There have been a lot of good ideas here so why don’t you all get off your couches and do something with it! Who needs a big name, that’s just a convenient excuse. Who was Bill Watterson or Scott Adams before they were syndicated?

Best of luck to you all.

By the way Pat…

“Can anybody say “Simpsons Comic Book Guy”?”

I don’t allow “Simpsons” in my house, and don’t ever attack my husband like that again! People might start to see you for who you truly are.

As matters stand “Editorial control” is largely a codephrase for “advice on how to make your comic more palatable to the newspaper market.” If you’re doing something else, Editorial advice of that kind ranges between irrelevant and harmful.

If a comics editor were willing to work with me in the same way my novel editors works with me – helping develop the characters and keep the plotline consistent and making me aware of literary sources and helping with techniques to develop suspense or horror or technical consistency or giving hints on how to make sex scenes meaningful in the context of story or resolve dangling storylines as I bring the work to its climax and through its denouement – then huzzah for editorial control, I’d adore it and use it.

But I haven’t been able to find the market where that kind of editor works and, when the editor is working at cross purposes to the author, editorial control really is just a buzzword for censorship. There may be a few editors of the kind I’d like to work with working at Image and Vertigo, but personally I haven’t seen ‘em and my art skills aren’t yet good enough to even attempt to sell into those markets.

The medium of comics as a “serious” literary form is young, and mostly (exclusively?) growing up outside of newspaper comics. It’s got a lot of immature prima donnas, true. But it’s vibrant and alive and growing. Give it a few decades and see what happens.

Also, while I am not saying that one medium is inherently better than the other, newspaper comics do tend to be more professionally executed and edited than web comics. Even a dull, creatively bankrupt legacy strip like Blondie is more consistent and fundamentally sound than 99.9% of self-published web comics.

In all web publishing (comics, music, video, blogs, etc) there seems to be a misconception that editorial guidance is the same as censorship, that any suggestion or criticism on the part of a publisher somehow contaminates the art. This is not true. F Scott Fitzgerald needed Maxwell Perkins, The Beatles needed George Martin, and, er, The Game needed Dr. Dre.

What is really desired here by the web comics crowd is legitimacy. They seem to feel (and maybe not say it out loud) that publication by a syndicate somehow legitimizes their work. A web cartoonist may be extremely successful in his work, earning a living with a devoted fan base, but still feels he is missing something without the “legitimization” of newspaper syndication. This is silly. If you are successful, you are successful.

For web comics to be truly taken seriously, the community itself must take itself seriously. Cartoonists and readers must demand excellence. Cartoonists must not bristle at any criticism that may float their way. Readers and critics need to read intelligently and not engage in fan-boy-like this sucks/this rocks behavior. The web comics community must develop its own standards of legitimacy and not look for approval from a different medium that really doesn’t give a rat’s ass about them.

Although I think one of the advantage Cagle has is that editorial cartoons are easier to distribute.

But in order for a new syndicate to happen, they’ll have to focus mostly print. The web version should have two weeks delay, so it will encourage readers to actually pick up newspapers to read their favorite strips.

The music industry had to shift gears due to downloading, the movie industry is just now coming to some kind of terms with web piracy (albeit slowly.) Even comic books had a depression of sorts in the mid-90′s to earlier this decade. They have yet to regain their former glory, but they didn’t sit back and say, “Things are fine,” and die slowly. They acknowledged the lack of readership and took steps to gain them back, by putting out a better product.

Why are syndicated comic strips so special that they are allowed to operate pretty much the same as they have for the last 60+ years? Any other company that didn’t change with the times for that long of a time would be gone now, or at least on the ledge. Especially one that has been so severly affected by the emergence of the Internet.

I don’t think it’s out of line to say something’s gotta change; besides making comics even smaller. Go comics, Comics.com and DailyINK subscriptions are steps in the right direction, but in the long term I don’t see them working as-is. And there’s still the ‘specialness’ (i.e. nostalgia, plus, easier on the eyes) of reading comics in print.

Some kind of hybrid would be nice. And the key word here is “distribution”. Something made available online, that can be purchased in a print-version, or that can be inserted into the paper, weekly or maybe even daily, for the general population (and any other methods anyone can come up with.)

The logistics of doing this are probabaly harder than I’d like to know. And I’m sure this just screams of the magazines that other companies are trying. But just think about a syndicate representative going into a newspaper and instead of begging for one, single feature to be squeezed into their paper, they present an all-in-one package that they simply have to insert into their paper like any other ad.

Those who don’t get the paper can read it online in either a subscription or pay-as-you-go or other more proper format.

And for those who don’t like to read comics online, but don’t get the paper, it can be made available in the magazine section, or even, *gasp*, in place of one of the tabloids in the store checkout lane. Or even direct subscriptions for the people who get the paper, but only for the comics, and would like to save some money.

Though, I’m sure if that plan worked, papers would complain about the further declination in readership; assuming they acknowledge there’s a problem. Maybe forget the save money part and charge as much for it as the average paper and that can be used an incentive by the papers for readers to decide if they want a whole paper for the same price or not.

It’s easy to point at the World Wide Web and blame it for the decline of newspapers, and especially newspaper comics. But you don’t need the WWW to fully explain what’s happening.

Newspaper comics are getting less space in papers, I believe, because newspapers are facing less competition from other newspapers in their home markets today. Back in the day, comics were a reason why Homer and Harriet Housekeeper would buy one local newspaper instead of another (or even possibly, gasp, buy both of the local papers!). Well, today, in most markets, there’s only one newspaper to buy – so the papers don’t have to work nearly as hard to distinguish themselves, and the first cuts come to “bonus” features like comics.

This monopolism, I believe, is also the cause of lowered standards of journalism, stagnation in newspaper readership and editorship, and the consequent decline of total newspaper circulation. If you want comics to thrive again in newspapers, you must first correct the monopoly problem, both so that newspapers as an institution can thrive again and so that they have a need for product distinction for comics to fulfill.

Because I believe that correcting that kind of structural problem is out of the scope of comics creators, I’m not seeing a rosy future for comics in newspapers.

Also, I have to point out that whatever different people may feel about “quality” in comics, the criteria for success are different in newspaper and web comics.

First, because of the web, comics no longer have to be successful in order to exist. There’s very little expense involved in webpublishing, and people with regular jobs (like me) can do it out-of-pocket as a hobby.

That means thousands and thousands of strips become available to the entire web-using audience for free, simply because people like me enjoy cartooning. And even though we don’t expect to make any money, any comics author who does, has to compete with us. As Microsoft is learning in its dealings with Linux, competing with free is hard.

So if you’re going to make money in comics you have to be really good – regardless of whether you’re syndicated or not – because us ‘indie’ comics creators are making our stuff available free and if people don’t think you’re better enough to pay for, then you’re not going to make money. And that’s the hard truth of trying to make money in any creative enterprise – you have to compete with amateurs who are doing it because we love doing it.

Next you have the differences in market dynamics. There’s a fundamental distinction between the way people get comics in newspapers and the way they get comics on the web. For a comic on the web, there’s a voluntary act required on the part of the reader before that comic will ever come up under his or her eyeballs. Conversely, newspaper readers read a whole collection of comics selected by someone else.

This means webcomics are nearly incapable of offending their audiences, because of audience self-selection. The sort of people who are capable of being offended by whatever a particular webcomic does simply don’t go look at that webcomic. But in a newspaper, the audience is everybody regardless of what they are offended by (see earlier note about there being only one local newspaper now, and think about the corollary).

So excellence is different for the different kinds of market; If the market is people who selected your comic, specifically, like the market for print collections, graphic novels, and web comics, you can pull out all the stops and go for the kill. In a newspaper strip or collection magazine strip, where the audience selected only a collection that happens to include your strip, you have to be compatible, in terms of not offending people, with the demographic that’s purchasing that collection. In a newspaper, where the demographic is everybody, it’s an extreme case – excellence lies in a very gentle kind of humor with no sharp edges or free-swinging hooks.

But in any collection you’re going to have to decide what is and isn’t offensive to your demographic, and therefore what is allowed, and market accordingly. People learn the tenor of your collection and buy it or not, depending on whether they are offended. You trade off your purchaser demographic against the range of humor that’s allowed, with the monopoly-newspaper market at one extreme, and the completely self-selected web market at the other. One one end, you get Garfield; at the other, you get Ghastly’s Ghastly comic and Sexy Losers.

Finally we get to Watterson’s problem. The syndicates want format restrictions, so that they can offer the strips to newspapers who print comics in a several specific formats. There’s a sort of cookie cutter that they have to be able to apply to your sunday strip, rearranging the panels in a variety of standard ways or even leaving out particular panels, while still having what’s left
make sense.

Watterson cried foul and rebelled against this, and managed to make his rebellion stick. Go him. But it hasn’t made the practice of requiring the cookie cutter any less common for other artists, has it? But if you’re printing your own collection, this problem goes away.

Anyway, unless we see some competition in local newspapers, I think that the market for newspaper comics is firstly too uniform, and secondly fading away. The good news is that the market for graphic novels seems to be expanding. Comics creators are going to have to place their work wherever they can – newspapers being one market among many, and the web being another. The creative continuum between simply hasn’t been explored yet.

Simply because of the diversity of new media and opportunities, I don’t think it’s wise at this point to give up your characters and copyrights to a syndicate deal if you want to continue to be successful in the future.

I believe one aspect of creative expression is discretion. Sometimes we are smart enough to figure it out for ourselves and sometimes it is imposed on us by others. While I gather that most in the thread feel that there are too many limits for print comic strips, I feel that limits aren’t necessarily the killer of creativity nor entirely a bad thing. I’m not saying the limits don’t need some changing, but I really see little value in strips full of swearing and raunch. Freaking out over use of some words like *crap* though is ridiculous for sure (although it lead to some good cartoon strips pointing out some issues with reader complaints).

Anyway, thanks to all for the robust discussion.

Unless one is willing to cartoon in a vacuum, and doesn’t care about his audience or the economic aspects of cartooning as a profession, you must limit your creativity in some ways to conform to what your audience will allow.

Andrew Ringnalda

Thanks. And with that clarification, you have affirmed the point that I was making. The diversity of interests in the marketplace allows for creative cartoonists to target specific niche audiences, and deliver a strip that speaks to that audience. Given the attitudes, values, and interests of a specific niche, you are free to exercise as much creative freedom as the audience allows. And if you violate those boundaries, you will hear from your readers about it, whether you are following the Jantze model, or if you are in newsprint.

Unless one is willing to cartoon in a vacuum, and doesn’t care audience or the economic aspects of cartooning as a profession, you must limit your creativity in some ways to conform to what your audience will allow.

When I was in college, an art teacher in a cartooning class I took was trying to get another student to understand that all creativity has limits if you want to interact with an audience. This student had drawn a futuristic space epic, (which I envied because of his rendering ability,) but had included graphic violence, nudity, and language in panel after panel. The student thought everyone would love his strip; the instructor disagreed, stating that there would be only a few readers that the strip would speak to. The student in question didn’t get it. (I don’t know what ever happened to him; I’ve never found his name in web searches.) Nevertheless, I believe that all cartoonists (and authors, painters, etc.) who are trying to interconnect with an audience must exercise some level of self-censorship (ugh–that may be a dirty word for some of you) if they want any kind of economic success. It doesn’t mean everyone has to do a mom-dad-kids-dog kind of family strip, but most sizable audiences have limits to what they will accept from a given medium. So in this respect, self-censorship (let’s call it self-editing) will have some effect on the size of your audience, but that effect is probably small compared with the general content and direction a strip is taking.

Thanks for reading my post.

Andrew Ringnalda