Ryan (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} qwantz) wrote,@ 2009-04-13 16:15:00 |
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on the newspaper comics page
At the Titans of Small Town show last weekend, I was chatting with some of the people there and someone (I've forgotten your name - sorry!) asked me about newspapers and comics and I had a revelation I'd never had before, which is as follows:
The death of newspapers is going to be great for comics, you guys!
And here's how I defend that:
When you say "comics" to people, they'll think of what they're familiar with. And if you say "comics" to most people in North America - and here "most people" unfortunately means "people who have never stepped inside a comics shop" - what they'll be familiar with will probably be three things: superheroes, Archie, and newspaper strips.
Superheroes are pretty easy to avoid if you don't read them: they're sold in comic shops, and the only time they intrude out of that is on amusement park rides and when movies come out. Archie you'll see in the checkout at grocery stores, but I don't see many adults (besides myself) flipping through them while waiting in line, and I don't think they sell much beyond the under 12 set. I think it's fair to say that newspaper strips are the only comics the average adult in North America has a chance to read every day. They're in the same paper that the news comes in! That's CONVENIENCE.
And what sucks is that most comics appearing in newspapers are BLAND. Terribly, similarly, depressingly bland.
There are exceptions! There are some great newspaper strips, I am pretty sure. And while it could be that newspaper syndicates offer a huge array of really good comics to papers, what the editors of every mainstream newspaper have overwhelmingly chosen, in every city I've ever lived in, traveled to, or otherwise read the papers of are the safe ones, the standbys: Garfield. Hi and Lois. Blondie. Hagar the Horrible. Beetle Bailey. Born Loser. Frank and Earnest. The Wizard of Id. I say "mainstream" newspapers because I've never seen an alt weekly running "Beetle Bailey" unless they're being particularly ironic. Look, The Onion's print edition thought it would be funnier to run Cathy in Spanish than it would be to run it in English, the language that the rest of the paper is printed in.
I'm referring to these comics as "bland" because they're all telling the same sorts of jokes, jokes that have long become predictable. I'm not saying they're terrible, because they're obviously appealing to an audience - and judging by the interchangeability of their humour and their comedic aesthetic, it seems like they're all appealing to the SAME audience.
That's where the problem is! The comics being printed in most newspaper comics pages don't appeal to the majority of people. Obviously one comic is never going to appeal to everyone, but there's so little variety in most comic pages that it reduces down to presenting only one sort of comic, only one sort of comedy, day after day. There's a variety of reasons (safety, momentum, the syndicates themselves) that these comics, the safe ones, are the comics that most people are exposed to, day after day. Can you really fault the public for deciding that maybe comics just aren't that good? For confusing the medium with the only examples they've seen of it? After years of reading the comics page and finding only one good comic - or worse, of reading the comics page and finding nothing but a sea of depressing comics that follow the formal structure of a joke, but are so wholly and unambiguously unfunny, they defy classification as "humor" - can you blame them for finally concluding, "Wow, maybe comics just aren't for me."?
And with newspapers (in their current format) struggling, so too is their comics page. It'll either die slowly or it'll morph into something different, and either way it'll be an improvement. It's going to be great, you guys! In 15 years, when young people hear the word "comics", they're not going to think "Garfield". Nobody but Garfield fans will think that! The rest of us will either be thinking of a comic that WE enjoy, or we'll never have actually read a comic and have fewer negative preconceptions about the form.
I want to be clear: this is not dissing newspaper comics, beyond those that I named, I suppose. I'm not saying all newspaper comics are terrible: in fact, I'm certain there's actually MORE terrible comics online than there are in print. And I'm not dissing print as a medium either - whether print or web comics, we're both doing comics, guys. What I am dissing, what I'm prematurely celebrating the death of, is the standard newspaper comics page: that ambassador which, for whatever reason, ended up privileging blandness over interest, sameness over change, safety over risks. That ambassador which once reached into the homes of most everyone in North America, introducing comics to a whole generation with a depressing, bland handshake that went on for 80 years. That ambassador which started out great, but which ended by giving a whole generation the smallest idea of what comics can be - of what comics ARE, right now.
This isn't a problem online because there is no syndicate there deciding which comics to price at which rate and no newspaper editors deciding for you what to read today. There's just comics - most of them free. If you find one you like, odds are the author is also linking to his or her favourites too, which is a great starting point for assembling your own reading list. There's tons of great work out there - you just need to go exploring.
The good newspaper comics will still be just as good when you're reading them online.
At the Titans of Small Town show last weekend, I was chatting with some of the people there and someone (I've forgotten your name - sorry!) asked me about newspapers and comics and I had a revelation I'd never had before, which is as follows:
The death of newspapers is going to be great for comics, you guys!
And here's how I defend that:
When you say "comics" to people, they'll think of what they're familiar with. And if you say "comics" to most people in North America - and here "most people" unfortunately means "people who have never stepped inside a comics shop" - what they'll be familiar with will probably be three things: superheroes, Archie, and newspaper strips.
Superheroes are pretty easy to avoid if you don't read them: they're sold in comic shops, and the only time they intrude out of that is on amusement park rides and when movies come out. Archie you'll see in the checkout at grocery stores, but I don't see many adults (besides myself) flipping through them while waiting in line, and I don't think they sell much beyond the under 12 set. I think it's fair to say that newspaper strips are the only comics the average adult in North America has a chance to read every day. They're in the same paper that the news comes in! That's CONVENIENCE.
And what sucks is that most comics appearing in newspapers are BLAND. Terribly, similarly, depressingly bland.
There are exceptions! There are some great newspaper strips, I am pretty sure. And while it could be that newspaper syndicates offer a huge array of really good comics to papers, what the editors of every mainstream newspaper have overwhelmingly chosen, in every city I've ever lived in, traveled to, or otherwise read the papers of are the safe ones, the standbys: Garfield. Hi and Lois. Blondie. Hagar the Horrible. Beetle Bailey. Born Loser. Frank and Earnest. The Wizard of Id. I say "mainstream" newspapers because I've never seen an alt weekly running "Beetle Bailey" unless they're being particularly ironic. Look, The Onion's print edition thought it would be funnier to run Cathy in Spanish than it would be to run it in English, the language that the rest of the paper is printed in.
I'm referring to these comics as "bland" because they're all telling the same sorts of jokes, jokes that have long become predictable. I'm not saying they're terrible, because they're obviously appealing to an audience - and judging by the interchangeability of their humour and their comedic aesthetic, it seems like they're all appealing to the SAME audience.
That's where the problem is! The comics being printed in most newspaper comics pages don't appeal to the majority of people. Obviously one comic is never going to appeal to everyone, but there's so little variety in most comic pages that it reduces down to presenting only one sort of comic, only one sort of comedy, day after day. There's a variety of reasons (safety, momentum, the syndicates themselves) that these comics, the safe ones, are the comics that most people are exposed to, day after day. Can you really fault the public for deciding that maybe comics just aren't that good? For confusing the medium with the only examples they've seen of it? After years of reading the comics page and finding only one good comic - or worse, of reading the comics page and finding nothing but a sea of depressing comics that follow the formal structure of a joke, but are so wholly and unambiguously unfunny, they defy classification as "humor" - can you blame them for finally concluding, "Wow, maybe comics just aren't for me."?
And with newspapers (in their current format) struggling, so too is their comics page. It'll either die slowly or it'll morph into something different, and either way it'll be an improvement. It's going to be great, you guys! In 15 years, when young people hear the word "comics", they're not going to think "Garfield". Nobody but Garfield fans will think that! The rest of us will either be thinking of a comic that WE enjoy, or we'll never have actually read a comic and have fewer negative preconceptions about the form.
I want to be clear: this is not dissing newspaper comics, beyond those that I named, I suppose. I'm not saying all newspaper comics are terrible: in fact, I'm certain there's actually MORE terrible comics online than there are in print. And I'm not dissing print as a medium either - whether print or web comics, we're both doing comics, guys. What I am dissing, what I'm prematurely celebrating the death of, is the standard newspaper comics page: that ambassador which, for whatever reason, ended up privileging blandness over interest, sameness over change, safety over risks. That ambassador which once reached into the homes of most everyone in North America, introducing comics to a whole generation with a depressing, bland handshake that went on for 80 years. That ambassador which started out great, but which ended by giving a whole generation the smallest idea of what comics can be - of what comics ARE, right now.
This isn't a problem online because there is no syndicate there deciding which comics to price at which rate and no newspaper editors deciding for you what to read today. There's just comics - most of them free. If you find one you like, odds are the author is also linking to his or her favourites too, which is a great starting point for assembling your own reading list. There's tons of great work out there - you just need to go exploring.
The good newspaper comics will still be just as good when you're reading them online.
