The Mark of Collins

Since social media began, it has had an instant appeal to marketing folks for the free and massive audience it can provide. Corporations began seeing the potential in public relations and advertising too, and a forward-thinking marketing professional, Rich Levin, being a big fan of cartoons, came up with the notion of using them in his campaigns. Yay!

Cartoons are always eye-catching and fun, lightening up the driest of subjects with a gag, and some, no, a lot of companies are engaged in products or services that would put a rock to sleep. The dilemma for the cartoonist is to find the humor in them.

Tom Fishburne was and still is, I’m assuming, a successful social media marketing cartoonist for companies around the globe. His Marketoonist website offers toons for all sorts of aspects of the business world. Check him out.

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why create a website for a phantom? Well, if you know anything about me, and I think you do, you know I have worked for some notorious publications in my time. Companies might be sensitive toward that, so to make sure that never becomes a concern, I donned a pen name and web presence to insulate my cartoon endeavors from each other.

Mark O’Collin is a mix of my middle name and my family’s original Irish surname. George Trosley, the cartoonist, was the first to say that it sounded like The Mark of Collins. As in the Mark of Zorro, the early sixties Disney show with Guy Williams playing the role of the dashing swordsman of old Mexico, Zorro.

For a time, I tried my hand at infographics, which is a discipline all its own, lemme tell ya, but I learned how, just like I learned how to create e-books, I had the motivation of sheer financial necessity to keep me focused.

Infotoons convey a lot of information through images, text, and graphic design elements to tell a story and educate the reader on any subject imaginable. A cartoon infographic adds the element of humor and draftsmanship. And it has to be funny. That’s a lot going on at once.

Those were always a lot of work. I have not looked at them in a long time, and I’m amazed how much effort I put into them! Back then, I was reinventing myself after my magazine work went south, and I was putting everything into the work I could to keep the assignments coming in regularly.

I worked for a long list of clients, some of them listed here on the website’s Clients page, but many more came and went for many years, leaving just one still at the present: Axiom On-line Legal Service Providers. The cartoons are mostly used on Linked-In and may be elsewhere too.

Check out my Collinstoons.com website for a ton of other “sociamedimarketoonings” things! You might not get some of the jokes if you aren’t working in the fields of healthcare insurance, business software, or retail real estate investments, but I tried my best to come up with humor that would get a laugh out of someone who was. It turns out, those folks are starved for humor in their work-a-day worlds, and it also turned out that it didn’t take much for me to supply them with a smile.

They in turn supplied me with an income in a tough period of my career when I was starting over completely, blazing a new trail that I didn’t see coming, which I have done several times in the past half-century of putting pencil to paper. Cartoon opportunities seemingly fell from the heavens without me having to do much except hop on board and hold on.

I’m thankful for the breaks I’ve been blessed with. It has always been tough to get breaks in this business. You either have to be very good or very lucky, and I think I have a bit o’ both.

Cheers! —Mark