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Should old newspaper comics make way for new ones?

0219_comics

The Columbus Dispatch (love that name Dispatch, for a newspaper), dropped the daily reruns of Peanuts, they say they have been paying thousands of dollars a year for the rights to print the reruns. While it’s true that Peanuts is a money machine, should new features be run in the newspapers, leaving the legacy strips to online locations?

I’ve always felt that when a cartoonist retires or dies, the feature should go with them. I sort of was hesitant after reading the Cartoonist Round Table article awhile back, I wrote about it here. But should the comics pages make way for new features when a cartoonist is done?

I do enjoy Dick Tracy and Nancy, which have new cartoonists and writers but I also read them online, like I read most of the comics now. I rarely read them in the newspapers, for one thing, the newspaper editors have terrible taste and they don’t run the comics I like, for another thing, they are too small to read in the newspapers. I also posted an image once of one Sunday page where the panels were smaller than postage stamps!

I think most readers these days read the comics online, simply because most readers are younger and that’s where they get their news and entertainment and the newspapers are dropping many comics and features as they tighten up the printed paper.

There is an interesting column in Tedium, called, “Rethinking the Funny Pages,” where writer Ernie Smith says the newspapers comics are starting to “age out.” The column was written in February after Mort Walker’s death and the change over of Nancy. He also claims that the future of comics is online. It’s an interesting read.

Hanging out on Sullivan Street

sullivanstreet

Here’s a great photo from the 1930s – a bunch of boys hanging out on Sullivan Street in Brooklyn. I like that the boy at top reading the newspapers looks as if he’s reading the comics. It sort of looks like the Daily News Sunday comics section. Doesn’t it?

Ladies mile

ladiesmile

Saw this old photo online somewhere. Love it. I can stare it it and just see so much going on. Look at the dog. Look at the lady getting onto the carriage. Is she posing for the photo? Was this just a nature shot? I’m guessing this is 6th Avenue because of the elevated train to the right and the buildings look like so many of them that are still there up and down 6th Avenue in the teens and 20 (streets).

This photo is Ladies Mile in NYC in the year 1897. Ladies Mile was a shopping district in the late 1800s. It went from roughly 15th Street to 24th Street and from Park Avenue South to west of 6th Avenue. A large part of Broadway, also comprised Ladies Mile.

So many of the buildings are still there today. When I’m walking around New York City, I can’t help but feel their presence. They are kept in such great shape, especially the old department stores. Many are separated into a few different stores, but the old buildings look as if they were just built. Some have golden cupolas on the roof and they all seem to have those great Beaux Arts and Queen Anne style arches and layers.

As I walk through the city, and not just in the Ladies Mile area, building seem to jump out to me and speak to me. What I do is google the address and all sorts of wonderful history pops up. I get the history of the building, when it was built, what it was originally used for and so on. There were so many department stores back in the day and not just department stores, smaller buildings pop up as being rooming houses for men, or an old fire houses or old livery stables. It’s quite interesting.

In October, this year, I think it was, I had an old photo of buildings on Union Square from the late 1800s. It was on my phone. I was holding the phone up and trying to match the view to see if I could find the exact buildings. As I was holding the phone up, it looked as if I was taking pictures, but I was just looking at the image to compare it to the current street. I had the phone up to one guy’s face and I got embarrassed.

I showed him the photo and told him what I was doing and he started laughing. I think he thought I was taking pictures of him.

I never did match the buildings. I did match the exact location, just not the buildings.

Charles Addams; mysterious and spooky

The Long Island Press has a nice feature on cartoonist Charles Addams. I didn’t realize there was a Long Island Press. When I was a kid I delivered the Long Island Press newspaper. I like seeing Long Island Press stretched across the monitor, sort of like the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, which has also been reborn as a website. You can read the original Brooklyn Daily Eagle online, the digitally scanned pages are here. The Long Island Press is also printed monthly. I’m in Long Island often, I’ll have to look for it.

I love the names of newspapers. Some I don’t get, like the Hartford Courant and the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

An outtake from the article on Charles Addams says, “When he was 12, a New York Herald newspaper cartoonist said he was untalented and should forget his dream of an art career.” I had a similar experience from one of the syndicate heads, I’m way more than 12 years old now, but it’s interesting how great artists (Addams, not me) are usually turned down until their time comes. How many times was Charles Schulz turned down? 80?

Being told I can’t, makes me work harder to prove that I can, which seems to be the case with Addams and Schulz.

I always liked tv shows based on comics and comic strips, it wasn’t a deliberate thing, but I realize that I love The Addams Family, Hazel and Dennis the Menace, to name a few. Whenever I see them on tv, I stop to watch.

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My Mouse Comic

There is a cute little comic that’s grown on me lately. It’s called, “My Mouse Comic,” by William White.

I read it on Facebook here, but you can also see it on it’s own website here.

It reminds me a bit of my Paws comic, where there are calm, cute animals going about daily life; simply drawn and enjoyable.

William has been trying to increase his audience. I keep meaning to tell him about my Instagram idea for comics. I think he’d find a big audience on Instagram. My Mouse Comic a cute little thing that would appear in people’s feeds daily.

mouse1 mouse2 mouse3

Why the new Instagram algorithm is a good thing

In my previous post I was talking about Instagram and comics. Many cartoonists were not fans of Instagram and they really should get into it.

They can still post on private websites and other platforms, but I do believe Instagram is the best at the moment. It is defiantly the most popular.

I mentioned the guy who didn’t like the idea of time consuming hash tags (all five seconds of that).

Another person didn’t like that they had to use their cell phone to upload to Instagram, rather than use the computer. Aren’t people on their phones all day, every day? What is the difference if you upload a comic strip via your phone? There are programs that let you set up the Instagram post ahead of time and have it post the day and time you prefer.

And there was another complained about, “LO-REZ SQUARE F*CKING JPEGS.” I guess he doesn’t realize that the whole internet works on lo-rez f*cking jpgs.

These people are their own worst enemies.

Another was concerned about the new algorithms where in the past when you posted something, it would appear at the top of the timeline and then work its way down as other people posted. But that was a negative. If you posted a comic at 8 am, it was gone and unseen by 9 am. The new algorithm, keeps it moving around, so it doesn’t disappear and that post and others always pop up somewhere.

So many popular comics use Instagram for posting their comics, along with so many other platforms, and at Instagram alone, they have hundreds of thousands of followers. This and the hashtags bring thousands of readers a day – thousands of fans.

Post your comics on Instagram!

Instagram hashtags are the key to new readers and fans

There was a discussion on Facebook about the best social media platforms for comics. But this applies to everyone who posts on social media platforms. While we were discussing this on Facebook, another platform is better for comics and most things – that’s Instagram.

I suggested Instagram because according to news reports, that is the most popular platform for teens and young adults now. I’m thinking that most people would like that demographic for an audience, along with older folks, of course.

I like the new formatting on Instagram for comics where it allows you to post one comic panel at a time and then the reader can scroll through, reading one panel at a time. It’s perfect for single panel comics, too, but of course, not great for long form comics.

But as usual, many cartoonists are their own worst enemies. They don’t agree with posting on Instagram for the silliest reasons. I guess they would rather continue to post their comics in a black hole where only they see the comics.

In our online discussion, one person claims, “The only gripe I have about it is that it takes a while to type all the individual hashtags for each post.”

Less than smart comment. The hashtags are the key to readers – readers that don’t follow you on a daily basis. People use hashtags to find things on Instagram. If you post a comic strip about bicycle riding, you can use the usual hashtags like #comics #comicstrip #art and so on, but you can also add #bicycles #cyclists #ride, etc. and in that way you are opening up the post to those people.

I live in a seaside community and on my personal Instagram page, I can’t tell you how many boating people follow me when I post pictures of the marina and boats and docks in my neighborhood. They see the hashtag #boats #bay #water and they find my posts. And they end up following me.

I think Instagram makes the best use of hashtags of all the social media platforms, Twitter is probably second, but I’m not sure if it’s good for posting daily comics. I think Twitter is better used for communicating with fans and readers, you know, keeping them up to date on what you are working on, maybe sharing some of your daily life and travels.

Another issue people had in our discussion group was the new algorithm used by Instgram where the posts are not appearing in the order they are posted. But this is a good thing. I’ll explain why in my next post.

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Thanks to the Durrells and Anthony Bourdain, I have wanderlust

I’m feeling wanderlust. I was watching the Durrells in Corfu the other night and I really would love to live like them. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a PBS show, it’s a true story about a mother and her four children who move from England to Greece in the 1930s after the father passes away. The kids are about 11 to 22 years of age.

The surroundings and town are so beautiful. They live in a big old house at the water’s edge, surrounded by the sea and beautiful mountains and they are ensconced with the locals who become their friends.

Each of the kids has his own thing going on from the youngest one loving and collecting animals to the oldest being a writer who is trying to be a world traveler. It’s excellent.

Right after the Durrell’s I turned to Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown and it was about West Texas, which according to this episode is completely different than I thought. The people are very accepting, they love their Mexican neighbors across the river, they speak Spanish, out of respect, as one man put it, they eat Spanish food and there is a large Mexican influence, they know that their land was once Mexican land, and oh yea – they don’t want a border wall. This is one of the best episodes I’ve ever seen. It may be posted here on the Parts Unknown website by now, worth a look.

I am at the point in my life where I feel like selling all my possessions and just traveling and cartooning along the way, incorporating the locations in my work. When I think of the southwest, I think of George Herriman who had a very big connection to that area, as you can see in Krazy Kat.

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Annabel Langbein; natural New Zealand cooking

annabel “No matter how humble the food, people are always so happy to be cooked for.”

Those are the words of Annabel Langbein, a cook and food writer from New Zealand.

On Saturday mornings, I watch her tv show on one of our PBS channels. She cooks from her kitchen from her cabin in the woods, on a lake, in New Zealand on “Annabel Langbein The Free Range Cook,” which only has a few episodes – three seasons, 13 episodes per season. Anabel cooks off the land, she grows most of her own crops and she heads out to local farms for other sources of food.

I don’t cook, I barely like to boil water, but I enjoy cooking shows, I find them very relaxing. Put that together with Annabel’s New Zealand accent, probably my most favorite accent in the world, and it’s enjoyable, especially when she goes out to forage for food in the New Zealand country side and mountains. The scenery is so beautiful.

At the end of each episode, she brings a bunch of friends together and they eat out on teh deck of the cabin, they eat what she prepared throughout that episode. The people are mostly those who were in the episode earlier – maybe a wine maker or a farmer or a helicopter pilot who took her up over the mountains or maybe an apple orchard owner where she picked apples for that meal’s dessert earlier in the day.

She drives an old yellow truck and prepares meals out in the wild where she is spending time, like at the apple orchard or up in the mountains.

Anabel has an interesting history, she started out as a hippy in the 1970s, having left home at age 16 and lived in the wilderness, cooking over open fires, which eventually brought her to her cooking life.