Sometimes The Internet Disappoints Me

I think it unfortunate that the alt-weekly cartoonist Neil Swaab issued an apology for a mini-essay he wrote about the decline of alt-newspaper cartooning and the limitations of the Internet as a home for those cartoonists. I mean, it's nice as all hell, and speaks well of him as a person, but I selfishly sort of liked that he put those thoughts out there. Even though many of the responses were strong -- one, two -- I tend to see passionate dialogue as a good thing, and I think it's really only the fact that we argue a certain way on-line that makes this kind of conversation difficult.

In this case, I think it's the tendency to go to extremes that complicates matters, both for the way it leads to strong statements like Swaab's but also -- and perhaps more importantly -- in that people tend to cast different strategies as competing when they might be. Further, it seems that the constant rehash which is on-line argumentation sometimes compels people to get behind one of the strategies either to bolster their own choice or to look as if they're out in front on the best way of doing things. Me, I believe that the more ways that people have to make money from their comics, the better off things are for cartooning in general. I love the various webcomics models, including the drive-to-merchandise way of doing things, and I don't think there's anything morally objectionable to any of them. Driving readers to merchandise makes a lot of sense and in various ways has been around since comics' first decades as a commercial art form. As one of the links above points out, merchandising is what made Charles Schulz a very wealthy man. Yet I also think it's important to point out that the health of the traditional newspaper model until very, very recently is what allowed Bill Watterson to not merchandise while still earning a great living at his art. I want as many strategies as encompass as many different kinds of artists and their temperaments and skill sets as humanly possible. Alt-weeklies gave us Jules Feiffer, Tony Millionaire, Matt Groening, Lynda Barry and Chris Ware. I don't think it's wrong for Swaab to be dismayed when things become more narrow, and I don't think it's wrong for any of us to be concerned if a rich tradition of making comics has started down the road from ailing to all the way gone.

In ways the Internet does not disappoint me, here's a fine interview by Matt Bors with Alt-Weekly Editor Kevin Allman. That might be easier to get to just by going to Bors' blog and finding the appropriate entry. Lots of great stuff there, not limited to: the cost of dropping a cartoon isn't the cost of the cartoon but that cost plus the potential for ad space revenue it frees up, the Huffington Post is a total exploitative fraud (which isn't really a comics-related point, but needs to be mentioned as much as possible), and that it's the same with alt-weeklies as it is with so many of the entities suffering in the economic downturn: it may be the that the framework is too expensive, not that the product itself is bad or outdated.
 
posted 7:05 am PST | Permalink
 

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