Comic strips

The Mild Quandary of the Dedicated Thanksgiving Comic

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Daily Cartoonist Staff November 22, 2018 1 minute 3 comments

An interesting nuance of the business of syndicated comics is the Thanksgiving comic. It seems like an easy day to say “thanks” to your readers and/or maybe do a family dinner, turkey or pilgrims based comic.

But, what if you have clients outside the United States?

We frequently get substitute requests from newspapers in Canada looking for comics that don’t reference the U.S. holiday. And what if you have a large international client list? Thanksgiving references in Asia might result in head scratching, confusion and even tears. OK, maybe not tears.

Some cartoonists are savvy enough to write a comic that can be read as both a holiday and/or a general seasonal sentiment.

Some avoid the subject entirely.

But as we’ve seen in the past, avoiding a holiday without mentioning it has resulted in some GoComics commenters questioning the cartoonists’ patriotism … especially on holidays like Memorial Day or Veterans’ Day.

Oh, those GoComics commenters! Their energy in inspirational!

Happy Thanksgiving!

-John Glynn (who is very thankful for Mike Peterson and D.D. Degg)