The Story Behind Salad Bar Exam Cartoon & Gifts by Londons Times Cartoons

When I launched LTCartoons.com in 1997, everything we did was in black and white. We felt newspapers would “make or break us”, and for many years that was true in cartooning. We heard every excuse from “Your cartoons simply are not family-oriented enough” to “Nobody really would understand them…they’re kind of ‘out there’.” Yada yada. I worked with an artist named Richard Larson (no relation to Gary).  Newspapers just wouldn’t touch us. We didn’t take it personally. On any given day there were approximately 100,000 cartoons competing with us (and still are).

On the other hand we were getting amazingly positive feedback from families (even kids of all ages), and on the Internet within a year they were relatively well-known. We finally decided to do color and a t-shirt manufacturer in San Diego paid us $10,000 for the rights to 12 images (by then we were doing color); convinced newspapers were not going to be our bread and butter.

Peanuts creator Charles “Sparky” Schulz advised me that if I was ever to make any money in cartooning, it would not be from newspapers; they merely paid peanuts (no pun intended). He said the real money was in licensed goods, such as Tshirts, mugs, lunch boxes etc.  So that became my focus.  When someone finally created digital design a few years after I launched the cartoon, I spent 15 hours a day learning how to design products digitally.  I have designed about 160.000 products with my mouse and keyboard.  Though it’s not rocket science, it does take a few minor skills to learn. And I’m grateful for those who helped me along with learning that process.

Still curious why so much rejection from newspapers, and downright hostile rejection letters from literary agents.  Though most of those rejection letters were “form letters”, a few added personal comments.  One of my favorite was, “That’s all I need is another failed cartoonist”.  (That came from one of New York’s biggest literary agents who has been defunct for about 8 years). 🙂

I started researching a bit, and talked to some mentors (other cartoonists who had made it) only to discover newspapers no longer were the holy grail.  The Internet, somehow was going to be the place to showcase ones work.  One simply had to be creative and figure out a way to do so (attractively) and market them properly.

I returned to school at age 47 to learn Internet Technology and Business. This helped a great deal; though most of what I learned is now outdated.  However many of the business principles remain the same and I believe always will.

I started selling signed limited edition prints on Ebay and at the time they did fairly well.  I noticed some of my most popular ones had to do with either a particular animal (such as dogs, cats, mice, chipmunks, snakes, etc). Everybody had a favorite.

Also professions were popular, and, believe it or not, nobody liked lawyer jokes (as much as lawyers).  Well most of them anyway.  They loved to laugh at themselves and many bought their fair share of legal-related cartoons.

So I decided to “outdo” myself with one called “Salad Bar Exam” which is now 14 years old. It remains our trademark cartoon and people seem to like it no matter what their profession (or lack therof).  Also many vegans and vegetarians like it too, as well as dieters who love restaurants with salad bars.  And of course just regular people like you and me who like to laugh.

Many collect my licensed items of “Salad Bar Exam” since they tend to go up in value.  They enjoy items such as Tshirts, mugs, caps, eco-friendly bags, aprons, etc.

To view entire Salad Bar Exam line of Collectibles…

The Real Story Of The Invention Of The Internet….As Told by The Real Inventor & Cartoons/& Their Inspiration by Rick London

By Londons Times Cartoons Click To Enlarge

     Sometimes people believe the story behind this cartoon and more often than not, they don’t.

     Perhaps the year was 1999. I was taking a sabbatical from cartooning but still talking about it with people because I was mainly looking for people who could lead me in the right direction.  My venture was only two years old and my site contained less than 1000 cartoons. Some of them were fairly good, but remember I was 44 and quite immature for my age, okay immature for a 25 year old’s age, but hey, I was becoming in my mind “The King Of Cartooning”.

     Along the way, online, I  met a very nice guy, a Dr. Vinton Cerf who lived in Washington, D.C as I had done for 12 years.  Vint was a Sr. VP at MCI when it was still open.

     Back then, if I remember correctly broadband was not available, or if it was it was in limited places.  Vint had AOL Online and he had my team draw a graphic of a skeleton with cobwebs sitting at his pc with an alert on his monitor “Welcome To America Online”.  Back then, that was very funny as AOL, Compuserve, NetZero and the  rest were quite slow at connecting, and felt even slower once broadband arrived.    A copy of it still sits on my site in the computer cartoon archives.

     I remember feeling a bit bad at the time because a childhood friend from 1^st and 2^nd grade, Bob Pittman, after founding and selling MTV, became CEO of AOL for a good many years.  I hope he never saw it but one never knows. I never got an ugly call from him and Vint was happy. He loved to joke about how long it took him to get on the Internet using his trustworthy, but very slow AOL.  

Custom Cartoon for Dr. Vint Cerf, Father Of The Internet by LTCartoons.com. Click to enlarge.

     Well there is more to the story.  Vint was just a sophomore at Stanford in 1969 when he came up with the idea of TCP-IP, the protocol which eventually became the Internet.  Professors and others talked him into selling the rights for awhile to the Pentagon and they called it “Arapnet”.  It was mainly an email communication device between different governmental entities.

     In 1974, Vint learned that will a bit of work, it could go public, but it would take a Congressional vote.  He approached a young (then Congressman from Tn. Named Al Gore who liked the idea and called it the Information Superhighway. 

     That same year he pushed it through Congress and the world had the Internet.  There was not a lot to it except email, bulletin boards and some domains.

     Ten years later an MIT professor named Tim Berners-Lee invented a software called the WWW which would drive the Internet into places we never dreamed imaginable. 

      Suddenly it became a major media and communication device.  The best features at that time were Yahoo!, Hotbot, email, and some bulletin boards.  There was no Google, online college, social media, or anything else that has driven it to become the most important media of our time. 

     Hence the silly little cartoon at the top of the page.  Compare it to the one we did for Vint, and you can see we’ve come a  long way baby along with that little invention of his The Internet. 

    And by the way all these years the joke was NOT on Al Gore. His exact words were, “I created the incentive to invent the Internet”, and in Washington political terms, that is exactly what he did.  Though I’m not a big Al Gore fan, I surely do get a good chuckle when some know it all jokes about Gore and the Internet and has snide know-it-all chesire grin to go with it.

By the way Dr. Vinton Cerf was selected as creative director for Google which is where he remains for about a decade now. Way to go Vint.