The End Of Alternative Comic Strips

Part One: The Beginning Of The End

Earlier this week Village Voice Media suspended publication of all its comic strips across its entire chain of alternative weekly papers in a cost-cutting move. Let me restate this so the significance sinks in: Village Voice Media suspended publication of ALL its comic strip across its ENTIRE CHAIN of alternative weekly papers. For those who don't know, Village Voice Media owns fifteen papers in key cities like New York and LA and is a huge component of the alternative comic strip lifeblood. With roughly one hundred thirty alternative weekly papers in the USA, shutting out fifteen papers accounts for a drop in 12% of the print outlets alternative comic artists can see their work published. This is a huge blow to the alternative comics industry. In addition, across the board, the other 88% of papers have been cutting comics in hopes of staying afloat in the tough economic times. On top of the loss of these fifteen papers, a lot of the cartoonists who were syndicated by them have already, or soon will, lose outlets in the one hundred other non VVM-owned papers. This is a big deal.

The alternative comic market is very tight. There are a vast number of artists fighting for an ever-shrinking bottleneck of space. Particularly as not only have comics been cut to save money in papers, but the papers themselves are going out of business. And when they're not going out of business, they're being acquired by chains like VVM--the largest in the publishing groups of alternative weeklies--which streamline their material to feature less original content and more syndicated content to save money. That means, with some exceptions, publishing the same three comics in all of their papers for uniformity. According to the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies website, chains account for forty-seven of the one hundred thirty alternative weekly papers. VVM owns fifteen papers, Creative Loafing owns six, Time Shamrock five, Southland Publishing four, Portico Publications three, Phoenix Media three, News and Review three, New Mass. Media three, Metro Newspapers three, and City of Roses two. I have no idea how similar papers are to sister papers within the chains, but as far as VVM is concerned, streamlining and syndication is a big trend.

So a market that is already tough to break into and survive in has now been made even tougher by this decision. With other papers facing the same economic hardships and susceptible to the hive-mind approach that takes place in media industries, it's not unrealistic to expect that many will soon follow the path that VVM has started. And even if they don't (or don't immediately), let me stress again that this is 12% of the market completely wiped off the face of the earth in one day. And that's cataclysmic.

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