» E&P is reporting that the Village Voice Media is “suspending all of its syndicated cartoons” across its alt-weekly chain. The decision hits Dan Perkins (Tom Tomorrow)’s This Modern World who loses 12 or so clients in one fell swoop
» I received word after posting yesterday’s comic page changes that Darrin Bell’s Candorville has been reinstated at The Seattle Times last week. This was the second time that it had been dropped in the last few years, but each time readers bring it back.
» On the web side of things, Steven Cloud’s Boy On a Stick and Slither will be leaving comics.com on February 4. Steven tells me that he has no desire to be syndicated and will pursue independent (webcomic) path for his creation. You can continue to follow it on his website.
» Comic Book Resources has posted a press release stating that Last Kiss, a tri-weekly feature, has debuted on GoComics.com. The feature is drawn in an old romance comic art with a more modern edge in dialog. The four that have been posted are quite good. Last Kiss is created by John Lustig.
Actually Last Kiss IS romance comics – Lustig bought old Charlton story rights and repurposes the artwork. I quite like it.
Extreme good wishes to Mr. Cloud!
It’s all good. But it’s not exactly that I didn’t want to be syndicated. It was that the offer wasn’t there. That being the case, I’d rather be independent. No hard feelings or anything.
“Candorville” replaced “Lola” by Todd Clark in The Seattle Times. Darrin’s lucky the PI didn’t pick it up…
I never really had the bug to be syndicated either, though I did self-syndicate to alt weeklies beginning in the late 70s and continue with some of those papers to this day. That’s how I came up. But a few years ago independent weeklies began selling off to chains and their focus turned to lifestyle and entertainment content. Instead of honest to god editors and art directors, the business was slowly taken over by trendy bean counters, the the brilliant folks who today are letting cartoonists go all across the country, thus murdering their increasingly shaky content further.
What kills me is they all act as if cartoonists represent nothing more than inconvenient overhead, when in fact the twenty bucks a week they are saving will never save a single paper from going under.
So I changed my focus then and concentrated on getting more magazine work while retaining as much biz with the alt press as I could.( A first love thing.) That approach has worked well for me. But there sure is a lot of writing on the wall. The Creative Loafing chain, which bought both the Chicago Reader and the Washington City Paper less than two years ago is in Chapter 11 and I suspect that whole raft of periodicals will simply cease to exist, as will the chain that let Dan Perkins go, etc. etc.
I use my site as both an entertainment vehicle/ego trip thing and as a tool for editors and art directors looking for reprint stuff. It works pretty well on both ends for me, especially since I never intended to become a “brand” and can sell in many different directions. All I ever really wanted to do was draw cartoons and sell them to people, and it’s been great to have been able to make a living at it all these years. But all that writing on the wall these days never seems to be contained anywhere by a balloon, if you know what I mean.
Hello.