CSotD: The Way We Live Now
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Bad news: Metro has cut their cartoonist, Guy Venables, effective the end of November. Granted, Metro isn’t exactly the Times of London, but then again, it seems aimed at giving people what they want to read. I would think good cartoons would fall under that category.
Venables has been a frequent flyer here, because his work is both funny and intelligent: The above riffs on the discovery of a Neandertal murdered with a spear 75,000 years ago.
He’s also a good guy. As noted here at the time, when some anti-immigrant bureaucrat painted over Disney characters at a refugee intake center, Venables offered to restore the pictures, only to be turned down because the government did not want to create a welcoming atmosphere. So he rallied his fellow cartoonists and they produced a coloring book for incoming children that would welcome them, entertain them and give them insights into the customs of their new nation.
I’m not too worried about Guy, who told me he’s got more than one iron in the fire:
I’ll be going back to being a freelance cartoonist for Private Eye and the Spectator and am pitching around for more regular work but I do write comedy for the telly, too, so I won’t starve. I’m also a qualified ship’s captain so I might grow a beard and lose a leg and just get on with that.
Good to know there’s still a viable market for cartoonists in Britain. When I was in high school, I subscribed to Punch, and while I didn’t understand the political articles, I certainly enjoyed the cartoons. I think Private Eye fills the gap left by Punch’s demise, and some of the cartoons that end up here start out there, since several cartoonists share their work online.
I’m glad Venables expects to get through, but it’s still rotten news and I’m sorry to have announced it on International Artists Day, since he is one.
Photographic Juxtaposition of the Day
Maybe newspaper publishers should tag along with me once in a while for a little market research. That first picture was taken at one of Anne Hambrock’s much-missed cartoon festivals in Kenosha and shows families lined up as Lincoln Peirce signed Big Nate books, the second shows what happens at Ohio State when the Billy Ireland brings in Dav Pilkey.
Though it should be noted that both Big Nate and Captain Underpants are in books, which gives me a cunning plan:
Charlie Brown and I are roughly the same age: I was born in January,1950, he first appeared in October. I must confess, however, that. as a young lad, I knew him mostly in reprint books. While I read the Sunday funnies from an early age, I wasn’t a dedicated daily reader until high school.
Which I suspect makes me not much different from the Big Nate and Captain Underpants crowd shown above.
When Charles Schulz had his stroke, I gave our editor a heads up so that, when the strip ended, we wouldn’t get “crammed,” which is when the syndicate switches you to whatever they’re trying to push instead of asking you what you’d like. We made a choice, but it turned out we were among about five percent of Peanuts newspapers that didn’t go for reruns. The other 95% became oldspapers.
Jump up a quarter century or so, and reruns have become a regular thing. My local paper runs a dozen strips, of which five are reruns, six are zombies and only one is drawn by its original creator. I’ve pointed this out, they haven’t responded.
But here’s my cunning plan: Subscribing to the paper costs $180 a year, which people are beginning to question because the paper is down to about 16 pages a day, and only six issues a week.
What if, when you subscribed, the paper featured 12 really good, fresh, new comic strips, plus you got a book of really good, reprints? Even if they limited it to Peanuts, they could feature one book a year well into your dotage. Or one of the syndicates could set things up each year, so subscribers would get Doonesbury this year and Baby Blues the next and so forth.
My guess is that they could come up with pricing that would fit within that $180 annual subscription, and people would enjoy the books. They might also enjoy getting a dozen fresh strips in their paper each morning instead of only one.
And, BTW, if only one syndicate took up the idea, it would give them extra bargaining power with participating newspapers.
And here’s a treat for grown-up cartoon fans: Thursday, October 29, at 7 p.m., you can stream Democracy Under Siege, a documentary about the current threats to freedom featuring cartoons by Ann Telnaes, and, for this special showing, with her appearing afterwards along with Cartoonists Rights head Terry Anderson to talk about the film and the threats.
Here’s the link to IMDB’s rundown of the film, and it’s worth clicking on just to see the “cast.” However, here’s the more important link to how you can get aboard for the screening. It’s free.
Y’know, like our country once was.
There’s still time to head things off. Voting is easy, and it’s a sign of healthy self-respect.
But having gone through a whole lot of discouraging stuff, let’s go out on a bright note. First Dog is generally as cynical as they come, but here he points out that you don’t have to let the rot seep into your bones.
It’s possible to be smart and wary and to protect yourself without becoming that which you fear. Do something nice, for a person or a snail. It doesn’t have to be public. If only the snail knows, it still counts.
However, you can be a good, kind person and still have an appetite for cynical laughter, and I stole today’s headline from Anthony Trollope’s 1875 novel which might have been written this morning. It’s about a group of ambitious social climbers who invest in a project being promoted by a mysterious, boastful, self-proclaimed millionaire.
I’d have laughed aloud reading it, even if it didn’t bear such an uncanny resemblance to, well, the way we live now.
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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