The End of Sunday Comics?

My brother came across this AOL.com blog post spelling doom for the Sunday Comics earlier today. Despite hardly ever seeing him read them, he seemed pretty distressed.

And they make a solid point. Its tough for artists to make money when media conglomerates like the Tribune company are hemorrhaging money. This is how, for years, these cartoonists have made money. When that well dries up, they need to look for greener pastures elsewhere, just like anyone in any other profession.

But at the same time, the internet might be just as harsh a place, if not harsher. While, comics will be able to withstand print-to-online porting the way text never could, the web comic is a much different beast than its traditional counterpart (see xkcd, the Perry Bible Fellowship and Cyanide and Happiness as examples). Even Garfield Minus Garfield is a hit online despite being wildly unoriginal, much to the dismay of Jim Davis (or so I would imagine).

As overlooked as it is (up until now, at least) the traditional comic strip might just be one of the unfortunate casualties of the old media-new media hybrid that will inevitably become the place most people get their news.

What about the other parts of a newspaper that come secondary to the news? Oh, what will happen to the Dear Abby collumn!?