Too young. You don’t qualify. I doubt you’d pitch a fit if anyone replaced ‘Crock’ with ‘Get Fuzzy’.
I’d pitch a fit if someone replaced “Get Fuzzy” with “Crock”. However, I do think that Get Fuzzy needs to be replaced, which saddens me. It seems to have lost its funny somewhere, and is now just surreal.
The Web is the only place for good comic strips these days. Period.
Agreed about that. Plus the creator doesn’t really have a sense of comic timing/pacing at all-as a result the strip often suffocates from an overload of themes & dialogue.
Actual editor checking in here to report another discouraging factor: money.
Very long post follows:
As news editor of a small daily, the managing editor happily hands over responsibility for the comics page to me, because I care about it.
The publisher is not particularly a comics fan, but recognizes their importance. She just wants two things:
1. No negative calls from readers and
2. No more money for comics than we are currently spending
That’s what makes it tough. We get the majority of our comics from United Media (United Features and the old NEA - Newspaper Enterprise Association.)
Its a big package deal. We get the following:
Alley Oop Dailies
Arlo and Janis Dailies
Ask Mr. Know-It-All
Astro-Graph
Big Nate Dailies
Born Loser Dailies, The
Byron York
Celebrity Cipher
Cokie Roberts and Steven V. Roberts NEA
Consumer Reports
Cow and Boy Dailies
Diana West
Donna Brazile NEA
Dr. Gott
Drew Litton Editorial Cartoons
Eat In and Save (formerly NEA Food)
Ed Stein Editorial Cartoons
Etta Hulme Editorial Cartoons
Frank and Ernest Dailies
Frugal Living
Gene Lyons
Grizzwells Dailies, The
Herman Dailies
Jeff Stahler Editorial Cartoons
Jerry Holbert Editorial Cartoons
Kathryn Jean Lopez
Kit ‘N’ Carlyle Dailies
Moderately Confused
Monty Dailies
Morton Kondracke - NEA
NEA Bridge
NEA Column Closers
NEA Crossword Puzzle
NEA FULL SERVICE PKG
NEA Holiday Gift Guide
NEA Holiday Strip: Luann
NEA Monthly Update
NEA Specials
Next Steps (R) NEA
On Religion
Peanuts Christmas Countdown
Peanuts Classics Dailies
Peanuts Rock the Vote
Peanuts Tall Dailies
Robert Ariail Editorial Cartoons
Shortcuts
Smart Money
Soup to Nutz Dailies
Sweet Land of Liberty
Today’s NEA Billboard
Truth About Money
Village Idiot
World Almanac Databank
There’s a tremendous savings to this package over the a la carte costs of the individual features. Of course, it includes many columns, features and comics that we don’t carry, but it does include all our five editorial cartoonists and six political columnists, the crossword, bridge column and medical column.
And the syndicate is very clear: no substitutions are allowed. We can’t even trade in two or three mediocre strips for one good one. I know, I’ve tried. It’s a take-it-or-leave-it thing.
We do buy a la carte from King Features - Blondie and Dennis the Menace. But those are legacies from decades. The publisher is afraid that if I ask to even switch to a different strip for the same money, they will use that as an excuse to hike our rates.
In the nine years I’ve been dealing with the comics, I have only been able to convince the editor to add the cost of one new strip, Leigh Rubin’s Rubes, and that was only after a sustained campaign of beautifully parsed logical arguments whining on my part. With declining revenues, that’s not going to happen again.
I was able to make one positive contribution though. Our paper took a major reduction in size earlier this year. That made the six columns of our page layout even narrower. And since comics have long been running in a three-column-wide format, they were set to get significantly smaller. So I did a redesign of the page. We are now running the comics four columns wide, which increased the relative size of each strip from what they were before the downsizing. The other two columns we fill with panel cartoons and the crossword.
As you can see from the list above, we have a choice of the “classic” or the “tall” Peanuts. Classics are proportioned the way they were before a previous size reduction in the standard newspaper page. The tall ones are proportioned more for skinnier widths.
So I’m running the classic Peanuts across the whole six columns at the top of the page. Not only does it unify the page, but it gives readers a choice. The state’s major daily, which has a decent circulation in our town, just 90 miles from the big city, runs the tall Peanuts, which have a different strip each day than the classic Peanuts. It’s a minor thing, but the reader who buys both the big city daily and ours will see two different Peanuts strip. One tiny incentive to buy us as well.
People really like the larger sized strips and the way they look on the page, which is some consolation. Now if we could just upgrade the content…
One other development. Creator’s Syndicate now offers newspapers the opportunity to run all of their comics on the newspapers’ websites with no cash out of pocket for the newspapers. They send templates which automatically pick up fresh comics every day. All they want in return is to run an ad on each comics page and take the revenue from that. They also provide space on each comic page for us to sell ads ourselves and keep the revenue. Its an interesting model.
Sreators Syndicate seems to be the most xartoonist friendly of the bunch. Does it seem like that from your perspective, Hometownboy?
Quite the opposite. I’m not informed enough beyond hearsay, but I’ve heard other cartoonists refer to them as “the bottom feeders of the syndicate world.” They’ve been said to offer dirt cheap rates to newspapers for their strips, which, in turn, short-changes the artists.