Go, Read: Newspaper Strip Features

Two long features on newspaper comic strips have popped up in the past few days, both worth reading. The first is a feature from a Columbus, Ohio newspaper about the difficulty papers have in editing strips. This is indeed a curious because unless something's changed in the last few years, most cartoonists are expected to provide clean material once they learn the ropes over the first 12-24 months, an initial period during which their strips are more closely monitored.

The second feature looks like a wire story about cartoonists taking breaks, which is great in the number of people they have chiming in -- you have to love Scott Adams noting how long he kept his day job after Dilbert started. I think they miss the point about what makes daily newspaper production difficult, though. It's not just coming up with a joke every day, even though doing that and drawing six dailies and a sunday can be a 50, 60, 70 hour week for some cartoonists. A huge contributing factor is that cartoonists learn to meet this daily deadline while having to worry about their early sales levels. Until you get hundreds of clients, any extra time you might create for yourself that if the job were secure could go into doing an extra strip a week and building a backlog to burn off so you could take a break, for a lot of cartoonists I've met any such time gained that way is pretty much consumed by second-guessing the material you just got done, tweaking it, worrying over it so that you can become more popular, so that you can survive. It's not a hard job, but it's a tough, tough market, and unless you're lucky to hit immediately that tough market makes it a harder job.
 
posted 1:38 am PST | Permalink
 

---

 
Daily Blog Archives
November 2019
October 2019
September 2019
August 2019
July 2019
 
Full Archives