Summer Sunday #2
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Mike Peterson’s Comic Strip of the Day brings up a sore spot with me: the quickly vanishing same day online sources where one can find the Sunday Doonesbury title panel.
At the beginning of this year I had three online sites to find that panel. Pete Hegseth took the Stars and Stripes (scroll down) opportunity away from me. Until a few weeks ago the weekly Martinsburg (W.V.) Journal published a week’s worth of comic strips, daily and Sunday, every week on their Special Sections page that included the full half page Doonesbury. To repeat: until a few weeks ago.
Now The Santa Maria Times is my last remaining online same day source.
Which brings me to the same day online Prince Valiant title panel. My one and only online same day free source for this rarity was the USA Today Comics Kingdom page until, again, earlier this year when they switched from the third page format to the half page format. Now I must rely on the kindness of strangers and Daily Cartoonist readers to let me know when the change of illustrations occur.
Both Doonesbury and Prince Valiant title panels are available at newspapers.com but with a 30 day delay.
And in the end…
Growing frustration has led animator turned comic strip creator Nancy Beiman to discontinue FurBabies after three years, at least for the Summer while she reevaluates her priorities. From her FurBabies Substack:
… Without online publicity, a new online comic strip has no chance at growing readership. And if I spent as much time on social media promoting the strip as seems to be required, I would not have time to draw it. Age is a factor here.
We are also at the mercy of technology.
FurBabies regularly received up to 100 comments per day before the GoComics site was updated in March. This dropped to 60, then 20, per day, after the update.
Then the Comments app was ‘improved’.
On June 25, the day after the update, there were four comments, not including my own. The number of comments, page visits, and likes determine the royalty payments.
I have more followers on Substack than on GoComics. I have no way of knowing if there is any overlapping readership to GoComics from Substack or from Bluesky.
I’m not sure what to do with FurBabies. The book is not selling. I can’t get any of the local papers or book review sites to review it. Maybe I should just take the hint.
Maybe it’s just time for a very long vacation…
Not nearly as frustrating as Nancy’s situation but for those of us who grew up during the Cold War Space Race and the original Jetsons that last panel in today’s JumpStart was supposed to be normal routine by this time.
Back to Doonesbury…
Dwight Garner for The New York Times reviewed Joshua Kendall’s Trudeau & Doonesbury earlier this month (or here).
Trudeau’s life is on display in a new biography, Joshua Kendall’s “Trudeau & Doonesbury: The Cartoonist Who Turned the News Into Art.” It’s the first major biography of this reclusive satirist. It was written with Trudeau’s cooperation — he agreed to be interviewed, and he granted Kendall access to his archives — but it doesn’t dig too deep. It verges on hagiography.
It’s possible Trudeau doesn’t have any skeletons, even plastic ones, in his cupboard. As the Newsweek editor Dominique Browning complained to Jonathan Alter in 1990, after Alter had turned in the first draft of a profile of Trudeau, “Nobody leads this kind of golden life.”
Kendall’s book works anyway; it has a good story to tell…
A week later Alexandra Jacobs for the same New York Times Book Review took on EMPIRE OF INK: The Printers, Rogues, and Radicals Who Invented the American Newspaper by Alex Wright (or here).
In his scholarly, unruffled third book, “Empire of Ink,” Alex Wright reports that America is down from 9,000 papers in 2005 to 6,000 in 2025 (more than I would have guessed), with an average of two more closing each week.
“Empire of Ink” helps explain the lingering attachment to the increasingly obsolete and overlooked technology of type on paper. It’s an unsentimental history of the American newspaper from the Revolutionary War to the beginning of the 20th century, finding in the actual cut-and-paste culture from then much in common with today’s jostling, jousting online media.
The book labors hard, and mostly well, to build a bridge from yesteryear’s multitasking print mavens to the TikTokerati of today, stopping by legends (like Horace Greeley) and little-knowns along the way.
Both the above reviewed books are in my possession and at the top of my to-be-read stack but first this notoriously slow reader is only halfway through volume two of Rick Atkinson’s The Revolution Trilogy and must finish that before deciding which of the other two will win out for my night time reading after The Fate of the Day.
Since Mr. Jack didn’t show up in today’s Popeye here are a few entries at Allan Holtz’s Comic Strip History blog about the scoundrel.
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