In addition to the fact that we’re being pushed out of newspapers, I want to remind people that NCS voters did not vote to give even a single woman a Reuben Award, in 2023. Every winner in a voting category was male.
This did not get enough attention at the time, but it damn well should have.
Dunno about that specifically, but I certainly remember being on a webcomics panel at NCS Fest once, with at least one comics man of that nationality, and several other men, and realizing that I was both the only woman there and the only one who had ever had a negative experience online.
Everyone else on the panel is going like “all of this has just been 100% fun and positive for me” and I kind of sigh and go “all right, I guess it falls to me to tell you how women and queer people get treated when we have the audacity to make comics.”
Yeesh.
It's depressing how retrogressive that all is. I'd once looked up to newspaper comics as full of possibilities, but it's become more and more of an abandoned zombie wasteland. I always held P&hU as a light in the dark.
The day is coming when I leave the world of newsprint and just become a graphic novelist full time.
I honestly haven’t yet mainly because “syndicated cartoonist” is the dream of my youth, and that is a really hard thing to walk away from.
To be clear to anyone reading, Phoebe and Marigold aren’t going anywhere. If/when the strip ends, they’ll go on starring in new books for as long as people keep wanting to read about them.
Glad to hear!
I'm very happy the books are selling well! I guess one silver lining is that people do, in fact, like reading comics in print, and book collections can fulfill that.
Oh, I’ve always felt the explosion of kids’ and middle grade graphic novels is an underrecognized story.
I’m something like the 8th best selling non-manga graphic novelist in the world. I personally outsell Marvel, annually. Meanwhile Raina outsells me 4 to 1 and Pilkey outsells me like 10 to 1.
Kids don’t read comics in newspapers anymore, but they read comics as much as ever, maybe more. It’s insufficiently noted because anything kids like, particularly girls, gets treated like it’s a sideshow. But numerically? It’s the main event.
Even though I feel P&hU will always have a place in the papers, as someone much more enamored of the legacy aspect of art, I am so glad the books are huge sellers and guaranteed a place in the public consciousness for years/decades to come.
Very bad scene. Keith Knight told me he lost track of how many times editors told him that they loved his comics, but that their paper already had a Black cartoonist so there wouldn't be any room for him.
When I dared to complain about the NCS voters awarding an entirely white and male slate of winners last year, a white comics man, who I will not name but for whom I now have less respect, declared to me that the NCS could not possibly have a bias issue because Ray Billingsley won once.
Shaenon and I did a quick headcount, and I think Curtis and Baldo were it as far as comics by nonwhite creators. Going back to conversations with Keith again, he points out that his high school curriculum had more books with talking animals in them than books by or about POC.
Oof, yeah.
I also remember Jan Eliot saying she had editors say they already have a strip by a woman cartoonist, so there's no room for "Stone Soup".
Both cartoonists deserve more appreciation
Jan also has had…issues with the NCS itself (she’s no longer a member), and I’ve come to feel that’s underdiscussed, probably because people within it don’t see anything wrong.
If a newspaper editor had the budget and creative control to include all of the syndicated strips available from women and POC, I'm curious how many strips that would be. Many papers today have thirty comics, maximum, but most are probably closer to twenty.
That sucks so much. And most kids won’t have access to web comics, so it really relies on access to collections. Which don’t happen unless you already have an established reader base.
It is unevenly bad. It’s also just bad. Zombie strips and almost nothing with a new idea in 40 years. Maybe better would be less uneven but enshittification rules the business world.
