The (very) Humble Beginnings Of Londons Times Cartoons

I started working for cartoonist Rick London, founder of Londons Times Cartoons, when I was 21 years old and still a student at a nearby state university. I'd had a number of jobs, but he was the first boss I had that taught me pragmatic knowledge in the real world. Rick did not have a formal education, he does at the time of this writing, but the year was around 1997 or so.

He had just lost his mother to cancer, of whom he cared for for several years, and and shortly after lost his job in sales. He had nothing, and I took what he could pay me. I mostly did administrative and computer work just a few days a week at most. I was better at the computer and Internet than him (he didn't know computers at all) so we were able to help each other. He was a very savvy marketing and sales person, he just didn't know how to apply it to new venues such as the Internet. He was a fast study.

All he owned was an awful used computer, a phone line, a book called "Internet For Dummies" (which he was constantly reading), about $300 or so, and some old beat up clothes. He didn't even have a car, and was virtually homeless except for abandoned metal warehouse donated by a friend. He slept on a cold concrete floor covered by an army sleeping bag.

The two of us labored in that run-down building just outside of his hometown of Hattiesburg, Ms., where he had been ignored most of his life for being labeld "mentally ill". One would never know it; he was the kindest most gentle loving soul I'd ever met. I once told him I would have married him if he had been twenty-five years younger. He later moved away from Ms and finding advanced medical care, he discovered he did not have depression at all but something called TRD (Treatment Resistant Depression). He received a vagus nerve implant (We stayed in touch and he improved dramatically), even finishing three years of college and starting up major online stores from his cartoon venture.

He worked every day out of that abandoned tin warehouse for a year, he lived in it as well. It had a phone line and electricity. He bathed in the sink (it had no bath). He ate what food he could find and what friends brought him. He didn't get to eat every day. He was obsessed with starting what he said would be "the biggest offbeat cartoon venture ever", as he was a very big fan of Gary Larson and The Far Side. Of course nobody believed him and, in that part of the world, simply deemed him "possessed". But I knew him better. I knew he had it in him. I'd never met anyone even close to being that creative. My beliefs turned out to be facts. I am writing this ten years later.

London's cartoon collection is the biggest inventory of offbeat cartoons on the Internet and most visited and most visited site of its kind He began counting visitors in 2005 and has close to ten million now. He owns about ten or so gift and collectible stores bearing his cartoon images. The stores sell everything from tshirts to coasters to aprons bearing his cartoon images. He does not draw them. In an amazing business move, he found a team of some of the best cartoon illustrators I've ever seen, and asked them to simply work on speculation. If nothing sold, nobody made a penny. If they sold, they split the keep. In any case, Rick offered the illustration team his website, which was becoming a very visited website after a few years and a place to showcase their work and link back to their own site. But at first, if Londons Times Cartoons received fifteen visitors a day, it was a very good day. Today it receives about 4000 per hour. So if they made no sales, they easily made indirect sales from all the new publicity. And they did.

Rick is a tremendous animal lover; he took in a beautiful stray, "Thor" who recently passed away at about age 21, or so the veterinarian thinks, and this wonderful dog stayed with him through his entire venture. I spoke to Rick last week and he is still grieving. Rick gives a percentage of all pet-related cartoon gift sales to various animal causes. He never fails to. I think he should have been a vet and sometimes he agrees but says "At age 53, I will consider it in the next life, if there is one".

Rick couldn't even afford a domain for a website when he started and had to settle for a free one with interrupting pop up ads. He had one illustrator and less than fifty cartoons. Today, in 2008, as I write this, his site has over 8500 Londons Times Cartoons and stores featuring almost 100,000 cartoon items. Rick London is Horatio Alger incarnate. No doubt.

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Rick London's Offbeat Cartoon Collection The Incredible Story Of Cartoonist Rick London

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