Weekend Reading: NYCC, Donald Duck and The Incredible Hulk

I’ve been thinking over the last couple of years that with blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, podcasts, video and live internet feeds that you can probably have a decent out-of-town convention “experience” without leaving your house.

For example, the New York Comic Con is over and Tom Spurgeon at The Comics Reporter has the best con report: news reports, links, observations and opinions. He didn’t attend, but it’s hard to argue with his analysis.

Incredible: In case you haven’t heard, Marvel is developing a new TV series based on The Incredible Hulk. No doubt a “Get Lou Ferrigno A Role On The Show” Facebook page will be up by the end of the day.

Duck: Jaime Weinman poses a few questions in a post he calls “Disney And The Copyright Police.”

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THIS MODERN WORLD: Tom Tomorrow and the Alternative Cartoonists

It’s a tough time to be a cartoonist these days. Magazines started dropping cartoons from their pages years ago. Daily newspapers (remember them?) are now dropping whole pages of comic strips. They’re also doing away with their salaried editorial cartoonists. Now the evolving economy has come for the alternative weeklies.

With a name like Tom Tomorrow, you’d expect him to fight aliens with a ray gun in some old Mort Weisinger DC comic from the 1950s. Instead, Mr. Tomorrow fights society’s evils with something better, a Wacom tablet and Photoshop and a wicked sense of humor. Now the erstwhile Mr. Tomorrow could use a hand.

According to his blog, which has been confirmed by other sources, the Village Voice Media conglomerate has been hit just as hard by our collapsing economy as other newspapers and magazines. They’ve responded by dropping all the syndicated cartoons from their various alt-weeklies. This includes the loss of This Modern World by Tom Tomorrow.

For now, the Dallas Observer, New Times Ft. Lauderdale, Houston Press, LA Weekly, Minneapolis City Pages, Nashville Scene, OC Weekly, Pitch Weekly, Seattle Weekly, Denver Westword and the Village Voice in New York will all be cartoonless.

If you’re a fan of Tom Tomorrow’s and you live in one of the above cities and you’d like to do him and his fellow cartoonists (guys like Max Cannon, Ruben Bolling, Lloyd Dangle to name a few) a solid, take the time to write a nice, well-reasoned letter to the editor and ask her to reconsider the decision and bring back the cartoons. Yeah, there are lots of great cartoons on the internet, and Tom Tomorrow and his cartoon pals may not be to your political taste, but as long as there are newspapers there should be cartoons in them. They’re one of the most popular features they have. I think the people in charge sometimes forget that.
(Artwork ©2008 Tom Tomorrow)