The problem with print

The Comics Page -- that is, the collection of syndicated comic strips that appears in your local paper -- became twice the topic of insider kerfufflagration this week. For fans of the form, it's worth a look at them both.

Let me start by saying this is not going to be an example of responsible reporting. As I begin writing, it's 5:47 AM EST on a Saturday and I really don't think anybody is hoping for a phone call right now, even to get their side of things. So I'm just gonna tell you what I already know and what I think.

But I'd love to hear from the principals involved in these and, if they'd like to provide their viewpoint, I'll not only update this but will announce the update in a separate posting.

Everyone else is, of course, encouraged as always to comment.

First up is last Saturday's "Doonesbury":

Trudeau could have been a little more specific in his message, had the gag not required him to cut back to two panels' worth of dialogue. But Zonk and Mike's admonition that print matters touched off a response on the strip's own (well named) Blowback page as well as at the Daily Cartoonist (with additional links there) that revealed how many really touchy readers and creators there are out there.

What is true is that the overall medium of comics is not dependent on syndication or print.

Just as the overall medium of live-action drama is not dependent on the film industry. TV and movies have coexisted for more than half a century.

However, while it's not entirely apples-and-oranges, just as there is a difference between a small, independent film and a network sitcom, a syndicated comic strip has a different mission than a webcomic.

Web comics are niche-y -- one of the first (commercially) successful web strips was "Unshelved," a comic about working in a library that caught on because librarians were among the early adopters and it went viral among this specific group, widely scattered on the map but close-knit on the web.

In print, you have to appeal to enough people within a geographic region to be viable, and if only 1 percent of local readers are librarians (and that would be a huge number of librarians), it makes no sense to pay for a strip that will truly tickle their fancies, amuse a few others and have no appeal to the vast majority.

Moreover, I really doubt a lot of companies would produce blockbusters for people to stream on Netflix. You need revenues from theaters, or at least from TV networks and cable subscriptions, to maintain a viable level of choice. (Though Netflix itself has just unveiled, "House of Cards," which appears to be "The West Wing" with F-bombs. The medium is adapting to new realities, but don't look for any "Braveheart" level battle scenes without ticket sales to pay for all those non-CGI extras.)

In any case, almost all commercially successful web strips are niche-based. If you like broader-audience strips like "Doonesbury," you shouldn't feel threatened by Trudeau's suggestion that this corner of cartooning depends in large part on print revenue. 

Moreover, we're past the point where syndicated cartoonists rule the roost. There are still things to work out, but web cartoonists are an accepted part of the industry and the pissing-and-moaning phase is pretty much over, with the remaining whiners being divided between the armor-plated dinosaurs of print and the wannabe fringe of web cartoonists who blame their lack of commercial success on everything but the plain and eternal fact that, in any of the arts, making a living is tough and reserved for a small group.

The fact that you aren't among them may stem from any number of reasons, but "it's all a conspiracy" isn't one. Bitching about it instead of focusing on your work, however, might be.

"Never speak disrespectfully of Society, Algernon. Only people who can't get into it do that."

 

The other bit of news that drew attention recently (here and also here) was the decision of the Duluth News Tribune to cancel "Blondie" and to publicly scorch King Features in explaining their choice. 

Having worked that corner a little, I find the decision to drop it in the face of repeated price hikes understandable, and the lack of response from the syndicate incomprehensible.

Second part first: I've had good relations with syndicate sales people, publicity folks and even the brass, and have never had a problem picking up the phone and finding the person I needed. It's possible that the rep had no acceptable answer and was laying low in hopes it would all blow over, but I think something broke down here and, as stated above, I'd love to hear the other side on this.

But I also remember an editor, back in the late 80s, complaining about the price of Bloom County going up. Like the editor in Duluth, he felt he was being punished for being an early client because, while the contract was "until further notice," the pricing sure wasn't.

(BTW, he was one of the few editors I've worked with who not only understood but actually cared about comics, and I remember in blue detail how he felt over agreeing to pick up Berthed's post-Bloom offering, "Outland," and then having it turn out to be very expensive, extremely demanding about its print format and then creatively unfocused, inconsistent and generally not worth it. If I'd been repping that one, I might have hidden under a rock, too. Eeesh.)

So here's my takeaway on the "Blondie" issue in Duluth:

When I had the chance to re-do a full comics page, one of the issues I questioned was why our selection of Sunday strips bore almost no resemblence to our dailies, and I found out that the supposedly "low cost" standardized pre-printed Sunday package we had carried for years was laden with massively expensive "old favorites" that I doubt we'd have even bought at a good price had we been looking at them separately.

We were able to save money with a custom Sunday section that matched our daily offerings, partly because we found a competitive syndication print shop (because of the large expanses of ink involved, Sunday sections call for a different print method) but also because we stopped routinely paying massive amounts of money on the basis of nobody having bothered to examine the invoices.

I did find that, once we questioned them, we got some rollbacks. I would also note that getting rollbacks keeps strips in the newspaper, but it also means that the days are long over when having your strip in 100 papers meant you could quit your day job. Having 100 papers does indeed beat a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, but not by all that much anymore.

The important lesson overall is that, in this day and age, editors are no longer signing off on any invoices without reading them.

As that editor's note says, "Blondie" is a popular strip which, unlike many other zombie strips, has done a pretty good job of keeping itself fresh.

But let me repeat the lesson, in case anybody missed it before:

In this day and age, editors -- even the ones who really like comics -- are no longer signing off on invoices without reading them. Sharpen your pencils, folks: It's already becoming a bumpy night.

Comments

[Christopher Baldwin]

There are plenty of non-niche strips. Considering successful ones, PVP being a good example. Heck, I wouldn't even consider Penny Arcade to be niche, considering about 70% of Americans play video games. Girls with Slingshots or Questionable Content, neither niche, it's just a younger-and-more-perhaps-relationship-liberal lifestyle point of view.

I only hope that Trudeau did that as a marketing piece appealing to his print readers who already believe it, and that he's not that out of touch.

[Mike Peterson]

Gonna disagree with your definition of "niche," Christopher.

"Younger-and-more-perhaps-relationship-liberal-lifestyle" is precisely what a niche is for mass marketing purposes. It's not a small niche, and it's a niche well-served by whatever remains of the alternative press, but, in mass marketing terms, the non-niche market still considers "Will and Grace" edgy stuff. (And "gay" to be synonymous with "hilariously bitchy." Not sure that's a step forward from being invisible.)

And the only way you can count 70% of people as gamers is if you count Angry Birds and Farmville, which isn't exactly Penny Arcade's demographic.

The good news is, if Trudeau and I are wrong and non-niche strips don't need print revenue to stay afloat, then we'll see a flood of them.

But I think if you put most syndicated strips on web-only status, we'd see a lot more ink-stains on the hands of the folks working at McDonalds. Most syndicated strips wouldn't make it as webcomics. (Part of my frequent comparison of stars of silent film vs. those who made it in talkies. Related but distinct skill sets.)

[Brent]

Yeah, "plays video games" is very different from "being part of the gamer fandom". But I'd also go so far as to put Doonesbury as a niche strip.

As for strips and print media... a few years ago I was back in my home town and picked up the paper. Turning to the comics page, I saw that it had been reduced to half a page, and the sum of the ages of the comics in it was over 500 years. Every strip was over 25 but one (Flo & Friends), many were zombies (including Flo & Friends, which had outlived its creator at that time). At that point I knew that the accretion of old material had become so complete that it was a major blockage and that if it wasn't already heading for death, we should put it out of its misery. The only hope I see for strips is the web... a format were the comics page can be large enough that we can keep the ancient strips that people refuse to let die and still have room for new material to come up. I figure that if a strip has enough general appeal people will still follow it, because what keeps these things alive is nostalgia. If you take the print comics away, and people do feel empty without them, they'll follow them to the web... if they don't then they really weren't that important to those people anyways. So it's okay if some things can't make the transition... the Blondie issue just shows how much things need to be shaken up and market forces need to brought back in to help clean house.

But that's could just be me... I grew up in a small town that was four hours away from a city with movie theatres. I never thought about going to the movies... I'd see a trailer on TV and think, "I'll probably want to watch that when it gets run on TV in a few years." Even now, living in a city with movie theatres, this hasn't changed much... I just expect that I'll be able to see it in a few months, when it hits DVD/Netflix. So if most consumers were like me, even the movie industry would have had to majorly reform years ago (never mind just the comic syndicates).

[Mary in Ohio]

I have read Blondie all of my comics-reading or being-read-to life, and I want to latch on to your point that it has updated itself very well, while still keeping the tried and true of "Dagwood sandwiches" and Mr. Dithers' hissy fits. But I wonder if the syndicate has decided to keep jacking up the price on a strip perceived by some as a "dinosaur" precisely because they think that us old-timers are the only ones still reading the printed edition and we will be the ones to complain to the editor in Duluth (and it will definitely be culture shock when some of us geezers get a load of Pearls. Full disclaimer - I enjoy both strips.).Or is the syndicate just jacking up the price as much as possible?

[Mike Peterson]

One of the roots of the conflict between syndicates and artists is, I think, more a lack of common experience than common goals. Creators believe that, if you build it, they will come. Marketers know how to sell an attractive platitude like that, but they also know that it's kind of a crock on the pragmatic level. And they have developed a language based on what works.

F'rinstance, the concept of "niche." As someone who has worked in advertising and marketing, "niche" to me is far more than simply a matter of having "a specific audience."

It means something targeted to such a narrow group that it would take special handling to market successfully.

The example I gave, "Unshelved," wasn't chosen at random -- it's very successful, not only because, when it began, its niche audience was a strong presence on the developing web, but also because they were, in those pioneering days, actively passing on information to each other.

I'm not sure "Unshelved" would find an audience as readily today, on a Web that is more crowded and also more well-organized, which cuts the "Oh! Look what I found!" element of the early days.

(Anybody remember "Tourbus"? Those were the days, my friend.)

In terms of whether or not a comic is marketable for newspapers, the difference between a "targeted audience" and a "niche" is the difference between Foxtrot and xkcd.

Foxtrot is/was often geeky, but, even when the punchline is enhanced by knowing binary, knowing binary is never necessary to enjoy the strip. Amend is careful to provide a gag for everyone, even when he tucks in a special joke for nerds. The most "specialized" it ever gets is that you should know when there's a Star Wars movie coming out. That's pretty mainstream knowledge for the 18-to-34 demographic.

By contrast, xkcd often requires a high level of geekiness to even know what the strip is about that day, never mind to get the joke. Great on the web, but way too narrow a niche for newspapers beyond the student papers at MIT or Cal Tech.

Note that this doesn't mean a strip has to appeal to everyone. The bluehair crowd won't get the Star Wars and Hobbit references in Foxtrot, and, by the way, Mary Worth fans hate Sherman's Lagoon. It's not that it's too geeky. It just isn't their style of humor.

Where newspapers screw this up is by allowing that not just "older" but almost militantly un-hip crowd to dictate the entire content of the page. But the solution is not to allow 20-something hipsters to dictate the entire content instead. It's to balance the page with some strips for each of your main demographic groups.

Emphasis on "main."

Newspapers don't have to be McDonalds, but they can't be the Four Seasons either.

Think Appleby's or Chili's.

[Murdoch Matthew]

"Blondie" has indeed kept fresh -- to the extent that the characters little resemble Chic Young's creation. Now it's another gag-a-day strip. Well, how long can you stay the same age and have any sort of identity? Soap opera and comic strip characters seem life-like at the beginning -- then life goes on and on, and cliche's take over. The nice thing about Telenovelas is that they end.

[Mary in Ohio]

Murdoch - point taken, but think about what drew YOU to the "funny pages" in the first place as a kid. And most strips (except Mary Worth, f'r instance) are primarily Gag-a-Day strips - even the revered Calvin and Hobbes didn't have Dagwood sandwiches, but Spaceman Spiff and Miss Wormwood were certainly recurring themes!

[Mike Peterson]

Not only are a lot of strips gag-a-day, but that's part of what makes them work. It's hard to be a comic genius 365 or 366 times in a row, but what you can (and should) do is to create a setting that people enjoy visiting each day.

I read quite a few strips not because I expect to be knocked out of my chair by a new joke but because I like them. It's like visiting a favorite aunt.

And every once in a while, auntie makes a wisecrack that makes you chuckle, perhaps less for the remark itself than from the surprise that she was the one who said it. And that, to me, is what sets Blondie apart from the others of her age.

As said before, you need a balanced comics page because you're serving a geographic, not demographic, audience. Old Favorites are part of that balance.

[Brent]

Yep, and getting that balance is why I see print as a lost cause. There's not enough room now that people refuse to let strips die (Lynn wanted to end FBoFW, but got talked out of it by the syndicate which resulted in the hybrid format and then reruns). There's just no way to get a balance unless you can arbitrarily expand the size of the page to accommodate. And print can't do that (in fact, most papers seem to be working counter to that and are more likely to reduce the number of comics than expand). It's really the only solution, I don't see enough people left like me that accept that we could stop visiting Dagwood and Blondie everyday, because that just means that we get to make new friends to visit instead. The people reading print comics are happy with their comfy, warm nostalgia... there aren't enough adventurous types left to force a balance on such a limited medium.

As for why I see Doonesbury as being niche-y... it's because it does get special handling. Most papers I've read don't run it on the comic page, they run it with the editorials/opinions.

[Lost in A**2]

That's because Trudeau uses the edge, as well as the point, of his pen, not because of his limited appeal.

I think today's XKCD nicely illustrates 'niche.'

[Brent]

Using an edge is how you carve out a niche.