Ed Stein may be waxing nostalgic this week, as his new strip, "Freshly Squeezed," shifts focus from the home to the office, where everyone except ownership is preparing to do more with less.
"Freshly Squeezed" is a spinoff from "Denver Square," a strip Ed did for The Rocky Mountain News for about a decade. Launched September 20, it concerns a family with which the wife's parents are now living because their retirement fund tanked in the recession. While it took a little while for the strip to get its feet under it, has become a solid daily read, particularly as they move past the inevitable generation-gap jokes and into the meat of their situation.
In a very recent story arc, for example, they packed up the parents' house and dealt with the fact that the knick-knacks and pictures that defined that home will not have much of a place in the children's house. No, this isn't roll-on-the-floor humor, but, between his artistic style and his dialogue and scene-blocking skills, Stein has a light touch that keeps it palatable and brings a smile.
As for today's strip, Ed could not have known, when he was drawing it on deadline some weeks ago, that the parent group of his syndicate, United Media, would announce this week that they are transfering their operations to Universal Uclick, making Universal, together with King Features, the two remaining distributors of comic strips in the nation.
At the moment, it's unclear what this means, but one obvious effect is that, as the sales reps who sell strips to newspapers suddenly have a much larger number of strips to sell, the energy they can devote to promoting each one will necessarily diminish. I can't imagine a scenario in which this wouldn't be the case, and it isn't good news for artists hoping to increase the number of papers they are in and thus the percentage of licensing fees they receive as pay.
Here's something it certainly means for comics fans: If there is a strip you like, and it is not in your local paper, you should let the editor know that you wish it were.
That's always been good advice, but it becomes critical now because, if the editor does decide to make changes on the comics page, the odds of the sales rep happening to suggest your favorite have just diminished tremendously. If, on the other hand, that editor were to greet the rep by saying, "I've been thinking of adding (YOUR FAVORITE HERE)," it could well happen.
The market is shrinking, and the grousing in the current "Freshly Squeezed" story arc, while the strip is not set in the newspaper industry, has some significant resonance there. Of course, media tastes are changing, but television didn't kill the movie industry. After a little panic and floundering, the movie industry changed and adjusted and adapted to the shifting reality.
By contrast, newspapers have done a bravura job of misjudging the situation and making suicidal decisions, fueled in part by a simple inability to read the tea leaves and in part by the same corporate short-sighted race for next-quarter figures that fueled the overall economic collapse.
And, as it happens, today is the second anniversary of the day the Rocky Mountain News, Ed's employer for just over 30 years and the first newspaper to pay me for my writing, announced that it was shutting down in the wake of a vicious circulation war followed by an uneasy joint operating agreement with Denver's other paper, the Post. The Rocky published its last issue February 27, 2009.
Anybody who was planning to hang in at the Rocky until they qualified for retirement suddenly had to change those plans.
Ed has a couple of other irons in the fire -- chiefly the syndication of his editorial cartoons, which works differently than syndication of strips, though it's in the same hands -- and, being four years older than me, he is that much closer to being able to collect Social Security, or a reasonable facsimile thereof. Neither of us have as long to endure as the fellows in his strip. I suspect he's going to be just fine.
Especially since "Freshly Squeezed" just continues to be handed more and more material for him to work with.
(Now go back and read that part about telling the editor about your favorite strip.)
I will. But there's no chance they'd accept my suggestions. The local fishwrap is barely readable. It's owned by Sun Media, Canada's largest producer of tabloids and community newspapers; a subsidiary of Quebecor Media. Bad news. The comic strips are reproduced in grainy unnuanced black and white and so tiny you need a magnifier to see them. They think _Adam_ is still worth publishing. That's why I read my comics online and why your site is so important.
Quebecor is trying to get approval for a FOX style TV new channel!)
Posted by: Gilda92 | 02/26/2011 at 08:50 AM