The recent news of News Corp Australia delivering the death blow to Australia’s comic strip industry
has fans around the world worried about the strips and cartoonists involved.
The Daily Cartoonist can report that cartoonist Jason Chatfield will continue
to produce Ginger Meggs, albeit as it was for the first 72 years of its existence.
Jason let fans know about the circumstances surrounding Ginger Meggs in the latest entry (#4, dated August 27) of his New York Cartoons Substack while reviewing the new Funny Pages movie.
I saw a film about becoming a cartoonist the week I got laid off as a cartoonist.
Tonight I got to attend the premiere of a new film called Funny Pages…
I was a bit down in the dumps as this week I’d been laid off at my longtime cartooning gig doing a syndicated daily comic strip.²
That #2 footnote led us to Jason imparting the immediate future of Ginger Meggs:
² Yeah. Rupert Murdoch’s cronies, in all their wisdom, killed off the entire Aussie daily comic strip industry in a single day. Real nice.
https://www.gingermeggs.com/blog/weekend-sunrise-news-corp-kills-entire-aussie-newspaper-comic-strip-industry-in-a-single-day
(I’m still going to be doing new Sundays, but the dailies will go into reruns for the few small papers it still runs in.)
For the first 72 years of Ginge’s comic run it was a Sunday only strip. In 1993 James Kemsley inaugurated a companion daily which Jason has continued. So the Sunday page will continue while the daily strip will come to an end.
I haven’t been able to determine the first daily Ginger Meggs in 1993, but Jason tells The Daily Cartoonist that the final new daily will appear September 10, 2022. On September 12, 2022 the daily will revert to reruns while the Sunday continues with new, original content.
We hope the others will also continue somewhere, somehow.
™ Winslow Investments Pty Ltd; © Jason Chatfield
Post Script: Jason adds that “the Ginger Meggs animated series has a production company attached and is currently in pre-production in Australia. The next phase of Ginger will be even more animated.”