Are syndicated comics going to go away?

[Morgeruat]

I just read an interesting take on syndicated comics, and their future (syndicates sell comics such as Foxtrot, Garfield, For Better or for Worse, etc to newspapers)

http://www.pvponline.com/rants_panel.php3

Take a look it's interesting (if you are easily offended don't look at the first two links on the page - the audience flipping him off)

[Morgeruat]

since no one seems to care here's an update on Scott Kurtz's progress: from www.pvponline.com

A Unique position
Posted on Friday, August 6, 2004

When word got to the syndicated cartoonists that I was planning to offer PvP to papers for free, you can be sure they had something to say about it. There are message boards, both private and public where these guys lurk and PvP was a hot topic over the weekend.

I participated in two of these threads, trying to explain my position, only to be met with anger, naysaying, and downright insults. I had decided to post about it, made the post, then deleted it after Gary brought me back down to earth. Honestly, what did I expect from these guys, and isn't it better that I ignore their catterwalling anyway?

But since then, Tycho has made a post about the whole thing over at Penny-Arcade and so now it's all out in the open anyway. I guess he felt that he didn't have to be the bigger man about things. He called me awesome, which feels like a trap considering that six months ago he was referring to me as a vagrant pissing on a wall.

I was greatly hurt by what the syndicated cartoonists had to say towards me for several reasons, but most of all because my image of these people not only got cracked, but shattered into a million pieces. If you thought webcartoonists were bad about patting each other on the back, and giving each other awards for being kick-ass....well, you haven't seen NOTHING yet. That's all these print cartoonists can do. There's a private forum called The Wisenheimer where all they do is take turns telling each other how awesome they are.

In between dismissing me entirely, and mocking the way my Korean friends speak English, they were able to make some points against my plan, but I don't feel they hold up well to scrutiny. The most popular argument is that a cartoonist can't get his strip into papers without a syndicate. That is catagorically FALSE! Many cartoonists self-syndicate and several of them end up giving their strips to the papers for nothing or next to nothing. I know cartoonists who have their strips in 10-20 papers and none of them have the PvP nation writing letters.

Anyway, things are moving forward. I've already had people from college and alt-weekly papers contact me and I have a hit-list of papers I'm going to approach first in the major markets. Pretty soon, my success of failure is going to stop being speculation.

Make no mistake, whatever the syndicated cartoonists say, this IS possible. It's already been done before I came along. You can get your strip into papers. You can convince editors to drop Alley-Oop and put your strip in it's place.

The only differnece, and what puts me in a unique position, is that no one has offered PvP to the papers before. No one has ever offered a strip that has an established readership and has the book and toy deals already in play. Usually the papers come first and all that comes second.

The bottom line is that I've heard from all these guys before. In fact, it was six years ago when I was first posting my strips to the web and suggested I could make a living from an internet comic. They called me crazy then, and now that I've come back to tell them it worked, they're still calling me crazy.

Sh'yeah...crazy like a FOX!

[Kakero]

This kinda OT. I don't know why they call it syndicated comics but here if people say syndicate it usually refer to groups of people that belong to the darker side of the society.