Now let us mourn the passing of Family Tree, one of the comic strips I signed to United Media during my 2006-09 tenure as Editor of Acquisitions and Development.
In previous years my friend and fellow editorial cartoonist Signe Wilkinson, on staff at the Philadelphia Daily News, would have enjoyed a big paycheck as the result of this intelligent strip. Alas, the market for print comics has all but dried up. Comics pages are shrinking, newspapers aren’t buying, and the Internet doesn’t pay. When her strip vanished from papers, readers didn’t complain–they just began reading it online.
I will miss the Tree family. But I still have Signe to kick around–well, not really. No one kicks Signe around. But I can still whine–if she’ll take my calls.
1 Comment.
Yah this is a bad trend. I do have an optimistic perspective on it though, at least long term. I feel a lot of this is just the transition to a new media. Many things, good things, will die in the initial social transition as general pricing schemes and sustainable theories of cash flow haven’t really been figured out effectively on the internet yet.
There will be a dark era where this continues to be true, but then once enough has collapsed and died the need to change things will become overwhelmingly apparent and then change will begin. Sadly it will probably be at least a few decades before we reach this point which means a lot of starving artists are still slated for starvation before social reform sets in.