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Barkeater Lake comes to end

1 minute 25 comments

Corey Pandolph announced on the R.A.C.s that he is ending his comic strip Barkeater Lake on the 6th of January. The comic strip has been featured on comics.com for the last three years. Corey cited as other opportunities and projects have emerged that his comic strip has faded in importance. Corey mentions among some of the projects he’s now involved in:

I’ll still write for DAW when I can, do Evil Robot for Mad Magazine and continue to further my comedic career. I have some animated shorts out there being considered and I just started writing and co-producing a sketch comedy and stand up show here in Portland.

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Comments 25

  1. Randolph’s lack of enthusiasm for Barkeater Lake showed. I gave up on the strip because I got tired of storylines getting interrupted or outright reset right in the middle.

  2. I’ll miss banks and everyone else. This strip had enormous potential.

  3. I loved this strip and will really miss it!

  4. I LIVED for Banks… and I loved Winston 🙂 the poor sot! I am sorry to see this comic come to an end – it’s a sad day when any strip meets its demise… we need so much more humor in our lives!!!!

  5. I hate guys that do this. Bloom County is a good example. They get everyone excited in what they can do with art and a story line and then after your attention to their work launches a killer career for them they dump the ‘Toon. Too busy they say, too many peripheral opportunities. Yeah, right ink slinger. We got you where you are and then you jerk the rug out after we’ve been day to day, year to year readers. Piss Off.

  6. I think the comparison with Bloom County is a bad one. That was a successful Pulitzer Prize winning comic strip that made its creator a rich man.
    Barkeater Lake was a webcomic with two newspapers running the strip. How long did you expect Corey to produce this loss leader that was probably taking up half his creative energies. He ran it for almost three years (not counting his predecessor Social Order for years before that); he gave it his best shot. I don’t blame him for moving on, perhaps to something that can support a lifestyle.

  7. Thank you D.D. Very well said.

  8. I’ll second that.

    All the fans in the world can’t keep a strip going if they’re all reading it for free.

  9. I’m dubious to the sincerity of MarkC’s remarks. Methinks he doth protest too much,

  10. As do I Anon. Berke Breathed gave Bloom County a pretty good run and when he felt he was getting burnt out he stopped it to work specifically on Outland. As much as I would love to have Breathed’s kind of success I can’t fault the man for wanting to do something different when he felt he couldn’t say much more with his strip.

  11. Thanks for your comments, good and bad. Thanks for reading the strip as well. The decision to the plug was not easy, but as D.D. mentioned, the strip took too much time for nearly no money. While I agree a labor of love is worth doing money or no, I do still have to pay for the little things. Like food and beer.

    On a “scoop” note, I own the http://www.barkeaterlake.com name and am toying with the idea of bringing it back on my own. I’ll keep you all posted.

    Cheers!

    Corey

  12. Sorry to see you pull the plug on Barkeater Lake. I enjoyed the quirkiness. I also enjoyed the thought of getting away from this rat race to a simpler, if more weird, life.

  13. I can respect his decision to stop. But how about takeing a page from “Sheldon” and moving the strip from syndication to the web. Advertising revenues!
    Thanks for all the good times.

  14. I don’t know where you guys get to see your comics for free. I’m sure there are many places if you look hard enough. But I pay to get emails from a couple of different places. So to say that the ‘toon man is making no money is wrong. I’m paying for the service and they should be paying to move the comics through the system. So Randolph should be making money. Besides all that, I have a right to my opinion whether any of you like it or not. I liked the damn comic strip and paid to get to see it.

  15. MarkC,

    You certainly are entitled to your opinion. As for the paid subscription service, I believe comics.com charges you around $12 per year for a subscription and it includes something like 4 or 5 comics in your email? Now that has to be divided up between those 4 or 5 comics you chose.

    So, after United Media takes their 50% and the money is divided up to your chosen subs, we get pennies. I think I had around 5000 subscribers near the end and my last statement said I got $48.31 from subscriptions. That’s per month. Add in a few pieces of merchandise and the google ads in the comics.com site, and my last check was $248.46. And that’s high. Usual checks were under $200.

    Now, when I was really putting in the necessary time for the strip, it would take me about 30 to 40 hours a week to complete 6 dailies and one Sunday.

    You do the math. That leaves little time, if any to make any additional supplemental income for the month.

    Thanks for liking and reading the strip.

    FYI, my last name is spelled “Pandolph”

  16. Dude, I almost loved that goofy ass comic strip. When those squirrels went on manuevers it was the funniest comic strip in the world. One of the coolest things was when you drew the characters as real people in sketches and the ‘toon characters freaked out about the look of the sketch. If “Over the Hedge” can be made into a movie how about a much funnier strip called Barkeater?

  17. Corey, I really hadn’t seenthe strip until this article came up, and I just read through the last month of them. I’m saud to see you go, since the strip was very good and there are plenty of bad ones that cling to life like a tick on a mangy dog.

    Was Barkeater Lake in any newspapers? The money you say you were making, if it was only coming from Comics.com is peanuts! That really can only barely cover materials, can it? (if you don’t mind my asking)

    I wish you luck in Grad school and hope you may find the time to bring BL back in the future.

  18. Two newspapers ran “Barkeater Lake” through self-syndication (United Features only posted the strip on their comics.com website)

  19. I am saddened by this. When Barkeater Lake first came out, I was blown away by its originality. But, as the strip went on, as a reader I grew frustrated. Story lines I had followed closely were abandonned. Plus, there were frequent times when the strip would simply repeat itself. I will miss the characters. I guess this is one of the sad lessons of how difficult it is to break into comics and make money on it.

  20. Dang! Such potential, such great characters, such funny situations, but it was obviously not a priority of Corey’s…

    Rest in Peace, Barkeater Lake… We hardly knew ye…

  21. I’ll miss BL. I hated the weekend because there was no Sunday edition. The characters were unique and had interesting backstories. Sure, there was a talking dog, but he had integrity and common sense(and a pilot’s license!). Even a character like Sabrina, who might seem one-dimensional at first, was hysterical in the setting of BL. Hope you do something further with it on the web. Bacon will not be the same without it.

  22. Sorry things didn’t work out for you Corey, your strip was great. Sorry to see it go.

  24. I really hate to see this strip come to an end. It was a great way to start my workday. Best of luck to you in your future endeavors.

  25. As someone who grew up with Alley Opp and Lil Abner, I can say I’ve read lots of strips thru the years and have favorites and have some I will not read again. Barkeater Lake is one I will definately miss, I enjoy it! It is original and has such a variety of characters that a story line can go anywhere. Hopefully it will reappear someday. Thank you for keeping it going as long as you have.

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