The LA Times has an excellent story about the future of the comic strip, as seen by the likes of Berke Breathed, Cathy Guisewite, and Wiley Miller. They are appearing at a panel discussion in LA on Sunday.
I can’t say it better than Mr. Breathed: “ ‘I don’t think you’ll ever see another ‘Calvin & Hobbes,’ ‘Bloom County’ or ‘Doonesbury’ again,’ says Breathed, 48, who received the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning in 1987. ‘The popularity of those strips was built on a young audience great comic strips are not built on the backs of aging readers.’
“Part of the problem, Breathed and other cartoonists say, is that newspapers, when choosing their comic strip lineup, put too much emphasis on the opinions of aging readers. As a result, stalwart strips such as ‘Peanuts,’ which continues to run as a reprint since the death of Charles M. Schulz in 2000, and ‘Blondie,’ which was created in 1930 by Chic Young, tend to remain entrenched on comics pages.
“As middle-of-the-road as ‘Blondie’ is, it’s surprising to learn that it has come to represent a divisive topic in the comic strip community. Young passed away in 1973, and since then ‘Blondie’ has been carried on by his son, Dean, and is known as an example of a ‘legacy’ strip.
“‘As an art form, comics are threatened by legacy strips,’ Breathed says. ‘The fact that papers are running [legacy strips] throughout the country is a sign that they’re desperate to cling to the readers they think they need, and they’re afraid to take risks and find the new talent.’”
To complete the vicious cycle, syndicates gauge the timidity of newspaper editors, and as a result, choose only the blandest offerings to syndicate.
That means even the bravest newspaper editor has a watered-down selection to choose from if he or she actually wants to find some new talent for the comics page.
In response, Denise Joyce, president of the American Association of Sunday and Feature Editors, “says that while comics are not the huge player they used to be 20 or 30 years ago, they are definitely on the minds of features editors.”
“Regarding legacy strips, Joyce admits it’s difficult to replace them without making their fans angry. As a compromise, Joyce says her paper is running some comics online and Web-linking to others.”
Of course, once their newspaper readers discover comics published on the Web, they’re bound to discover a much wider world of comics that aren’t available in their newspapers, aren’t they? Comics that are neither watered-down nor timid.
So, in a way, people like me are indebted to the myopia of people like Ms. Joyce.
You keep sending them, Ms. Joyce, and I’ll keep keeping them.
Read the whole story.
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Transcript
Panel 1
Caption: Meanwhile, at Evil Inc…
Miss Match (walking in foreground)
Lightning Lady (in background): Psst. Come here…
Panel 2
Lightning Lady: You’re gonna hear about this today…
Lightning Lady: It’s better it’s from me.
Panel 3
Miss Match (holding phone): So what? A waitress spilled soup on Cap…
Lightning Lady: Read the comments.
Panel 4
Miss Match (angrily, as the phone in her hands erupts into flames): Meet-cute?! What the fuck is a “meet-cute”?!
Iron Dragon is walking by and sees this happening.
Panel 5
Iron Dragon: A meet-cute is when two characters in a romantic movie meet for the first time in a charming or embarrassing way.
Iron Dragon: Surgat loves rom-coms.
Panel 6
Miss Match (annoyed): I guess you think you’re pretty smart, huh?
Panel 7
Iron Dragon: No.
Panel 8
Iron Dragon (looking at phone, smoldering in Miss Match’s hands):
If I were smart, I wouldn’t have let Lightning Lady borrow my phone this morning.
I’m running a Spice Rack Comics Showcase on Patreon — a creator-by-creator spotlight featuring samples from every artist in the collective.
So far, I’ve highlighted:
• The Cummoner — delightfully unhinged fantasy filth
• Pixie Trix — sexy mischief wrapped in razor-sharp humor
And we’re just getting started.
By the time the dust settles, I will have shared 87 pages of NSFW comics with Patreon backers — all pulled from the massive Spice Rack sampler PDF. It’s a fantastic way to discover new creators, expand your reading list, and support the indie adult-comics community.
If you’re a Patreon backer, keep an eye out — more artists are being featured every few days, and some of these comics absolutely go places.
(And if you’re not a backer yet… this is a pretty great month to give yourself a gift.)
