Go, Read: Alan Gardner Compiles List Of 500-Client Strips

Alan Gardner at The Daily Cartoonist was apparently made curious by the 500-client benchmark that drove a recent story about Chad Carpenter's Tundra. He's now compiled a list of the features from all of the syndicates save potential Tribune Media Services that have that many clients (dailies and Sundays are traditionally counted separately, so if newspaper runs both the dailies and the Sundays that's counted as two sales).

It's an intriguing list, perhaps most notably for the relative absence of female creators, the number of legacy strips on the list, and the fact that two are flat-out re-runs. The re-run thing is compelling to me because while almost no editor is going to kill Snoopy, I have to imagine there's a ton of resentment from certain cartoonists that these strips are still taking so many slots in so many newspapers. It's like NBC having Cheers re-runs on Thursday at 9 PM. I always thought it worth noting, too, that Gary Larson and Bill Watterson, both of whom were criticized at one time or another as disrespectful mavericks in terms of various cartooning traditions, have never sought this avenue of publication, as both could probably eventually make it right back onto this kind of list were they to do so.

The youngest strip to reach that plateau is either Tundra or Pearls Before Swine, depending on how you measure Tundra's lifespan. I also think it's worth noting the general fact that anyone with this kind of client list is probably making a pretty good living from their work, and is likely to be able to count on work in the future because of the slow grind that is strips being dropped or replaced even if they fall from popularity. As much as people criticize the fading fortunes of the daily newspaper strip, that's a significant number of cartoonists super-comfortably employed.
 
posted 6:00 am PST | Permalink
 

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