about the death of my profession, reports of which I do hope are premature. But this caught my eye:
What are you saving (by dropping comics)? I asked him. He said, “If you added it all up? Jeez, a few thousand dollars.”
Well, there you have it.
See, the thing is, a few thousand dollars is a big deal for a household budget, for a young family trying to figure out how to pay the mortgage. A few thousand dollars is not a significant amount for a large newspaper chain whose advertising income, whose very existence, depends on readers who are in the habit of picking up the paper every week to read their favorite features. In the latter case, a few thousand dollars is about the cheapest fucking investment you can make, if it brings back readers week after week.
I would prefer to continue doing TMW, but everything goes to hell, I’ll move on to other things. (That’s the problem with the overused “buggy whip” metaphor — buggy whip makers didn’t just roll over and die, they moved to to make other things out of the materials with which they worked.) The question here is if the altweekly cartoons, which have contributed significantly to the papers in which they run, can really be tossed aside like yesterday’s garbage when the moment comes to save a few thousand dollars. I would like to imagine that this is not the case, but to paraphrase my earlier posts, consistent, ongoing and increasingly annoyed reader feedback is the only way to prove it. You people are all we’ve got here, if by “we” you mean “beleaguered, disrespected cartoonists.” Which I do.
(Edited, because.)