Here are the comic pages that I’ve found this last week.
The Detroit News has added Keith Knight’s The Knight Life to it’s line up.
The News Tribune, (Tacoma, WA) is adding Zits, Baby Blues, and Pooch Cafe. To make room, Mary Worth, B.C. and World of Wonder are being dropped. The paper said the change was necessary to save money and make room for more local material.
Tundra has been picked up by two more papers: Pittsburgh Post Gazette and The Day in New London, CT
Over at the Patriot-News, we’re running Cul de Sac for a two-week trial run …
It won’t poll well. Cul de Sac has been pulled from several papers already. The comics’ audience is getting very fickle these days. Kinda sad.
I really like cul des sac but if it’s left up to a poll – forget it. Polls are so easily manipulated in so many different ways. Have to think it’s almost impossible to get meaningful results from those things.
I’ve said it before many times, polls are crooked.
A small core of fans (whether addled old coots or middle-aged emo ladies) who have nothing better to do with their time can flood the boards with fake results – don’t forget it only takes a dozen to sway an editor- and keep their favourite strip in a paper at the expense of a talented newcomer who hasn’t had time to develop a following.
It happens, I have seen it at first hand, it’s not a rumour, it’s not speculation on my part – it’s fact. Polls are a complete waste of time. Editors should make their own choices, or (if they are not confident of their own tastes in the matter) appoint someone whose taste they admire.
“a small core of fans (whether addled old coots or middle aged emo ladies) who have nothing better to do with their time can flood the board with fake results”
That is not typically the demographic flooding internet polls – they write editors complaint letters. The poll flooders are young “hip” internet types.
“Polls are a complete waste of time. Editors should make their own choices…”
Oh, you mean for them to do the job they were hired to do… like they do FOR EVERYTHING ELSE IN THE PAPER?
What a concept.
More and more, editors are relying on polls or responses on online message boards to make comic strip decisions. And some cartoonists have gotten wise to that and have come up with ways to manipulate the system, not that it’s difficult. I mean, how tough is it to send a mass email to a fanbase and say, “everybody go here and say nice things about me!” What has me especially bugged is they don’t stop at complimenting their “favorite” strip, but they target certain other strips in that paper, giving the editor an excuse to drop. It’s really a shame that excellent comics like CUL DE SAC won’t get their just due because of this nonsense. Editors, please wise up!
It reminds one of the Salem Witch hunts once a group of people discovered they had power and abused it. How many new strips have we seen fold in the last year because they failed to gain a foothold? How much of that has to do with those “older readers” we always hear about and how much is internet sandbagging? It is cannibalistic and the strips that are suffering are not the long established strips – they aren’t going anywhere – it’s the newer strips that get sacrificed because the editors know there will be less fallout when cancelling a strip that has not yet had a chance to build up it’s fan base.
Another annoying thing about these polls etc. is that instead of just asking readers if they would like a larger comics section, the papers usually want readers to “vote strips off the island” opening the door for just the abuses Mark described. With the “Survivor” reality TV vibe everpresent today some folks really get a kick out of taking some comic strips down for the fun of it. They almost never actually read the paper in question. They also don’t seem to care that they are messing with the cartoonist’s livelyhood.
” I mean, how tough is it to send a mass email to a fanbase and say, ‘everybody go here and say nice things about me!'”
Mark, any time you need a mass fanbase email, just say the word!