By: E&P Staff The Chicago Reader has a piece today by Michael Miner in which he interviews several of top talents in alternative comics, among them, Matt Groening ("Life in Hell"), Max Cannon (?Red Meat?) and Ben Claassen (?Dirtfarm?) about the slow disappearance of such comics, and how much money really gets saved by the alt-papers making such cuts.
D.C. alt-weekly City Paper dropped its comics because in late 2007 its owner, Creative Loafing, slashed its budget, Miner notes. ?Dirtfarm? still runs, he writes, because Claassen offered do it for free. ?City Paper feels like family to me,? Claassen tells Miner. ?I called the publisher and told her that I would rather have it run for free than to not have it run at all.?
Village Voice Media, which controls the Voice and 14 other alternative weeklies, recently stopped publishing its syndicated comics. Miner reports that when he asked Associate Executive Editor Andy Van De Voorde how much was being saved by the move, he answered, ?If you added it all up? Jeez, a few thousand dollars. [The comics] typically run from $20 to $35 a week [per paper] to more than that in the larger markets.?
Check out the full story,
here.
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