But I will really miss Mark Trail.

Yes, and I neglected to mention in post that Thad is apparently the rarity with editors today, as simply being here indicates his willingness to learn more about the art form, which will make him a better judge of comics. Good on you, Thad.

The first thing editors need to understand is what function comics serve. This will lead them to understanding why they carry comics. Once they understand that, it will lead them understanding the demographics that will help the paper build readership. Coupled with learning about the art form, then choosing new features, and which ones to drop, will be an easier task. Then if they still feel the need to conduct reader polls, they will be able to conduct them properly and be able to decipher them correctly.

These are things that editors long ago knew and understood and used the drawing power of comics to help build the newspaper industry. After all, comics were the creation of editors and publishers, not cartoonists. Precious few editors today, if any, have any understanding of comics and what function they serve as it’s not taught in J-schools. If any editor was truly serious about learning how to do their job regarding comics, they would get in touch with the NCS and ask for help. But editors never ask for help, as they fear it will be seen as a weakness. They would rather run meaningless polls to make it look like they know what they’re doing.

Again, I’m talking in broad generalities here, but it comes from many years of working in newspapers and with editors.

No matter how much tap dancing they do around this subject, it all comes down to laziness on the part of editors regarding comics. Rather than taking the time to learn anything about the art form, much less make an analysis on why they carry comics in the first place, editors across the country continue to use the copout of polls to do their work.

I thought the reason that they ran dozens of strips was so that they can appeal to a vast cross-section of the audience. If the same 51% of comics readers votes for the same kind of strip over and over again, then you’ll end up with one kind of strip only and lose almost half your audience. Obviously that’s an extreme scenario, but it’s defended by the numbers.

But if you have some strips that appeal old and some young, some male and some female, some intellectual and some emotional, then you can get closer to pleasing everyone at least a little bit.

But these polls end up being about what people want to keep OUT of the comics page as much as anything else. Nowhere is it written that you have to like everything in the funnies, as much as you have to like everything that’s in the rest of the paper, or everything on TV or in a movie theater. That’s why there are many sections and channels and screens, so there is a selection. And that’s why there are editors and programmers and managers to make those decisions.

A good editor will have a certain amount of different types of strips to appeal to different types of readers. But, as in the poll in question, if you just lump all the strips together, then the ones that appeal to the broadest audience will win, at the expense of the strips that have a more niche appeal.

And that’s the editors job to know what appeals to whom, who is reading the paper, and what he or she can do to get those readers. Polls just let the inmates run the asylum.

Mr. Ogburn, my cousins live in Raleigh and, after growing up with the same old stuff running in the paper, they were thrilled by the changes that you made. They especially liked the new strips you were bringing in, like “Pearls Before Swine” and “Frazz”; more recently they have been enjoying the guest comics they you have presented. Please keep up the good work!

Thad, this is what cartoonists want, or at least I do. Editors making up their own minds. You don’t take a reader vote on your feature writers, so why do it on your cartoon strips? Stand or fall by your own decisions, and don’t even use the reader input, it’s a waste of time.

I know editors who have dropped strips purely of their own volition and who have never regretted it, and I have been contacted by a cartoonist of a dropped strip who asked me to send in fake letters! The same guy then contacted bloggers in the area where his strip had been dropped nd whipped up a letter-writing campaign to get his strip back in the paper.
It worked!

I am trying to get editors to deal direct with cartoonists, to see if any of them will take on a strip they think has particular appeal in an exclusive deal, i.e. pay bigger to stop that strip appearing in any paper within 200 miles.
The strip then becomes associated only with the (say) News and Observer,- people can’t read it in the local freesheet OR on the internet. The cartoonist is free to publish his own work in books.

The cartoonist is also free to carve out the same deal with a big paper in another state, but once again, nothing must appear on the internet.

The right strip would end up making money much more quickly than with a syndicate, the paper has a unique feature that increases readership, it’s a win-win, surely?