THE NIGHTMARE GALLOPS ON: PT 3

Alt-weekly comics are faring even worse than their mainstream brethren. Village Voice Media, which owns 15 weeklies including the venerable Village Voice, stopped publishing syndicated comics in early February. Creative Loafing, which owns five weeklies, did the same. All for the sake of bottom lines.

At his blog, Mike Cannon of Red Meat wrote: “It’s a sad state of affairs, and potentially the end of an industry — if you want to call it that — where a small handful of ragtag scribblers like me have slaved for many years (for very little money, if you ever wondered) to bring you a laugh or two every week. Times are tough,” he conceded, “but if the humble $10 to $20 that I generally get paid for a Red Meat strip is going to bring the whole operation tumbling down, then the alt-weekly industry is already dead on its feet.”

Matt Groening’s Life in Hell is still in about 40-50 papers, mostly on campuses, but that’s only a quarter of what its circulation once was, reported Michael Miner in the Chicago Reader February 12 (my source for most of this piece). Because of the success of Groening’s tv creation, “The Simpsons,” money isn’t an issue with him. “I like sitting down once a week and knocking something out all by myself,” he told Minor. “The rest of my life is full of collaborators. ... It’s very difficult,” he continued, “when you’re sitting there trying to come up with a punchline and you call up Lynda Barry and say, ‘Do you have any ideas?’ and she says, ‘Yes, quit.’”

Groening and Barry have been friends since college. “I know Matt’s conflicted about this and what he’s going to do,” Barry said to Miner. “Like everyone else, he’s in fewer and fewer papers. But he really does not want to give up his strip. He doesn’t want to quit. But quitting is lovely. I love to taunt him about how magical it is not to have a weekly deadline after 30 years.”

After the last paper kicks him out, Groening supposes that he’ll continue Life in Hell in books or online, but he’s in a unique situation: he doesn’t need the money from the strip. Most alt-weekly cartoonists have websites, but as Cannon said in his blog, “None of us make our  living from our websites. Let me repeat that: We don’t make a living from our websites.”

A longer version of this report can be found in the usual place, www.RCHarvey.com, Op. 240.