Breaking news: Hi & Lois acknowledges webcomics
September 18, 2009 at 10:30 am | In The Webcomic Overlook, comics, webcomics | 8 Comments
Apparently the standard bearers of Hi & Lois created a bit of a furor when it posted a strip criticizing webcomics. Weighing in are Josh Fruhlinger of Comics Curmudgeon, Xaviar Xerexes of ComixTalk, and Gary Tyrrell of Fleen.
Personally, I can’t muster up any emotion, negative or otherwise, over friggin’ Hi & Lois, but there you go.
Incidentally, the webcomic artist in the strip looks suspiciously like Seanbaby. Who really should be adding more commentary from Luke Cage, Mr. Fish, and Dr. Doom to his rad Hostess Fruit Pie collection.
UPDATE: Also, here’s an interview with Bloom County’s Berkeley Breathed (h/t The Beat). It’s tangentially related to the stuff above.
Bloom County was extraordinarily popular in the 1980s, a decade where along with Calvin & Hobbes, Doonesbury, and The Farside, it created a kind of renaissance for the funny pages. How different is the situation with newspaper strips today? Did the changes in the size of panels play a role in your recent decision to abandon newspaper strips? Will newspaper comics (and newspapers) survive? Have you ever thought about doing an online comic strip?
This is a sad topic but I’m going to be blunt. Newspapers have about five years left. Young readers of the newspaper comics simply don’t exist anymore in numbers that count. Those eyeballs are elsewhere and will not come back. Online comics are terrific. But they will never have 1% of the readership any major comic had 20 years ago, by the nature of the technology. They’re different beasts now. No, after having 70 million daily readers in 1985, getting 3000 a day online isn’t terribly energizing at this stage. I’m happy to go to the storytelling potential of film and books now. My heart was always there anyway, to be honest.
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Eh… Even if you had a movie, you might get 70 mil ticket buyers over a month or so. I’m hard pressed to think of any medium where you’d get 70 mil viewers a day for any kind of entertainment. Chasing those kinds of numbers is pipe dream stuff now.
Still, I wish Mr. Breathed the best.
Comment by delos — September 18, 2009 #
they have comics on the webs now?!
Comment by p — September 18, 2009 #
I think that when you said “I can’t muster up any emotion, negative or otherwise, over friggin’ Hi & Lois,” you very nicely summed things up indeed. It’s barely even worth making fun of, the newspaper comics mammoth, as it sinks below the tar to extinction, trying to pull its legs out with its head a la homer simpson.
Comment by Winston Rowntree — September 19, 2009 #
Breathed: If I was on top of the world at one point, I wouldn’t want to join the t-shirts and good-will crap shoot of cartooning on the web either.
That’d be like being… Poison and having to play at a car show.
Hi & Lois: That webcomic artist is neither a tubby bastard with a goatee, nor a hipster douchebag. A little research please, Hi & Lois creators.
Comment by William George — September 19, 2009 #
I’ve always hated Hi and Lois just for the fact that he hasn’t bothered to update the look of his teenagers and dresses them all like 80’s punk rockers or some other stereotype he has casually come across while stumbling across MTV.
This didn’t really upset me like it did others. Sometimes I think webcomickers are a bit sensitive. Now if a strip like Cathy did this though… *Fumes* >:(
Comment by zaymac — September 20, 2009 #
[...] The venerable comic strip Hi and Lois recently referenced webcomics and the monetization thereof via merchandising in a vaguely humorous fashion, leading to cries from [...]
Pingback by THE BEAT » Blog Archive » Kibbles ‘n’ Bits - 9/21/09 — September 21, 2009 #
[...] post on five things about comics that have changed in the last five years. And did Hi & Lois slam or side with webcomicdom? I don’t know what the verdict is but merch can sell well if you have the right products and [...]
Pingback by Strip News 9-25-9 | Strip News | ArtPatient.com | ArtPatient.com — September 25, 2009 #
[...] I think I’ve commented before on the schism between webcomics and print comics. Let me explain. No, there is no time. Let me sum up. There are a number of print comics who believe that only those who have been accepted by a syndicate are to be considered “professional”. Webcomicers are merely overrated T-shirt vendors. [...]
Pingback by Less Than Three » Archive » Nom de Bafoone — October 4, 2009 #