How are newspaper comic strips handling (or not) the pandemic?

June 10, 2020 12:58 PM

Should the funny pages look like the news? Josh Frulinger writes for Polygon about how newspaper comic strips are handling the pandemic.

These strips have such a long lead time that the pandemic was well underway before the strips could address it - though some worked with their publishers to switch out strips to stay up-to-date. Francesco Marciuliano, writer for Sally Forth (and others) wrote on MediumLarge about changing out some strips early in March.

On Sunday, June 7, many newspaper comic strips paid tribute to medical workers and other essential workers with visual clues throughout their strips -medical personnel (symbolized with a cartoon mask), scientists (a microscope symbol), teachers (an apple), food workers (a fork) retail workers (a shopping cart) and delivery drivers (a steering wheel). The more than 70 strips included both ones that are acknowledging the pandemic in their storylines and ones that are not. Some were pretty smoothly done some were..not.

Frulinger and his Comics Curmudgeon site previously on MetaFilter:
Mort Walker, 1923-2018
She Looks Like Sunday Comics: Watching The Brenda Starr movie (1989)
And more previously

posted by bijou243 (16 comments total)

Man, Berkeley Breathed has got to be happy he dumped syndication for direct digital distribution.

Not only did it allow him to work at his own pace (something that I think that has helped his writing strongly, allowing him to mostly write when he actually has a cohesive idea), but it also allowed him to respond quickly with strips that addressed the crisis. He was posting paintings and comics by mid-March.

Also, worth noting, the second link, MediumLarge, holds a special place for Francesco Marciuliano, because that was also the name of his long-running webcomic that he dabbled in to keep himself sane while writing the very straightforward and timeless Sally Forth. If you check the archives on the site, the MediumLarge comics are the oldest posts, and the run from about 2008 to about the beginning of 2015. I really love the contrast between his personal work and his syndicated work.
posted by deadaluspark at 3:04 PM on June 10, 2020 [6 favorites]

Dilbert has been all facemasks since the beginning. Anyone without one is assumed to be an idiot...
posted by jim in austin at 3:08 PM on June 10, 2020 [3 favorites]

I'm honestly surprised Dilbert isn't just QAnon dog whistles and rants about the "Deep State" at this point.
posted by sideshow at 3:25 PM on June 10, 2020 [30 favorites]

How is it that comic strips still have such a long lead time in 2020? What's the bottleneck?
posted by octothorpe at 3:37 PM on June 10, 2020

Not that I read comics very often or at all, but my mom has sent me photos of some and I was surprised that Sally Forth was actually showing pandemic-related comics by the time she sent me them (I dunno, April?).
posted by jenfullmoon at 4:14 PM on June 10, 2020

The bottleneck comes from the desire to have a really solid buffer, so that if something happens to the cartoonist, the strip can keep going for a while without having to go into reruns. I think they usually want something like a whole month.
posted by egypturnash at 4:40 PM on June 10, 2020 [4 favorites]

Before the ubiquity of email and web, comics artists mailed their work to a syndicate which printed them, bundled and mailed them to newspapers. Each strip, crossword puzzle, etc. was shipped as two weeks' worth of advance material, printed on good quality glossy paper, and those bundles had extra lead time built-in to ensure that everybody from New York to Guam was able to run the same Ziggy comic on the same day. I was working newspaper production in the early 90s, and when things were really slow (such as while waiting for editorial to finish revising a late edition) we'd read comics for the coming couple weeks.

Sunday strips needed even more lead time (iirc 8-10 weeks) because the syndicate also had to produce the color separations (to ensure Charlie Brown was the same hue in every Sunday newspaper) and the newspapers usually printed their Sunday color sections far in advance, partly to take advantage of their own slow times. iirc where I worked Sunday night was when they printed the comics for the next Sunday paper, and some newspaper presses did the color printing for multiple other regional newspapers so they needed even more time to get all those out on schedule. Probably it also gave newspaper mailrooms extra time to bundle all the coupon pages, furniture ads, and so on that used to come with your Sunday paper.

These days a 30 day lead time means pretty close to an actual 30 days' worth of comics in queue because everything from distribution through platemaking is electronic. But the schedules are probably kept as much because of tradition as because the syndicates and newspapers like the extra insurance.
posted by ardgedee at 6:13 PM on June 10, 2020 [14 favorites]

I'm honestly surprised Dilbert isn't just QAnon dog whistles and rants about the "Deep State" at this point.

Adams rarely does politics in his strip. Facemasks are the most topical thing I can recall. The strip is more hapless geeks vs clueless moronic normals. For me this resonates...
posted by jim in austin at 6:38 PM on June 10, 2020 [1 favorite]

yeah I think it was mostly meant as a dig at Handsome Genius Scott Adams, who famously once created a MeFi sockpuppet account to talk about what a handsome genius that Scott Adams is
posted by DoctorFedora at 8:06 PM on June 10, 2020 [19 favorites]

How will 1940s Army grunts handle the pandemic? What about a family with a large dog that does comical things inappropriate for an animal its size? Can a woman married to a man who loves very large sandwiches adapt to the new reality? The nation waits with bated breath.
posted by star gentle uterus at 11:23 PM on June 10, 2020 [7 favorites]

Doonesbury's mostly reruns these days, but we still get a new strip every Sunday, many of which have referred to coronavirus. Here's a couple of examples:

May 31st.

June 7th.
posted by Paul Slade at 11:54 PM on June 10, 2020 [3 favorites]

Huh, I had no idea that there were still new Doonesburys.
posted by octothorpe at 5:50 AM on June 11, 2020 [1 favorite]

I cannot believe no one has discussed the truly weirdest comic out there: Heathcliff.

That is today's comic strip. A cat wearing a "Chill" helmet is somehow topical to a pandemic, as if to signal that we as an entire planet need to just calm down about the whole COVID-19 thing.
posted by Delia at 9:43 AM on June 13, 2020 [1 favorite]

> Adams rarely does politics in his strip. Facemasks are the most topical thing I can recall. The strip is more hapless geeks vs clueless moronic normals.

When you realize that Adam's identifies with Dogbert rather than any of the workers, you can think of the strip not as something meant to sympathize with people stuck in bad work situations but as Adams' platform for mocking the vast population of Üntermensch to their faces.
posted by ardgedee at 3:23 AM on June 14, 2020 [1 favorite]

(FYI, some of the last few links in the post ["some were pretty smoothly done, some were not"] don't work, they link to paywalled pages, so I only get an ad for premium membership to that site.)
posted by LooseFilter at 7:30 AM on June 14, 2020

(FYI, some of the last few links in the post ["some were pretty smoothly done, some were not"] don't work, they link to paywalled pages, so I only get an ad for premium membership to that site.)

Ah, I see. I am not sure how to fix that as I am not paying for those sites, either, so that's what I get when I click on them now, too. If you go to the "Comics" link on that page and choose individual strips you can access the archives of them and select June 7. The strips I linked to are Baby Blues (smoothly) and Family Circus (done) and Six Chix (not). That's a lot of work and I apologize, I did not know that would happen. If anyone has a suggestion to fix, please let me know.
posted by bijou243 at 9:51 AM on June 14, 2020