Comics Stripped from Weekly Newspapers
As long as we’re on the subject of comics, it’s worth getting around to noting that both Seattle weekly newspapers, The Seattle Weekly and The Stranger, have dropped their featured weekly comics. The Seattle Weekly ran This Modern World, and The Stranger ran Troubletown.
So now when you go to your local coffee shop or cafe and pick up the alt-weeklies expecting to at least get a chuckle from two of your favorite comics, you will be disappointed. Well, if you don’t have your laptop with you anyway. You can still read them on the internet. (That’s the place where in the not-too-distant-future you will be reading all of your print media, so charge up that laptop before going to the cafe.)
Tom Tomorrow and Lloyd Dangle have written many posts about how they’ve been shafted by papers all over the country that used to run their comics. The papers claim they stopped running the comics as part of their cost-cutting efforts designed to help keep them in business. One link I followed led to me to this story that pointed out it typically costs most papers about ” $20 to $35 a week” to run the comics or about $3,500 a year. Wow… what a savings.
I don’t think cutting content is going to improve their circulation and, in turn, increase their ad revenue, so I think the weeklies are making a big mistake. We’ll have to wait and see.
For more about the missing comics I recommend this post by Tom Tomorrow and this one by Lloyd Dangle.
Funny how the sick work of Sean Delonas will continue to be available in Rupert Murdoch’s rag, and two really good comics that are actually funny won’t be available in my local papers.
