In the apocalyptic world of print media there are the upper reaches—where a Sam Zell scratches to save the bankrupt Tribune Company from $13 billion in debt. And there are the lower reaches—where $8,000 is a big deal. That’s what D.C.’s alternative weekly, City Paper, figured it would save by dropping syndicated comics.
“The art director didn’t know what to make of his comic either, so he sent him what I imagine was a form rejection letter. Buzz showed up again about a week later. This time he asked how much it would cost to run his cartoon as an advertisement. They told him that a space that size would cost about $300 thinking he would back down and give up, but he instead said ‘OK’ and pulled three smelly $100 bills out of his sock and slapped them down on the reception desk. He did this for three months. They eventually just gave him the space.”
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What are you saving? I asked him. He said, “If you added it all up? Jeez, a few thousand dollars. [The comics] typically run from $20 to $35 a week [per paper] to more than that in the larger markets.”
Since the early 80s, Matt Groening’s Life in Hell and Lynda Barry’s Ernie Pook were fixtures in Reader classifieds. No more. The January 8 Reader carried one of those intricate full-page panels Groening draws about once a year, but before that, there hadn’t been an issue with comics in it since November 27, and there wouldn’t be another until January 29. Space for comics comes out of space for editorial as a whole, and there’s not enough room for all the editorial the Reader wants to run. The Reader still wants to run comics, and lots of other things it can’t fit, but readers can be forgiven for not realizing that.
Life in Hell still runs in some 40 to 50 papers, most of them in the college press, Groening says—but that’s a fourth as many as used to carry it. Thanks to The Simpsons he doesn’t need the money. But “I like sitting down once a week and knocking something out all by myself,” he says. “The rest of my life is full of collaborators.” He thinks something’s happened to alt-weeklies that he doesn’t like. “There’s a lack of enthusiasm and a lack of strategy and certainly a decline of design. Alternative newspapers don’t seem to be the hippest thing around.”
