These aren’t the funniest of times for cartoonists.
The same forces that have collapsed newspaper staffs and put some newspapers out of business entirely are taking their toll on the people who create the material that many readers turn to first every morning.
And just like their more sober colleagues who report and present the news, the people who help populate the funny pages are scrambling to figure out how to survive the changes. And they, too, are finding in the Internet both a bane and a blessing.
Pearls Before Swine creator Stephan Pastis knows both sides of that coin. The comic featuring the cynical Rat, the hyper-naive Pig, elaborate, soul-crushing puns and the catchphrase “zeeba neighba!” was on the verge of national distribution back in 2000 when the syndicate got cold feet, fearing its edgy style would bomb, and pulled it back. Instead, it ran Pearls on the syndicate’s website.
Then Dilbert creator Scott Adams started checking in, blogged about it, and suddenly its hits soared, Pastis says. Newspaper distribution followed.
“I owe my career to the Internet,” says Pastis, who left his job as a lawyer to pursue the comic strip dream full time. “And it also sort of plagues me.”
The Pearls writer and artist was in Wisconsin over the weekend for the Festival of Cartooning in Kenosha, an event organized and run by Anne Hambrock. Her husband, John Hambrock, writes and draws The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee; the couple lives in Kenosha, where John Hambrock also runs a design studio, In-House Communications.
The festival is the second one Anne Hambrock has put on in Kenosha. She organized the first, which drew 250 people, in 2011 in conjunction with a gallery show, “One Fine Sunday In The Funny Pages,” that she helped bring to Carthage College that year. This year’s attendance grew to nearly 400, she says, and the event raised more than $9,000 for charity.
“My overall goal is to put cartoonists and cartooning back into the mainstream of entertainment,” she says. “That’s where it was when I was growing up and I think it belongs there again.” Citing the success of comic-book-based movies like The Avengers and their spin-off products, from t-shirts to video games, she adds, “People consume cartoons just as much as they ever did; they are just less aware of the people behind the images.”
Besides interviewing Pastis last Friday, I sat in on a panel discussion Saturday afternoon as he joined seven other cartoonists featured at the festival to talk about their work and the role of their craft in our culture.
For editorial cartoonists, the future is “very murky,” says Phil Hand, who draws for the Wisconsin State Journal as a freelancer and who took part in the Saturday panel. And as media have become more fragmented along ideological lines, cartoonists’ skins have had to get thicker. “People do not like having their viewpoints challenged,” Hand says.
The expectations for people hoping to make a living from the craft have changed for good, he adds. “I have to come to trips with the fact that there are not going to be staff jobs again.”
Edison Lee creator John Hambrock finds that the Internet can provide more exposure – online audiences, blogging to help generate interest, social networks to spread the word and direct marketing for books anthologizing strips. But that’s a lot more work, he observes.
For panelist Norm Feuti, who has two strips, Retail and Gil, the Internet is simply inevitable. “We have to embrace the Web whether we want to or not,” he says. Gil, he notes, started its life as a web comic and has since found its way into print. The still-unanswered question for web comics: “How do we monetize that?”
Cinderella stories like Gil and Pearls show that the Internet can be a boon to comic artists by letting them build an immediate audience online. It gave United Feature Syndicate, the syndicate carrying Pearls when it launched, a test market that showed a cautious sales staff the strip could grow a sizeable audience; it’s now in more than 600 papers. (United has since been acquired by Universal Press Syndicate, where Pearls now resides.)
The web also helps build an audience for the strip in cities where it doesn’t run yet, Pastis says: Comic fans can read it online, then try to persuade the local paper to pick it up.
There’s a downside to that, too, however. In the past, when a newspaper dropped a strip, fans were motivated to mount campaigns with editors to bring it back. “Now I hear from people who say, ‘My newspaper dropped you, but that’s OK because I read you online.’”
The flaw in that: With every newspaper sale, the comic makes a few bucks. For every newspaper that drops it, that revenue stream goes away. “Nobody has figured out how to make that money off of the Internet,” Pastis says.
And it’s not getting better, he adds, citing the New Orleans Times Picayune’s move to become a primarily online publication distributing in print just three days a week.
“It is so scary. I don’t know how a town makes it if their newspaper isn’t published every day.”
Once again resembling other segments of the newspaper business, cartoonists like Pastis are finding every way possible to expand their presence in the new digital space. He’s on Facebook, he Tweets (albeit infrequently), and he’s got an app on iTunes that presents classic Pearls strips with added features, including animation and other video. (He’s also releasing a children’s book he wrote – one that has nothing to do with Pearls but sounds like it will share the comic’s flavor or humor.)
Having a presence “across the board” of many platforms is simply mandatory to reach and hold younger readers, he says. “And you have to brand yourself. That’s something creative people hate to do. But you have to be out front.”
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Second Thoughts: Eugene Kane won’t stay at the Journal Sentinel and cover education after all. After originally planning to reject a buyout from the paper, Kane thought again. But his voice won’t leave the paper entirely; he gets a freelance Sunday Crossroads column. “Basically I changed my mind,” he says, after taking a week off and considering the buyout’s terms, which are better than now provided for in the new Newspaper Guild contract for newsroom employees. The regular Sunday column evidently helped sweeten the deal. “Seemed like the best option,” Kane says.
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