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Retro Geek ends run

Alan Gardner81 mins

Retro Geek, the newly launched feature by Steve Dickenson and Todd Clark has ended as of yesterday’s strip. According to Jan Guszynski, Director of Marketing for Tribune Media Services, the two creators made a decision to pursue other joint and independent projects.

8 thoughts on “Retro Geek ends run”

  2. Not sorry to see this contrived strip end. Based on the samples I went through, it was lame dialogue with xerox-quality clip art. Awful.

    I hate Lola, too. But at least that’s original art I can dislike, not lame clip-art style.

    Shame on everyone involved with this strip…

  3. When Todd Clark took sole custody of Lola earlier this year I asked him about that and about Retro Geek. Responding to the Retro Geek inquiry he said,
    “It’s quite a combination of things on retro Geek. Some images early on
    we bought from sites that specialize in that stuff. Very pricey to get
    permission for what we’re doing with them. Lately we’ve found a small
    goldmine of very old magazines that everything inside is pd at this
    point, so we’re scanning old images and photos and rendering the art
    ourselves. Some thru tricks in photoshop, others painstakingly drawn
    and retraced on the lightbox. No two are really done exactly the
    same. it’s been quite a learning experience on legal issues and just
    working the art itself. Actually pretty fun.”

    The last week of Retro Geek had a new website listed:
    http://retrogeekthecomicstrip.com/

    As for the shortest syndicated strip…
    for the modern age it seems to be a tie between
    Retro Geek and Pete Murphy’s Hippy and Pop.
    Both started January 7 – Retro Geek ended March 30th
    and Hippy and Pop ended March 31st; but Retro Geek
    had a Leap Day the H&P didn’t.

    A complete Hippy and Pop archive at
    http://www.geocities.com/hippyandpop/thestrips.html
    A complete Retro Geek archive at
    http://www.tmsfeatures.com/tmsfeatures/subcategory.jsp?catid=2046

    Please forgive all the links.

  4. Hmm, I hadn’t even heard of this until now. Looking through the archives, it doesn’t look like I missed much. I don’t care much for clipart comics in general, though, Wondermark does a good job with this type of style. It’s certainly more entertaining.

  5. Retro Geek isn’t a bad idea, and it’s also not without humour, but I would have flagged this straight away as one for the “too hard” basket.

    It has limited appeal, its target audience being the small proportion of comics readers who “get” the concept, plus the act of putting together all the retro-style art was ten times harder than drawing it from scratch.

  7. Retro Geek was amusing, or at least I thought so. The problem is that like similar strips, its appeal is limited and it just couldn’t survive in the “big leagues.” I doubt any of our photo-manipulated strips, except perhaps Wondermark, could.

  8. I had high hopes for Retro Geek, but the writing was too lukewarm and predictable for me.

    It was also unfortunate that much of the clipart was grotesquely distorted to fit into the dimensions of a rigid comic-strip format. When the clipart fit nicely, it was beautiful… but when it didn’t, it was horrendous to look at.

    Steve Dickenson looks like Kevin Bacon!

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