend of his, someone he’d met through his father, Leo Newcombe, the former general manager of the Sun- Times.
“I couldn’t have done it without her,” Newcombe told us. “The fact that she appeared in 1,200 newspapers meant that Creators suddenly had 1,200 newspaper clients overnight.” Johnny Hart’s B.C. came next, followed by Herblock, and Mell Lazarus brought his two strips aboard. Now Newcombe says Creators is the syndication industry’s sixth biggest; a recent Editor & Publisher survey of the 1988 year in syndication was little more than a list of his acquisitions: Lazarus, the Archie strip, columnists Joe Bob Briggs and Percy Ross, editorial cartoonist Mike Luckovich, and Doug Marlette, who draws both editorial cartoons and the strip Kudzu.
“I took it around to the major syndicates,” says Batiuk, “and what you were basically faced with, if you wanted to get into the game at all, your ticket of admission was signing away all your creations to the people who syndicate you.”
Mell Lazarus runs a sort of hotline for the National Cartoonists Society. He tells new cartoonists negotiating their first contracts what they’re entitled to.
George and the Night Visitor
