Cartoonist Rick London, A True Horatio Alger Story

In the late 1990's I met an interesting man while I was in college in southern Mississippi. His name was Rick London who later founded the Internet icon, the offbeat Londons Times Cartoons. I had worked in several places. Rick was the first boss that had any substance as to my marketing degree. I think it is safe to say he was and is a genius. He was not educated, but learned through life's hard knocks. I was about twenty or so. Rick was in his early forties.

When I decided to go to work for Rick he had just lost his mother to cancer and also lost his job in sales at a local tv station. I did minor secretarial and organizational work, filing things, and helping keep Rick organized which was not his strong point. On the other hand, I was trying to learn marketing, and that was his strong point. It was a win-win situation even though the pay was low. The information I got from that man remains invaluable a decade later. He is as close to a hero as they come.

Rick had nothing but the shirt on his back when he started and a lot of good ideas. He had managed to say several hundred dollars from his old job, and he bought a beat-up pc for a few hundred (probably worth $25) but someone "saw him coming", he had books on the Internet, and a favorite that he was always reading was "Internet For Dummies". His stray dog "Thor" slept on a sleeping bag with him on the hard concrete floor in this horrible warehouse that he called "Corporate HQ". It was also his home for a year.

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.

Rick labored day after day from of that ugly tin warehouse for a year, as well as lived in it. Nobody would rent to him. He had access to a phone line and electricity and cold running water and that is all. 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's Far Side. Nobody trusted or believed him in his hometown simply thought he'd lost his marbles. 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. He never really cared what they believed anyway. He knew they were narrow-minded as did I.

Londons Times Cartoons is the biggest and most visited offbeat cartoon site on the Internet by far. Rick decided to put a counter up in 2005 and has close to ten million now. He owns about ten peripheral gift and collectible stores bearing his cartoon images. He does not draw them. In an incredible move, he recruited 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 these artists what 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. Of course he can afford his own domain now; in fact many domains.

Rick London is a caring person, especially when it comes to children and animals; he was always taking in strays; one was a in a beautiful dog "Thor" who recently passed away at about about 21, 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".

Horatio Alger has nothing on Rick London. Rick's cartoon site now has 8500 cartoons and his product stores about 100,000 or more products. He even has his own line of gourmet cartoon coffees and even a cartoon casual wear line of designer clothes. The man, is really just getting started mid-life. How can one not admire such a determined soul?

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Londons Times Cartoons The Incredible Story Of Cartoonist Rick London

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