“So let’s say it does wreck newspaper comics. I’m on board with that. I want to punch a hole in the boat. I want to see the whole thing flush like an animal carcass down a toilet bowl, and the carcass is on fire.”
Brouhaha brews between the big and the bitter! Tycho actually has the best summary of the whole thing, so read that too, but here’s the bullets:
- Scott Kurtz has a very popular daily webcomic, PvP. Not the most popular strip in existence, but vastly more popular than most other webcomics–popular enough that he lives on its ads and his print deal with Image.
- Now, he wants to see his comic in newspapers.
- Many newspapers aren’t doing that well, because not as many people read newspapers as used to do so.
- To reduce costs, these newspapers are continuing to cut print space and funding for syndicated comic strips, something they’ve been doing aggressively for over a decade; some newspapers (like the Philadelphia Enquirer) have asked syndicates (like Universal Press) for a year of free strips, or demanded (like Knight-Ridder, which owns 31 large papers) a price reduction in strips across the board.
- Scott has siezed on this opportunity to leverage his strip’s popularity, offering PvP, free of charge, to multiple newspapers and newspaper conglomerates. It’s a smart deal for him–he gets huge exposure, and he’s already doing the strip anyway–and for them–they get a new-to-them comic with an established audience for free.
- Newspaper cartoonists who are aware of this are rabidly hating on Kurtz, while secretly urinating in their Depends.
Now, Scott’s success in this arena is hardly guaranteed. Newspapers are paranoid about comic strips, generally preferring the most sanitized, humorless pap available, as a sop to their demographic (which, I’m sorry to say, skews more and more to “old” and “boring”). This is why things like Cathy and Marmaduke and (hideously) Family Circus continue to exist. PvP has cussing and violence in it sometimes, and it might get angry letters, and it’s four inches of column space that could be used to squeeze in another ad.
Regardless, there are going to be alt-weeklies and college papers that take him up on it. They’re all going to profit from the deal. And Kurtz won’t be the first webcomic to jump to newspapers, but he will be the first one to do it for free, and bigger papers are going to look at that and start asking questions.
“Hey,” they’re going to ask, “why are we paying thousands of dollars for comics that could be generated by a monkey on lithium? Why are we getting exactly the same comics as everyone else, when we could be making exclusive deals to get a comic nobody else in the region has? Now that the Interweb allows millions of people to read any paper they want, can we use comics to leverage our success in that arena?”
The answers might be “because, because, and no,” but they will ask, and that’s a change. You remember the last time things changed in the newspaper comics industry? In a good way?
Me either.
