Arts Entrepreneurship Podcast: Making Art Work · Nick Petrella and Andy Heise

#362: Dan Gorman (Illustrator and Comic Artist) (pt. 2 of 2)

·39 min·2 clips

Dan Gorman treats comic-con tables as a marketing investment, not a sales channel, and always leaves with a connection.

1. Part 2 of the Arts Entrepreneurship Podcast's interview with Dan Gorman (Episode #362) covers his multiple LLCs, Route 8 Studios, fee structures, and running Akron Comic-Con. 2. Hosts Andy Heiss and Nick Petrella talk with Gorman, a Cleveland Institute of Art medical illustration BFA who has sketched for over 15 years and worked on more than 150 licensed trading card sets. 3. The central thread is how a working illustrator balances client work, ownership stakes and community-building, with Gorman saying 'the only way out of a situation is through it' when he takes on projects that feel wrong. 4. Gorman holds three LLCs (a Comic-Con business with partner Jason Miller, a ghost hunt team in Canton, and Route 8) and learned business basics from Miller and nine years at a law firm, though he wishes he had known how much LLCs complicate taxes. 5. Route 8 Studios was meant as an outlet for personal projects, but clients now request Gorman or co-lead Damien Kendrick by name, so he hands work to interns and Kent State students, including Emma Patch on inks. 6. He sets fees by what a project can afford rather than strict industry rates, and sometimes crowdfunds work through Kickstarter; he also describes the National Cartoonist Society, which he joined around 2017-2018 after Polly Keener, his Akron cartooning teacher from age 10, sponsored him. 7. Gorman describes running Akron Comic-Con, with about 140 vendors, host hotel and guest contracts, work that continues 365 days a year, and twice having to remove upset vendors with security. 8. He says his career was jumpstarted by Steel City Con in Pittsburgh in 2006, which led to his first paid published work four years later, and he tells artists to treat table fees and travel as marketing rather than expecting sales. 9. He also discusses his ghost hunt team, which helps locations like the Canton Palace Theater market paranormal investigations, and says his team appeared in the Prospect Place episode of Ghost Adventures. 10. Suited to freelance artists, comic creators and students weighing conventions and business structures.

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