Post Content

Real comics coming shortly, but a couple of points of interest in a rare midweek metapost:

  • I got interviewed by New Yorker cartoonist Zach Kanin for the New Yorker cartoon blog! Our discussion, which naturally came ’round to the soap opera strips, seems to have inspired Zach to do his own take on the genre.
  • Speaking of soap strips, several locals have contacted me for my opinion on the latest comics purge in the Baltimore Sun, which has jettisoned those soaps that survived the previous purge (A3G, RMMD, and the Phantom) and compacted everything onto a single page. I long ago migrated completely to the Houston Chronicle for all my comics-reading needs, and now read the Sun only for its hard-hitting coverage of local public transit failures and fur-coat related mayoral scandals, but if I had a 40 handy I would pour a bit out on the curb in memory of the glorious Sun comics page that once was. When I first moved to Baltimore in 2002, the comics occupied two full, glorious pages, and the local paper’s collection served as my introduction to most of the soapers that I cover on this site. It’s pretty safe to say that if I had arrived in town just a couple of years later, when most had been jettisoned, this blog would not exist. Newspaper editors will tell you that monkeying with the comics pages gets a huge reaction from readers, and I’m baffled on why they can’t make some money off of that passion. Put the damn things in a separate insert and pump it full of more ads than a NASCAR race, but do something other than just cutting.