The Daily Cartoonist

Yes, comics pages are in serious decline. Publishers such as Hearst, Patterson, et al., created comic strips as an entertainment form to draw readers to their newspapers on a daily basis. Publishers today would rather publish without the comic strip, and have spent years abusing them by reducing their size and by trading out entertaining strips for politically-edged strips. They have abused comic strip readers by yanking favorites and ignoring their pleas to return the strips, all the while praising banal strips with bad art in attempt to court a potential audience that never materializes. These publishers have scoffed at strips which uphold family values (yes, I used that term) to give readers strips that reflect their own jaded J-school cynicism, insisting readers don’t know what’s good for them. And then these publishers wonder what’s driving off their readers…