Bundled Extra: Julie Larson’s The Dinette Set Ends

Julie Larson ended her Dinette Set panel at the end of November after a life that stretches back to the late 1990s and 1990 itself if you include its alt-weekly predecessor Suburban Torture. A bunch of intriguing stories swirl around this one, including that I wouldn't have caught this at all if it weren't for a fan, Buzz Dixon, also being a devoted reader of the site. Strips and panels ending isn't the automatic news story it used to be.

Larson's decision is understandable and logical. She tells Phil Luciano in a retirement story she's down to about 20 clients after a high of about 70. Anyone buying your comics at all is an honorable number -- we're only twenty years removed from features launching at fewer than 10 and closing down within a year being a regular thing for syndicates, at least as it was described to me at the time. That certainly would have been the case when Larson launched, when the math at her then-syndicate King Features was explained to me as 1/3 of the strips becoming respectable or hits, 1/3 tanking immediately, and 1/3 hanging in there with some tenacity on the part of the cartoonist. A significant part of the comics page is made up of features where the creator has a work that can survive but hasn't yet thrived, even if your friends and neighbors think you're Jim Davis.

I also thought the strip had a nice sense of humor that would play better now, sold as a gentle satire of Midwestern state excess like the television show The Middle, than how every panel was described in the 1990s: "weird," like The Far Side. The chance of a late-period surge for a strip, a decision by editors to pick up something they've already seen cross their desks, is usually pretty small. This site and her many fans wish Larson the best in her retirement; a quarter-century of making comics is a remarkable thing.

For the time being, the archives remain up at GoComics.com.
 
posted 10:25 pm PST | Permalink
 

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