Rifling through the newspaper to dig out the comic strips will soon be a thing of the past.
News Corp Australia has announced it will be dropping cartoon strips from all its mastheads from September 11.
The decision by News Corp has disappointed cartoonists who said comic strips were relevant and a way for generations to bond.
© Sean Leahy
The Australian Broadcasting Corp. looks at the what some see as the end of Australia’s homegrown comic strips with the loss of an early way to introduce young people to newspapers, the refusal of the Murdoch newspapers to put the comic strips on their websites, and the future of newspaper comic strip creators in Australia.
© Gary Clark
He said it cost very little to use a comic in a newspaper because the market was flooded years ago by American comics such as Hagar the Horrible and Calvin and Hobbs “which set the bar really low for prices”.
He said US papers still published large supplements of comic strips with dozens of pages of cartoons.
“US papers actively cultivate new comics and trial young comic artists, there is an interaction with the reader,” he said.
“Here comics seem to be stuck away near the obituaries and forgotten about until they get their own obituary notice.”
The Herald comics page in 2002 - one Australian comic
When people ask me, “So why’d you leave Australia?” I’ll just point them to this post.
I feel deeply for any young artist trying to make a living in that artistic wasteland. Most aspiring young cartoonists will end up just becoming graphic designers and trying to make a small supplemental income with their (often very good) webcomics.