Is there a future for the "comics" in newspapers?
I visited with two great-nephews, and a great-niece, over the holidays and discovered the boys had never seen the Sunday comics in a newspaper before!
They live in Australia, but could that be the tip of yet another iceberg for newspapers to crash into?
At least one story in an Australian news website reports a drop in cartoons in that country and beyond:
I found one U.S. based website dedicated to keeping the comics alive...the comics curmudgeon. And last year The New York Times published an article about the 100th anniversary of a major syndicated comics company.
Like most folks my age, I read the comics each Sunday during my childhood....and continued to read one or more of the strips into adulthood.
I stopped a few years back when the newspapers shrunk the size of their pages to the point that I could no longer read the comic captions without a magnifying glass!
Comics were so important at one point that in 1945, New York's Mayor went on radio live to read them when a strike by newspaper delivery truck drivers prevented readers from seeing their favorites.
[Sunday Focus is a regular feature of www.TimLennox.com, now online for more than a decade.]
I visited with two great-nephews, and a great-niece, over the holidays and discovered the boys had never seen the Sunday comics in a newspaper before!
They live in Australia, but could that be the tip of yet another iceberg for newspapers to crash into?
At least one story in an Australian news website reports a drop in cartoons in that country and beyond:
Over the past 20 years it has become the trendy thing to do for newspaper editors to reduce the number of comics they publish. Not just in Australia, but all over the world. Just why, is baffling comic strip artists everywhere. Because following the deduction in the number of comics being published, there is a decline in circulation.
The reduction is always accompanied by other redesign contributions, so it is always hard to put the loss of circulation down to just the loss of comics. However when confuted by a continuing trend it is very hard to argue there is any newspaper anywhere, which has benefited in anyway by the comic strip reduction.
I found one U.S. based website dedicated to keeping the comics alive...the comics curmudgeon. And last year The New York Times published an article about the 100th anniversary of a major syndicated comics company.
Like most folks my age, I read the comics each Sunday during my childhood....and continued to read one or more of the strips into adulthood.
I stopped a few years back when the newspapers shrunk the size of their pages to the point that I could no longer read the comic captions without a magnifying glass!
[Sunday Focus is a regular feature of www.TimLennox.com, now online for more than a decade.]
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