Stripped bare: Is the print newspaper comics page in trouble?

“I’m seeing this as the inevitable result of people choosing to get their news online.”

Cathy Wilcox, cartoonist for this masthead and president of the Australian Cartoonists Association, was made aware of News Corp’s move to drop all comic strips several weeks before their final run by several cartoonists who were affected.

“I immediately penned a statement expressing condemnation on behalf of the ACA and posted it on Twitter. I was surprised to see how big, and vehement, the response was,” she said.

Since the announcement, Wilcox said she had been in contact with several local comic creators who had been affected by the decision, some of whom had also lost the majority of their income.

“I accept that newspapers, like all media, evolve over time to meet the needs of a changing audience, but many of those still buying and reading print news are of the generation that identifies with comics as part of their daily newspaper habit,” said Wilcox.

“I think the decision by News Corp seems short-sighted and risks alienating a significant segment of its readership, as well as killing off a little piece of Australian culture.”

In their explanations for their comics-section changes, Lee papers such as the World Herald, the Waco Tribune and Richmond Times-Dispatch, also cited the industry’s larger ongoing move to digital readership – as some outlets offer access to hundreds of strips online.

“It is both exciting, and somewhat nerve-wracking, to migrate from the traditional print to the somewhat uncharted digital world,” the Tribune wrote, “but that is exactly what we are doing, one step at a time.” (Disclosure: This author’s comic strip appears on the online GoComics platform.)

The Post-Dispatch’s announcement said that “the company’s goal with these changes is to make sure it can still devote resources to local news coverage and strong journalism”.

Lee Enterprises did not respond to requests for comment.

The biweekly Franklin News-Post in Virginia wrote that as of September 14, it would cease to publish comics and puzzles.

The News-Post noted that streamlining comics in Lee’s daily newspapers will help “reduce costs and enable resources to be maintained for reporting. But it also means that [Lee] newspapers that are published weekly or biweekly will no longer carry comics and puzzles”.

The seismic impact of such a change is shocking readers, and cartoonists whose strips are affected.

“This is sad,” tweeted a Post-Dispatch reader, showing how the print paper had cut “two pages of comics down to a measly half page” and adding: “Just kill the section entirely if this is the best you can do.”

News Corp declined to comment on any reader reaction to its move, which began on September 11.

“Our editorial cartoonists remain as loved and valued as ever and continue to play a critical role in both our print editions and increasingly in our digital growth strategy,” News Corp said in a statement.

“The decision to end comic strips reflects the changing readership habits of our audiences and this is why we are increasing our focus as a business on puzzles, games and crosswords.”

Rick Kirkman, co-creator of the syndicated strip “Baby Blues”, views such top-down standardisation and streamlining as a loss for creators and readers alike.

“I long for the days when all editors could make their own decisions about their comics line-ups,” Kirkman says. “They number fewer and fewer these days.”

Moves such as Lee’s “make it harder for new strips to gain footing with new audiences on their merits, which is sad,” the cartoonist says. “And it robs readers of their ability to have any meaningful participation in what they want to see in their local papers and furthers homogenisation.”

And Patrick McDonnell, creator of the strip “Mutts”, underscores why comics are a popular staple of the newspaper, with readers developing long-term relationships with their favourite comics: “Over time, the characters are like family. Newspapers should consider this bond before they decide to make drastic changes.”

Wilcox says she “trusts that younger comics creators will forge and cultivate a following elsewhere, as they are already doing, to outlive the dinosaur press, but the days of the well-paid, syndicated comic strip artist seem to be over”.

This shrinking of US “funny pages” comes more than a century after the rise of the print comics section. “Comic strips were created – by editors and publishers – for a very good business reason: to attract and hold readership in order to beat out the competition,” says Wiley Miller, creator of the syndicated strip “Non Sequitur”.

“Diversity of the comic features – and building the best comics for exclusivity by individual newspapers – created a great competitive market that was largely responsible for building the powerful newspaper industry of yore.”

Sara Duke, curator of popular and applied graphic art at the Library of Congress, highlights how comics became a commercial engine.

“From the time the first popular sequential feature ran in [Joseph] Pulitzer’s New York World in 1895, the Yellow Kid, as he became known, was a marketable character: bicycle races, flip books, stage performances and even whiskey. His presence on products ensured that Americans – no matter where they lived – were offered the same features in their newspapers and the same products to consume,” Duke says.

Such competitive commercialism not only made top cartoonists wealthy; it also put comic strips at the centre of national daily conversation – a cultural perch that peaked by mid-century.

Today, though, “the era of mass consumerism is fracturing”, Duke notes. “Where the country might have collectively talked about the death of Farley in Lynn Johnston’s “For Better or For Worse” the day it was featured in the newspaper, now that world is changing as more consumers engage with content digitally.”

The World Herald writes of its shift that “for our print readers, our digital offerings are the perfect complement”. Another Lee paper, the Martinsville Bulletin in Virginia, wrote that “comics characters are often on their phones and computers and social media – and now it’s time their newspapers are catching up to the inevitable direction, too”.

Some readers, though, are not ready to migrate. The Post-Dispatch has been publishing letters from its readers about the changes. One reader wrote: “90 per cent of the comics I liked are gone.” Another wrote that comics are often “a child’s first introduction to a newspaper”.

One subplot to the Lee chain’s changes is the response of Adams, who told Fox News that his loss of Lee clients “was part of a larger overhaul, I believe, of comics, but why they decided what was in and what was out, that’s not known to anybody except them, I guess.”

Some outlets characterised the dropping of “Dilbert” as the strip’s having become a victim of “cancel culture”. Adams had recently satirised environmental, social and governance (ESG) policies and workplace diversity efforts, and had introduced a Black character named Dave who identifies as White.

“I don’t know why it happened,” Adams tells The Washington Post about the massive loss of Lee clients, “but since I predicted cancellation for my ESG and Dave character content, it was a huge coincidence”.

“The argument that it was a general downsizing not directed at me is nonsense,” Adams says, “because obviously each comic was judged separately to be in or out” of the print sections. (Some newspapers run “Dilbert” on their business pages instead of their comics pages.)

The larger issue is assessing the future of the printed comics page – and whether what’s left will be a thoughtfully curated reading experience.

“Cartoonists may create a daily feature and need to rely on other sources of income, where those in the golden age of newspapers had a salary, a pension and perhaps even benefits,” Duke says. “The mass consumerism of the comic strips is still there, [and] products are still there, but the need to engage that content on paper is gone.”

Miller, meanwhile, was sceptical even before this month’s changes.

“What Lee Enterprises is doing with this cookie-cutter approach is the opposite” of papers curating their own interesting and extensive comics sections, the “Non Sequitur” creator says. “But I think this horse left the newspaper barn long ago.”