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Comic strips

Tom the Dancing Bug cut from Salon

1 minute 14 comments

Ruben Bolling has posted news that his strip, Tom the Dancing Bug, has been dropped from Salon.com.

I was told that the cancellation was made because of “severe budget constraints,” and that traffic for the comic continued to be good. I know that must be the case; it was consistently on Salon’s “most read” list. In fact, on the day they informed me, Thursday, out of the dozens of features to be published on that day, Tom the Dancing Bug was one of the leaders in popularity.

And when I checked in yesterday to see what Salon’s “Comic Page” looked like, I saw that Tom the Dancing Bug was still there, and doing fine in comparison to what is now Salon’s last surviving comic strip, Tom Tomorrow’s great This Modern World.

Correction: Tom the Dancing Bug was dropped from Salon, not Slate. The above post has been edited to reflect the correction.

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Comments 14

  1. So…you’re leading the “must read” list. OBVIOUSLY, it must be cut. Apparently the insanity disease inflicting newspapers is spreading to the online world, too.

    Wow. This just isn’t good.

  2. yeah… this seems like a first.

  3. “Tom the Dancing Bug” was cut just a few weeks after I quit submitting “the K Chronicles” to Salon (not Slate), because of the abysmal rate they were paying me.

  4. I’m with Tom. Salon has grown up and is now acting like a real newspaper!

    In other news, McDonald’s has decided to save money by no longer putting meat patties in the Big Mac.

  5. Well, frickity frick. This is certainly messing up my morning routine for Wednesdays and Thursdays. Can somebody suggest alternate sites/papers where the K Chronicles and Tom the Dancing Bug can be found?

  8. Thanks! And I’ll spread the word.

  9. I’m telling you, our best bet is to band together in a cartoonist caravan, and travel from flea market to flea market selling packages of tube socks with hand-drawn cartoons on them.

    I’d proudly wear “God-man” tube socks.

  10. Dropping Tom The Dancing Bug is somebody’s bad idea, pure and simple. If shedding one of its strongest editorial assets is somehow supposed to keep the bankers at bay, I wouldn’t put much stock in Salon’s future.

    I’ll take Derf’s notion one step further–maybe we should make a quilt, a magnificent cartoon quilt, and haul it from town to town, if for no other reason, to confuse the semi-literate.

  11. The self-cannibalization process worked so well for print newspapers, I guess web publications feel they have to try it too. It’s a clear sign of Salon’s impending doom.

    Yes to a tube sock-quilt caravan! Anyone have an old decrepit smelly school bus?

  12. I think an old Fair-food van would be better. That way we could supplement our tube-sock profits by making Elephant Ears with cartoons drawn on them. Anyone know if sharpie markers are toxic?

  13. The psychotic paranoid that lives in the back of my head wonders… Are they cutting this because of cost, or are they cutting it because it expresses opinions that might scare advertisers?

  14. @Derf, the FDA never said they were, so…

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