Go, Read: Scott Kurtz On Garry Trudeau

Scott Kurtz has a short essay up on comments made by Garry Trudeau in his Slate interview about the general prospects for cartoonists, which is a subject that today always includes the prospect of webcomics cartooning. I always enjoy reading Kurtz on the subject of webcomics -- he knows his subject, as that's how he makes his living; he's frequently funny; and he's passionate to the point of pissing people off. These are all great qualities, and they're put to good use here.

I think this post shows off Kurtz's strengths and weaknesses on this particular subject. Kurtz is right, here and in general, that webcomics cartooning provides a multitude of options for a lot of cartoonists to pursue publication and see rewards from it. He's further correct that this includes many cartoonists that wouldn't have those opportunities otherwise, that this a good thing in comparison to limited opportunities elsewhere, and that while these new avenues will see some cartoonists who are going to do very well the fact that it won't include everyone at those compensation levels isn't an indictment of those opportunities. His best bit of analysis is that Trudeau's off-hand comment about newspaper comic strips offering pop-culture tenure can be seen as a damning criticism of that field, an accretion mechanism that wraps certain cartoonists in a hard-to-penetrate armor made up of hundreds and hundreds of clients that runs the huge risk of perpetuating mediocre work in newspapers and making it hard for better, less-established work to find purchase.

However, I'm not sure that the benefits and opportunities of webcomics and some of the problematic aspects of newspaper print cartooning always have to be placed into gladiatorial combat with one another. Just the fact that Kurtz had people egging him into writing this mini-essay betrays an odd cultural mindset, no matter how nimbly Kurtz plays against it. I very much doubt Trudeau meant to be anything close to provocative with any of his statements. I also remain unconvinced about some of the more extravagant language that comes with Kurtz's analysis. It seems to me that we have yet to reach the point where the newspaper strip field is "crumbling down" around anyone's ears to the extent asserted. It's always been difficult to forge a career in that field, and it's indeed more difficult right now at various stages, but there are still a lot of cartoonists that are doing just fine in that arena, both established and new. If you abandon the standard of "how things used to be in comics when Ham Fisher walked around punching people in the face while wearing solid gold shoes" for a standard of "how things are for all cartoonists generally" the newspaper strip field remains a successful corner of comics, even with these recent structural changes.

I also think Kurtz misjudges Garry Trudeau's ability to do well on the web if he had to. Trudeau's partnership with Slate seems to me one of the more successful and reliable comic strip platforms on the Internet. I would assert that it's Trudeau's on-line presence that drives a lot of the interest in his books these days, and that this is reflected in how they're presented, formatted and assembled now as opposed to, say, the Holt paperbacks of long ago. My hunch is that if Trudeau was shorn of his newspaper income, he wouldn't necessarily be dependent on his syndicate having a monetized model for him to plug into, he would be in what seems to me a pretty solid position to find a magazine partner that could help support him, or provide him with a platform so that he could be more aggressive with licensing, or any of the options other cartoonists more focused on the on-line avenues are able to pursue. In other words, Trudeau's point that this wouldn't be the same living he's making now and that he might be better off as a writer on Stephen Colbert's staff doesn't necessarily lead directly into Kurtz's suggestion that this would be no living at all. We can't know, of course, because the model Trudeau employs right now depends crucially on that still-existing income he makes from syndication, and it's nearly impossible to project around it.

I make a significant chunk of my living by self-publishing on-line, and I hope that no one takes my statements here or elsewhere as some sort of Defending Print stance. I mean, I'm fine being kicked in the nuts when I say something stupid -- which is nearly all of the time -- it's just that I think this particular framework is misapplied and counterproductive, both in this case (for the most part) and in cases like it. Print doesn't need defenders; it needs people that know how to work within that changing market according to the opportunities it presents today as opposed to chasing the shadows of the past. I feel similarly about webcomics and prophets and their orientation towards an unknowable future. I believe in whatever works, and will continue believing in those things until they all-the-way don't. Garry Trudeau has never been a model for anyone other than Garry Trudeau, but that model's worked out pretty well for him so far and continues to do so. In that way, he resembles the best webcomics cartoonists more than he stands in natural opposition to them.
 
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