Cartoons Go Online

A sample of the comic strip The Norm, by Michael Jantze.

If you want to take the pulse of newspaper comic strips, look no further than Jim Davis’s Garfield, a strip that nicely sums up both what’s right and wrong with the medium. Despite being about 20 years past its prime, the lasagna-obsessed, Monday-phobic feline remains immensely popular, boasting a readership of about 275 million worldwide. In 2004, it was picked up by an additional 50 newspapers, bumping its total syndication to some 2,620 newspapers and placing it in a tie with Charles Schulz’s masterful Peanuts for the most syndicated strip of all time.

While there’s no arguing with hundreds of millions of Garfield fans, Davis’s strip is perceived by many cartoonists as the Fat Elvis of the funny pages. It’s a perfect example of what’s called a “legacy” strip – a title that continues to gobble up precious newspaper space and shuts out fresh, young talents in the process. Davis’s bloated creation may be read (or maybe I should say endured) by millions, but the strip remains little more than an engine for an estimated annual $1-billion US merchandising machine responsible for pumping out T-shirts, coffee mugs, plush toys and, last summer, an inevitable $85-million US Hollywood movie. And as Davis has admitted, Garfield has long been written by a committee and is drawn by a stable of full-time artists – none of which happens to be Davis himself. (Last year, the 60-year-old confessed that he spent an average of five days a month actually working on the content of his strip.)

It’s legacy strips like Garfield, Blondie, Hi and Lois (and even that poor sad sack Ziggy) that drive people like Michael Jantze to distraction. The 42-year-old Jantze grew up with Peanuts and was an early devotee of Bill Waterson’s modern classic Calvin and Hobbes. He managed to channel these obsessions into The Norm, a gently offbeat strip that recounted the life of his titular hero Norm as he changed jobs, girlfriends and eventually got married. Jantze, who lives in San Francisco, sold his strip to King Features Syndicate (one of the industry’s big three, along with United Features and Universal Press) in 1996 and slowly gained a loyal audience. But while his readership was dedicated, The Norm stalled at just under 100 newspapers – a far cry from Garfield-like stardom. Nicole Jantze, Michael’s wife, business manager and current spokesperson, blames the lack of promotion and the ongoing reign of legacy strips for the strip’s failure to break out.

“The basic syndicate contract pays [the cartoonist] under minimum wage, when you look at the average number of papers most strips are in and the number of days you're producing,” she explains. This situation is a result of a revenue-splitting arrangement that is as old as the newspaper strip itself. The standard 20-year syndicate contract sees all newspaper and merchandising revenues divided 50-50 between the cartoonist and the syndicate. If a strip grows enough to be picked up by say 500 papers, the artist’s cut can be quite handsome. But thanks to the shrinking newspaper market, many young cartoonists have been stymied by lower and lower distribution levels, which translate into lower incomes across the board.

“It’s a very, very tough business and the creator has no control over it,” Jantze says. “This is because all the bargaining is done between the [syndicate’s] salesperson and the newspaper editor. It really is a syndicate – you can never forget that.”

When their contract came up in the fall of 2004 (Michael had negotiated a rare eight-year deal) Nicole convinced him to turn his back on the syndicate. The last newspaper version of The Norm ran on Sept. 12. The next day, Nicole posted an announcement on their website: if enough fans were willing to pony up a minimum of $25 US a year, The Norm would find new life as an online strip.

This wasn’t the first time someone had tried to emancipate the comic strip. Over the 109-year history of the form, a handful of strips – such as Fred Harman’s 1930s western strip Red Ryder and James Childress’s Conchy in the 1970s – have found success with self-syndication, by selling their work directly to newspapers. But this was always seen as an alternate means of attracting a syndicate’s attention. (For instance, Red Ryder was picked up by the Newspaper Enterprise Association and went on to inspire a radio show and a popular BB gun before ending in the 1960s.)

After extending their deadline to Dec. 31, the Jantzes announced in January that they had come close enough to their goal of 4,000 subscribers. The Norm was re-launched as a members-only strip on Jan. 3. Tom Spurgeon, a journalist and former newspaper cartoonist who has tracked the Jantzes’ venture on his website The Comics Reporter, says he was “astonished” that they were able to make their online gambit work.

“No one has lived the dream of becoming rich at comic strips without the involvement of syndicates. It's the standard path to becoming a star,” he explains. But when it comes to Jantze, “I wouldn't be surprised if he's making twice as much this year on The Norm than any year he was syndicated. What would happen if a more popular strip were to try that?”

In many ways the migration of comic strips to the internet is a sound business decision. Reacting to the twin pressures of rising newsprint costs and dwindling readerships, newspaper publishers over the years have drastically reduced the space devoted to strips. As a result, most strips today run at about half the page size that Little Orphan Annie did 50 years ago. The diminishing importance of comic strips, combined with a reluctance to recognize new talent, has resulted in a whole generation of cartoonists who see newspapers as a fading relic.

Since 2000, dozens of young cartoonists have used the web as a self-syndication scheme. While the quality and success of these vary widely, a few have managed to rise above the fray and build a healthy audience. Some, like PvP, Penny Arcade and Sluggy Freelance, have benefited from a young, video-game obsessed readership that enables them to run their strips for free while garnering income from video-game ads. (PvP also earns revenue with comic book-sized strip collections.) Other sites, like Modern Tales and Serializer.net, offer an assortment of alternative and independent comics with rates as low as $2.95 US a month.

A sample of the comic strip Achewood, by Chris Onstad.

Then there’s Chris Onstad’s Achewood, which has taken the creative opportunities of the internet to new and profane ends. In October 2001, the 29-year-old Stanford University graduate launched the strip – which he says documents what his wife’s stuffed animals do when the couple isn't home. Brusquely drawn and often innovative, Achewood has been billed by Onstad as “a cartoon of modern life as lived by a retarded otter, an alcoholic tiger, and two bears.” For the first two years the strip was strictly a part-time venture. Buoyed by T-shirt sales and his self-published strip collections, the San Francisco Bay Area resident quit his job in 2003 and began chronicling the twisted adventures of his four stuffed protagonists full-time. But unlike the Jantzes, who tried but failed to make it big in newspapers, Onstad has little interest in setting up shop next to Beetle Bailey.

“I see the ‘Funny Pages’ as a false goal for cartoonists. Cartoonists have to horribly emasculate themselves if they want to see newsprint,” he says via e-mail. “Newspapers were a flawed mechanism for getting this sort of entertainment to people anyway, but they were the only way. Not anymore. It's easier to send the link to my strip to your friend than a cut-out clipping.”

To him the online environment is as essential to the success of his strip as the syndicates were for generations of cartoonists before him. The internet offers “nothing but benefits for me. I can write whatever I want and not have some editor gating my work. It lives or dies via word of mouth.”

So what does he think about the future of the newspaper syndicates?

“I don't really care about what happens with the syndicates. I do my thing, we run our business, we follow our vision,” he says. “It's all a nice ‘F--- You’ to the guys in ties and short shirtsleeves who hold new comics up against the ‘gold’ standard of Garfield.”

Brad Mackay is a Toronto-based writer. He is currently collaborating on a book with Guelph-based cartoonist Seth about the history of Canadian cartooning.

Letters:

As a reader of both the Norm and Achewood (and an amateur cartoonist myself) I have to agree with the article put forth. Newspaper syndication has driven some of the best cartoonists of today out of syndication, or turned them off of cartooning all-together.

The internet has allowed a plethora of people to call themselves "cartoonists", however those who do their craft in order to be "hip" and "trendy" quickly die out. People who draw comic strips just to be cool quickly lose interest, and never develop a firm readership. But these true cartoonists are able to capture their readers interest; remember that online you can choose not to read a comic strip. In a newspaper, you really have no choice; with 12 strips to choose from in your daily paper, most people won't put in the energy to NOT read one in particular. In a newspaper you're stuck with what they give you; online the choices number in the THOUSANDS for every taste and interest.

The fact is, syndicated strips are turning many readers to the web. Strips like Garfield and Peanuts aren't so much funny as they are a sense of security. Garfield is fat. He hates Mondays. He loves lasagne. People read the strip not because it makes them laugh, but because they develop a sense of security with it. Strips like BC, with it's born-again Christian preaching, no longer strive to entertain the reader with innovative humour; they're written to appeal to the post-50 market.

So while some might consider these comics to merely be "rebelling" for the sake of being different, perhaps we should consider why there is a reason so many are moving off the beaten path. Perhaps there is a legitimate reason they've dropped their sticks and walked away from the dead horse.

Perhaps I'm just some edgy hip 20-something who can't stand authority, but answer me this: when was the last time a newspaper strip has made you laugh? Not just a little chuckle once a month, or a smirk on the bus. I mean loud, uncontrolled laughter. The kind that when you think about it an hour later you start laughing again. You'll never see someone having that kind of reaction from their daily dose of Family Circus.

Ronald MacKinnon Neil's Harbour, Nova Scotia

It's easy to dismiss "Garfield" (and several others). Probably makes you feel all "hip" and self-justified. But some of us - no, many of us - simply find the strip funny. Consistently so, in fact, just as we did with "Peanuts" and in fact still may thanks to "Peanuts Classics." The strips you cited as more worthy of display, along with several others, no, many of us just don't find them all that funny or interesting. I'm glad you feel better than us, more culturally out there. But perhaps you're not. Perhaps you're wrong. Perhaps you shouldn't sneer so much at people who don't get comic strips that aren't funny and aren't drawn very well. But that would be ever so unhip of you. May you and Harvey Pekar and his ilk all be very happy together.

Richard Szathmary Clifton, New Jersey