Whatever you may think about the future of newspapers, they are how I make a living at present, and for the foreseeable future. If your local weekly is one of the papers that dropped TMW over the past couple of years, please write/email/tweet them and request its return. Be polite–but persistent. If you want to support TMW, this is both the easiest and most important way to do so. (There’s a directory of all the AAN-member papers here — chances are your local paper is in it.)
Also, while I’m on the topic: a warm welcome and many thanks to Urban Tulsa Weekly, which just started running the cartoon last week.
Update: a reader forwards his correspondence with the Houston Press:
Are there any plans on the horizon to reintroduce comics to your paper? I really do miss them…specifically, DerfCity and This Modern World, but I think comics in general are a good thing to have in the paper. Just curious.
Sorry Chuck, no such plans in the near future.
-Blake
The three month suspension is now in its sixteenth month. However — you’d never know it from my work, but I am a crazy optimist deep down, and even at this late date I continue to hope that editors will recognize, in the words of the reader above, “how stupid it is to remove one of the most popular (and least expensive) features of their newspaper.” But even if not, I just want to make a couple of things clear. The cartoon still runs in a lot of papers –90 or so by my last count. I’m doing fine. And whether I ever get back any of the VVM papers that I lost last year (apart from the Village Voice itself, where the cartoon was reinstated last year, for which I remain extremely grateful — and as I’ve said before, readers should show them some love for that decision) — at any rate, whatever happens from here, the loss of those papers may have been one of the best things that ever happened to me. In a pretty direct way it set into motion a chain of events that led to me working with one of the greatest rock and roll bands in the world, which in turn has led to some of the more extraordinary experiences of my life. So, one door shuts, another one opens, life goes on. I hope the pendulum eventually swings back, but I have no hard feelings about any of this — it was just business.
Update 2, from a reader via Twitter:
@karlsiemsen: I first started reading weeklies for the comics, they’re still the main reason I pick one up if I do.
Editors take note.