How many of us here read their daily comics entirely or primarily in newspapers?
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entirely online/email/rss
When I lived in WI, we subscribed to two newspapers . . . Milwaukee Journal/Sentinel and Kenosha News. When we moved to FL, all our news comes online, and so do our comics – much faster, more choices and cheaper, altho I do support various comic artists thru Patreon or by purchasing their books.
I have always subscribed to the local daily newspaper my entire adult regardless of where I am. It is my primary source of news and comics, but I do supplement my comic reading with gocomics and comic kingdom features for those comics not carried by my newspaper.
I read the Washington Post in hard copy, but I also supplement extensively with GoComics, Comics Kingdom, and webcomics.
We subscribe to our local Tucson paper, but home delivery is up to >$700 per year. Sadly, they’ve dropped a lot of comics, Non Sequiter being the latest. I go online for the rest. I really like to go through the paper, but it’s mostly ads now.
Entirely online. Nothing printed.
I predict that zero people here read their comics “entirely” in physical newspapers, if for no other reason than the selection effect of asking that question on a blog about comics.
Almost always in the daily printed paper. I’m lucky that the local paper (smaller town) still has a full page with 4 single panel comics at the top and two columns of standard 4 panel comics on the rest of the page. They also have one additional daily 4 panel on the crossword page, 2 bonus 4 panel on Saturday, and of course the Sunday insert. Sitting and reading the paper with morning coffee is still a thing for me.
I’ll go online for a comic if it is something specific I am looking for or if I missed a serial story line one for some reason.
I will jump on a discarded newspaper on the bus or in the trash room, because I love to read the funnies, but not enough to actually subscribe to any paper (and the allure gets less and less with each passing year — back in the day I think we had a subscription to the WSJ in the office, but that was before it became just another Murdoch tabloid; regardless, it didn’t have comics either way; they used to fight for the privilege of giving us the Daily News or the Post on the ferry (the Daily News having the better comics), but that was, somehow, decades ago…)
I used to keep up an app that consolidated the comics from the various sites by scraping, but I let that slide I guess again [shudder] decades ago…
So somehow, aside from the random discarded paper I scrounge, it’s this site from which I get most of my comics! (I only bother to keep up with xkcd and Bloom County on a regular basis, and will buy the occasional collection for a couple other web comics ever couple years…)
My parents get the San Francisco Chronicle, which has 2 full pages of (color) comics in the daily paper and 4 in the Sunday. I go over there frequently and generally read the comics when I do (nearly always on Saturday and Sunday, frequently other days). Which is really disconcerting when I go back to my standard online comic reading and I’ve read some but not all of them…
I actually still subscribe to GoComics; I used to have Comics Kingdom as well but have let it lapse and now read the few I’m still interested in with just links (can’t go back very far, but I don’t need to). I have a _lot_ of links to comics in my bookmarks, with this site included among them.
The few times I’ve seen a dead tree newspaper, the comics have been so small they are impossible to read, which is another reason to prefer them online, where they are large enough to read or, if they aren’t, can be enlarged.
My local daily newspaper (I’ve subscribed for forty-plus years, and get the shakes if it isn’t available first thing in the morning) carries 38 comic strips, of which I read 37 (I disliked GET FUZZY even when the strips were new, and refuse to read the reruns). I supplement that with (quick count) about 20 strips on GoComics and/or the Washington Post (used to use Comics Klingon directly for the latter, but no way I’m going to try to negotiate their site these days).
So, Mon-Sat, foughly two-thirds deadtree; one-third online. (The only other strip I regularly read online is OGLAF, but that’s a weekly.) Minor tweeks on Sundays for strips my deadtree doesn’t carry or for onlines like PRINCE VALIANT that are weeklies.)
No paper papers for me. Not since long ago when I worked night shift at a hospital and would pick up a Sunday paper on my way home.
I do get the New Yorker on paper, and expressly read the caption contest page, but see the other “drawings” only while reading elsewhere in the issue.
I haven’t read a paper newspaper since 2018. And only one that year.
Still get a print newspaper, but read funnies almost exclusively online at Gocomics and the Oregonian. A lot of vintage soaps and adventures that make me wonder how much of a following they still have. It’s evidently worth somebody’s while to write and draw Rex Morgan and Mary Worth at a professional level, as opposed to the sad state of Apartment 3G in its last days. As for Pibgorn and 9 Chickweed Lane, I somehow doubt any newspaper actually prints them.
Boston Globe, daily and Sunday, paper. It doesn’t bounce up and down when I try to read it. (It does when my Mom tries to read it but that’s Parkinson’s Disease.) The words don’t fade out after the third paragraph and tell you that you have read your free three articles for the month.
I’m surprised that nobody has commented about the indeterminate tense of the verb. I read comics exclusively in the newspaper in the States, but here I read them only online. Most German newspapers do not print any comics at all, and for those that do, it’s usually only one or at most two isolated “filler” features.
Before I was online, I subscribed to a weekly publication that was nothing but comics. That’s how I found some of my favorites, which weren’t in my local newspaper. Now, I get them all online, with occasional reading from scrounged newspapers (as mentioned by others, above).
I know someone who had gotten comics both online and from a newspaper subscription. Then the newspaper drastically cut the number of comics it printed, and said you could read them online. That was the signal to end the subscription; why pay for the paper if they’re telling you the best stuff in only online?
I remember that, Arthur. Or one of the, anyway. Something Falls Gazette?
Back in college, I was syndications editor of our campus newspaper; we’d somehow secured a subscription to Bloom County while the city paper wasn’t paying attention (and when they later woke up and found we had it were none too happy about it, but by then Berke had retired — the only way they found out was when we wrote them asking if they might allow the syndicate to relax its exclusivity deal they had for Calvin & Hobbes which we would love to be able to print now that Bloom County was done — not only No!, but they were incensed we’d had Bloom County, because that too was supposedly exclusively theirs!) The way syndications worked back then was you’d get the entire next month’s worth of the comic at the beginning of the month, and you were to print them as the days came up, on your honor (and I guess penalty of losing your subscription, not that anyone was paying attention…) This treasure was too good to keep to myself, so I took it upon myself to privately publish these gems to select friends of mine via Xerox and US mail — it’s not like we hadn’t payed for the rights…. Those were the days: that was the absolute BEST way to read the best comic, binge reading one month before everyone else! And, ah, to be young, foolish, irresponsible, and to get away with it all again…
Somewhat relatedly, has anyone heard anything about why rhymeswithorange.com shut down? It now just redirects to Comics Kingdom.
Bill: I think it was monthly or biweekly rather than weekly, and that name doesn’t look familiar. But it was a long time ago.
DiB: A lot of comic sites for King Features comics have shut down, all at the same time. I suspect a change in policy.
My local paper publishes two daily comics (not 2 pages, 2 comics). I also subscribe to the online L.A.Times, so there’s a page of comics in dead tree format that I (can) read online, but I don’t know how that works in this poll. The vast majority of comics I read are aggregated from gocomics, arcamax, and various individual online comics into a totally ad free format of my own design, but don’t tell anybody, ‘cause I’m not sure if that’s legal or not.
@ guero – I’m sure that if GoComics ever finds out about “Comics RSS“, they will have it shut it down immediately, especially since the operator is asking for monetary contributions for a website that effectively bypasses all of GoComics’ annoying ads and tracking garbage.
For the last 20 years, since I’ve lived in Germany, it’s been all online. My local paper does carry badly translated versions of Hägar, Fred Basset, Zits, and Garfield. I read them, because they’re there. In my two online years before that in the US, I was pretty much 50/50 with whatever was in the Oregonian and reading online for comics that I followed from when I lived in LA, but weren’t in the paper. And probably half the comics I read are webcomics anyway.
The only time I buy an actual newspaper is when I’m visiting some faraway town – it’s long been my practice to buy their local paper to get a feel for the community. If they happen to have comics in it, I’ll read them.
This JUST happened with the Kenosha News, to which BobMyFormerBoss (and still a good friend) still subscribes . . . so he’s canceling his subscription. I’m sure he’s not the only one who will do so.
For years, this local newspaper would run ‘surveys’, in which readers were asked which comics should be eliminated; I though it was a setup all along. The last straw for me was the deletion of ‘Cathy’; the editor actually stated that she is ‘no longer relevant’. At that time, online comics were just coming into vogue, I started my own comics/politics list, and never looked back. I’ve lost count, but I think comics and editorial cartoons and political articles make up more than 100 things I read each morning. Online.
The last few Sundays, the Tampa Bay Times has been delivering freebies, in hopes of increasing subscriptions, I assume. I don’t even take it out of the bag . . . just toss it. And to think I used to be a newspaper junkie – even when we went on six-week trips, I’d have all the newspapers saved up and actually read. every. single one. Now that I no longer live in a city/community, I no longer care about local goings on.
Primarily through the 2 newspapers i get online – one from where I live now and one from the city I moved from and still have family there.
Completely digressing . . . ‘it’s not like we hadn’t payed for the rights’
I’ve been seeing ‘payed’ instead of ‘paid’ more and more often. Did I miss a memo about this, is it becoming more common, or is it a variant spelling I never knew about (having missed THAT memo, too)?
I did until about a year and a half ago when I moved to an apartment that did not allow for the paper to be delivered to my door (they threw all papers at the office door, where they were often stolen). I then switched to an online version of the paper (basically reading a PDF of the printed paper) but find myself reading that less and less due to certain life events, and also because it is simply less pleasant to read than a physical paper. I may drop it soon, as its cost continues to rise as fast as the printed paper’s. I have since moved to a house and considered moving back to my subscription to the printed paper but balked at the cost (now around $1,000 a year and rising, home delivery is $3 a WEEK more than the newsstand price, this is twice what it cost 5 years ago).
It’s sad, because I very much enjoy reading the newspaper and really do not find the online experience of reading news or comics to be superior in many ways. In college (early 2000s), I was seldom without a copy of both the campus newspaper and the daily from the big city I grew up near (which then distributed to boxes as much as 250 miles away) that had 3 and 1/2 pages of comics back then. My friends would say “oh here comes Billy with his newspaper…” I had a cheap (something like $20 a semester) “college-rate” subscription to that daily that gave me a key that opened the street corner box they put the paper in.
@ billytheskink – If the annual cost of the (delivered) print edition is $850 to $1000, then the paper itself costs (at least) $2.25 per day. I remember someone objecting when I said that the purchasing power of the dollar had declined (and is less than the exchange rate with the Euro), but this seems to confirm my theory. A typical Berlin paper runs about €1.50, which would be $1.70 USD. On the other hand, the US price agrees pretty well with larK’s “10x” hypothesis: as a kid, I remember the Washington Post costing 25¢ at newsstands. It’s hard to imagine sticking ten quarters into one of those metal box vending machines (if they still exist).
“Completely digressing . . . ‘it’s not like we hadn’t payed for the rights’
I’ve been seeing ‘payed’ instead of ‘paid’ more and more often. Did I miss a memo about this…?”
No, that’s just a reflection of the high editorial quality we maintained on that paper, carried forward 30 years… :-/
Nowadays, if it doesn’t get a red underline in the editing software… “Payed” is only for use is fossilized phrases like “payed out the rope”, and not the general spelling for the past tense of “pay” in the financial sense. Personally, I’m all for the elimination of irregular spellings, but no excuses, this one is all on me.
All on-line.
I have always loathed the feel of newsprint ink on my fingers, so the advent of the computer has been a boon to me.
“No, that’s just a reflection of the high editorial quality we maintained on that paper, carried forward 30 years…”
The Kenosha News fired all its copy editors, or at least that was our theory. The misteaks were unbelievable, and very annoying.
@CIDU Bill: “I remember that, Arthur. Or one of the, anyway. Something Falls Gazette?”
The Menonomee Falls Gazette did adventure/soap opera comics, a week’s worth at a time, some current and some classic reprints. I think from memory it ran about three or four years. For a year or so it had a companion, The Menonomee Falls Guardian, which did the same thing for humor comics. Vague memory that when the latter folded, the Gazette took over some of the humor strips as well, but didn’t itself last much longer after that. I’ve still got complete runs of both in a box somewhere in the attic.
Ah, here we go — it actually last for over six years:
I pay about $475 a year for a daily+Sunday delivery subscription to the local paper (the Minneapolis STAR TRIBUNE). I must say I’m boggled at the idea of a comparable newspaper (which, I wonder?) somewhere else costing more than twice that (but I suppose if it had twice the comics and twice the baseball news in season that my paper has, that would still be worth it to me — maybe it could have twice as many James Lileks columns too? It’s not as though I care much about that ‘news’ stuff. . .) I’d also want twice as many bridge columns, NYT crosswords, etc. as well of course.
I used to read more strips online than now. At one time, the online Houston Chronicle (The Chron) allowed you to create custom pages from a whole bunch of comics. No ads or anything.
Comics and news pretty much exclusively online. Subscribed for years to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, until they discontinued home delivery because I lived too far away. After that, 15-20 years ago, I discovered online comics. Now I get several dozen every day between the Seattle Post-Intelligencer site and GoComics, plus a few webcomics. And in the last year or two I finally subscribed to the online P-D edition because they offered me a pretty great deal of $10 a month.
About half-and-half, though there are print comics I’d stop reading if I didn’t subscribe.
And sometimes I read the print comics through my paper’s online e-edition. Not sure if that counts as print or online.
My usual first stop is Mike Peterson’s blog Comic Strip of the Day, followed by CIDU. I subscribe to the local paper, 3Xweek; page 2 with the police log usually the most interesting. Also subscribe to the city paper from 50 miles away. Their comic strip selection is lame enough I don’t mind if I miss it. I usually bring it to work unread, leave it on the break room table. GoComics for a select few (e.g. Non Sequitor) and some oddballs whose sites I access directly. I’m old school and I enjoy the feel and look of a paper, shrunken as they may be. Agree with Andrea, it’s hard to read the tiny type, you’d think it was a product warranty or something. Thanks for your work Bill.
I read comics here. Drifted out of the habit as comics didn’t give me much joy. Most were just dumb. I like the discussions here, though. I check in on a few alternative comics every now and then.
I read the daily & Sunday comics in the newspaper, but weekly will read more strips online that are not in our paper than the number of strips in our paper. Oh, I read “Jump Start” daily in the paper, but they don’t print the Sunday strip, so I read that online. I found that the comics were starting to take too much time for the ones I was reading online, so I also cut three other strips to reading just the Sunday strips online. They are not storyline strips and the one strip visit is enough of a visit to them for me.
“On the other hand, the US price agrees pretty well with larK’s “10x” hypothesis: as a kid, I remember the Washington Post costing 25¢ at newsstands.”
@Kilby: While I’m sort of coming to grips with everything being 10 times more expensive than I think it should be, it recently struck me that of course it won’t stop: in another 40-45 years, things will be yet again 10 times as expensive as they are. So if I should live into my 80s, I’m going to have to be dealing with things being 100x more expensive than I think they should be. A newspaper will cost 25 bucks; a comic book will cost $30; Mad Magazine, if they’re still publishing, will cost $60 a copy…
I have to ask my friend who’s in his 80s about that…
@lark: And stores will have buckets by the cash register with a little sign saying “Need a twenty, take a twenty; have an extra twenty, leave a twenty.”
(Dollars, that is.)
I remember when comic books went from a dime to twelve cents. . .
Comic books managed to stay a dime for a really long time… I think public transportation and stuff like that probably too — payphones! There was huge resistance to raise the price to keep up with inflation, which leads me to conclude that a) when the services were first priced, they were actually a lot more “expensive” that we realize, because the value of that dime was a lot more, and b) we lived well for a long time paying the undervalued price because of tradition, when that dime was no longer worth those 10 cents… Sorta like gasoline, which we’re very price resistant on, even though we think it’s gotten so much more expensive, it’s actually cheaper today that in Lucas’ nostalgic American Graffiti past… Adjust that 50¢ a gallon for inflation (or even just my 10x rule ; – ) — gas today should cost at least 5 bucks a gallon, or, it should have only cost 25¢ a gallon back in the day…
Often instead of raising prices – sizes get smaller. People don’t generally notice that their can of tomatoes is now 15 oz instead of 16 oz, etc.
When we were looking at houses to buy one Robert’s dad would come to see it if we saw one we thought was a maybe. (You know, children can not be allowed to shop for a house alone – we were in our late 20s the first time we went looking and our mid 30s when we finally bought one.) We would show him a house we saw that was selling for around $68,000 and he would say it was $28,000 as houses sold in the twenty thousands when he was buying one in the late 1950s.
As a philatelist, I base my inflation feeling on postage costs. In 1959, a letter cost 25 francs. In 1960, after the devaluation, it was .25 new franc (1/100). In 2001, it was up to 3 new francs and .46 euro (1/6.55957) in 2002 when we switched. Today, it’s 1.05 euro…
I read comics mostly here (thanks Bill) or from here (interesting suggestions from everybody). French newspapers never really printed comics and I don’t read them anymore (bad writing, worse editing).
I’ve got a hard copy of Calvin & Hobbes home, I’ll probably buy the Basic Instructions books someday and I’d get Bug Martini books if they existed (up to 2016: I think it’s not as good as it used to be since it went from daily to 3-weekly).
Comics I Don't Understand 
entirely online/email/rss
When I lived in WI, we subscribed to two newspapers . . . Milwaukee Journal/Sentinel and Kenosha News. When we moved to FL, all our news comes online, and so do our comics – much faster, more choices and cheaper, altho I do support various comic artists thru Patreon or by purchasing their books.
I have always subscribed to the local daily newspaper my entire adult regardless of where I am. It is my primary source of news and comics, but I do supplement my comic reading with gocomics and comic kingdom features for those comics not carried by my newspaper.
I read the Washington Post in hard copy, but I also supplement extensively with GoComics, Comics Kingdom, and webcomics.
We subscribe to our local Tucson paper, but home delivery is up to >$700 per year. Sadly, they’ve dropped a lot of comics, Non Sequiter being the latest. I go online for the rest. I really like to go through the paper, but it’s mostly ads now.
Entirely online. Nothing printed.
I predict that zero people here read their comics “entirely” in physical newspapers, if for no other reason than the selection effect of asking that question on a blog about comics.
Almost always in the daily printed paper. I’m lucky that the local paper (smaller town) still has a full page with 4 single panel comics at the top and two columns of standard 4 panel comics on the rest of the page. They also have one additional daily 4 panel on the crossword page, 2 bonus 4 panel on Saturday, and of course the Sunday insert. Sitting and reading the paper with morning coffee is still a thing for me.
I’ll go online for a comic if it is something specific I am looking for or if I missed a serial story line one for some reason.
I will jump on a discarded newspaper on the bus or in the trash room, because I love to read the funnies, but not enough to actually subscribe to any paper (and the allure gets less and less with each passing year — back in the day I think we had a subscription to the WSJ in the office, but that was before it became just another Murdoch tabloid; regardless, it didn’t have comics either way; they used to fight for the privilege of giving us the Daily News or the Post on the ferry (the Daily News having the better comics), but that was, somehow, decades ago…)
I used to keep up an app that consolidated the comics from the various sites by scraping, but I let that slide I guess again [shudder] decades ago…
So somehow, aside from the random discarded paper I scrounge, it’s this site from which I get most of my comics! (I only bother to keep up with xkcd and Bloom County on a regular basis, and will buy the occasional collection for a couple other web comics ever couple years…)
My parents get the San Francisco Chronicle, which has 2 full pages of (color) comics in the daily paper and 4 in the Sunday. I go over there frequently and generally read the comics when I do (nearly always on Saturday and Sunday, frequently other days). Which is really disconcerting when I go back to my standard online comic reading and I’ve read some but not all of them…
I actually still subscribe to GoComics; I used to have Comics Kingdom as well but have let it lapse and now read the few I’m still interested in with just links (can’t go back very far, but I don’t need to). I have a _lot_ of links to comics in my bookmarks, with this site included among them.
The few times I’ve seen a dead tree newspaper, the comics have been so small they are impossible to read, which is another reason to prefer them online, where they are large enough to read or, if they aren’t, can be enlarged.
My local daily newspaper (I’ve subscribed for forty-plus years, and get the shakes if it isn’t available first thing in the morning) carries 38 comic strips, of which I read 37 (I disliked GET FUZZY even when the strips were new, and refuse to read the reruns). I supplement that with (quick count) about 20 strips on GoComics and/or the Washington Post (used to use Comics Klingon directly for the latter, but no way I’m going to try to negotiate their site these days).
So, Mon-Sat, foughly two-thirds deadtree; one-third online. (The only other strip I regularly read online is OGLAF, but that’s a weekly.) Minor tweeks on Sundays for strips my deadtree doesn’t carry or for onlines like PRINCE VALIANT that are weeklies.)
No paper papers for me. Not since long ago when I worked night shift at a hospital and would pick up a Sunday paper on my way home.
I do get the New Yorker on paper, and expressly read the caption contest page, but see the other “drawings” only while reading elsewhere in the issue.
I haven’t read a paper newspaper since 2018. And only one that year.
Still get a print newspaper, but read funnies almost exclusively online at Gocomics and the Oregonian. A lot of vintage soaps and adventures that make me wonder how much of a following they still have. It’s evidently worth somebody’s while to write and draw Rex Morgan and Mary Worth at a professional level, as opposed to the sad state of Apartment 3G in its last days. As for Pibgorn and 9 Chickweed Lane, I somehow doubt any newspaper actually prints them.
Boston Globe, daily and Sunday, paper. It doesn’t bounce up and down when I try to read it. (It does when my Mom tries to read it but that’s Parkinson’s Disease.) The words don’t fade out after the third paragraph and tell you that you have read your free three articles for the month.
I’m surprised that nobody has commented about the indeterminate tense of the verb. I read comics exclusively in the newspaper in the States, but here I read them only online. Most German newspapers do not print any comics at all, and for those that do, it’s usually only one or at most two isolated “filler” features.
Before I was online, I subscribed to a weekly publication that was nothing but comics. That’s how I found some of my favorites, which weren’t in my local newspaper. Now, I get them all online, with occasional reading from scrounged newspapers (as mentioned by others, above).
I know someone who had gotten comics both online and from a newspaper subscription. Then the newspaper drastically cut the number of comics it printed, and said you could read them online. That was the signal to end the subscription; why pay for the paper if they’re telling you the best stuff in only online?
I remember that, Arthur. Or one of the, anyway. Something Falls Gazette?
Back in college, I was syndications editor of our campus newspaper; we’d somehow secured a subscription to Bloom County while the city paper wasn’t paying attention (and when they later woke up and found we had it were none too happy about it, but by then Berke had retired — the only way they found out was when we wrote them asking if they might allow the syndicate to relax its exclusivity deal they had for Calvin & Hobbes which we would love to be able to print now that Bloom County was done — not only No!, but they were incensed we’d had Bloom County, because that too was supposedly exclusively theirs!) The way syndications worked back then was you’d get the entire next month’s worth of the comic at the beginning of the month, and you were to print them as the days came up, on your honor (and I guess penalty of losing your subscription, not that anyone was paying attention…) This treasure was too good to keep to myself, so I took it upon myself to privately publish these gems to select friends of mine via Xerox and US mail — it’s not like we hadn’t payed for the rights…. Those were the days: that was the absolute BEST way to read the best comic, binge reading one month before everyone else! And, ah, to be young, foolish, irresponsible, and to get away with it all again…
Somewhat relatedly, has anyone heard anything about why rhymeswithorange.com shut down? It now just redirects to Comics Kingdom.
Bill: I think it was monthly or biweekly rather than weekly, and that name doesn’t look familiar. But it was a long time ago.
DiB: A lot of comic sites for King Features comics have shut down, all at the same time. I suspect a change in policy.
My local paper publishes two daily comics (not 2 pages, 2 comics). I also subscribe to the online L.A.Times, so there’s a page of comics in dead tree format that I (can) read online, but I don’t know how that works in this poll. The vast majority of comics I read are aggregated from gocomics, arcamax, and various individual online comics into a totally ad free format of my own design, but don’t tell anybody, ‘cause I’m not sure if that’s legal or not.
@ guero – I’m sure that if GoComics ever finds out about “Comics RSS“, they will have it shut it down immediately, especially since the operator is asking for monetary contributions for a website that effectively bypasses all of GoComics’ annoying ads and tracking garbage.
For the last 20 years, since I’ve lived in Germany, it’s been all online. My local paper does carry badly translated versions of Hägar, Fred Basset, Zits, and Garfield. I read them, because they’re there. In my two online years before that in the US, I was pretty much 50/50 with whatever was in the Oregonian and reading online for comics that I followed from when I lived in LA, but weren’t in the paper. And probably half the comics I read are webcomics anyway.
The only time I buy an actual newspaper is when I’m visiting some faraway town – it’s long been my practice to buy their local paper to get a feel for the community. If they happen to have comics in it, I’ll read them.
This JUST happened with the Kenosha News, to which BobMyFormerBoss (and still a good friend) still subscribes . . . so he’s canceling his subscription. I’m sure he’s not the only one who will do so.
For years, this local newspaper would run ‘surveys’, in which readers were asked which comics should be eliminated; I though it was a setup all along. The last straw for me was the deletion of ‘Cathy’; the editor actually stated that she is ‘no longer relevant’. At that time, online comics were just coming into vogue, I started my own comics/politics list, and never looked back. I’ve lost count, but I think comics and editorial cartoons and political articles make up more than 100 things I read each morning. Online.
The last few Sundays, the Tampa Bay Times has been delivering freebies, in hopes of increasing subscriptions, I assume. I don’t even take it out of the bag . . . just toss it. And to think I used to be a newspaper junkie – even when we went on six-week trips, I’d have all the newspapers saved up and actually read. every. single one. Now that I no longer live in a city/community, I no longer care about local goings on.
Primarily through the 2 newspapers i get online – one from where I live now and one from the city I moved from and still have family there.
Completely digressing . . . ‘it’s not like we hadn’t payed for the rights’
I’ve been seeing ‘payed’ instead of ‘paid’ more and more often. Did I miss a memo about this, is it becoming more common, or is it a variant spelling I never knew about (having missed THAT memo, too)?
I did until about a year and a half ago when I moved to an apartment that did not allow for the paper to be delivered to my door (they threw all papers at the office door, where they were often stolen). I then switched to an online version of the paper (basically reading a PDF of the printed paper) but find myself reading that less and less due to certain life events, and also because it is simply less pleasant to read than a physical paper. I may drop it soon, as its cost continues to rise as fast as the printed paper’s. I have since moved to a house and considered moving back to my subscription to the printed paper but balked at the cost (now around $1,000 a year and rising, home delivery is $3 a WEEK more than the newsstand price, this is twice what it cost 5 years ago).
It’s sad, because I very much enjoy reading the newspaper and really do not find the online experience of reading news or comics to be superior in many ways. In college (early 2000s), I was seldom without a copy of both the campus newspaper and the daily from the big city I grew up near (which then distributed to boxes as much as 250 miles away) that had 3 and 1/2 pages of comics back then. My friends would say “oh here comes Billy with his newspaper…” I had a cheap (something like $20 a semester) “college-rate” subscription to that daily that gave me a key that opened the street corner box they put the paper in.
@ billytheskink – If the annual cost of the (delivered) print edition is $850 to $1000, then the paper itself costs (at least) $2.25 per day. I remember someone objecting when I said that the purchasing power of the dollar had declined (and is less than the exchange rate with the Euro), but this seems to confirm my theory. A typical Berlin paper runs about €1.50, which would be $1.70 USD. On the other hand, the US price agrees pretty well with larK’s “10x” hypothesis: as a kid, I remember the Washington Post costing 25¢ at newsstands. It’s hard to imagine sticking ten quarters into one of those metal box vending machines (if they still exist).
“Completely digressing . . . ‘it’s not like we hadn’t payed for the rights’
I’ve been seeing ‘payed’ instead of ‘paid’ more and more often. Did I miss a memo about this…?”
No, that’s just a reflection of the high editorial quality we maintained on that paper, carried forward 30 years… :-/
Nowadays, if it doesn’t get a red underline in the editing software… “Payed” is only for use is fossilized phrases like “payed out the rope”, and not the general spelling for the past tense of “pay” in the financial sense. Personally, I’m all for the elimination of irregular spellings, but no excuses, this one is all on me.
All on-line.
I have always loathed the feel of newsprint ink on my fingers, so the advent of the computer has been a boon to me.
“No, that’s just a reflection of the high editorial quality we maintained on that paper, carried forward 30 years…”
The Kenosha News fired all its copy editors, or at least that was our theory. The misteaks were unbelievable, and very annoying.
@CIDU Bill: “I remember that, Arthur. Or one of the, anyway. Something Falls Gazette?”
The Menonomee Falls Gazette did adventure/soap opera comics, a week’s worth at a time, some current and some classic reprints. I think from memory it ran about three or four years. For a year or so it had a companion, The Menonomee Falls Guardian, which did the same thing for humor comics. Vague memory that when the latter folded, the Gazette took over some of the humor strips as well, but didn’t itself last much longer after that. I’ve still got complete runs of both in a box somewhere in the attic.
Ah, here we go — it actually last for over six years:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Menomonee_Falls_Gazette
I pay about $475 a year for a daily+Sunday delivery subscription to the local paper (the Minneapolis STAR TRIBUNE). I must say I’m boggled at the idea of a comparable newspaper (which, I wonder?) somewhere else costing more than twice that (but I suppose if it had twice the comics and twice the baseball news in season that my paper has, that would still be worth it to me — maybe it could have twice as many James Lileks columns too? It’s not as though I care much about that ‘news’ stuff. . .) I’d also want twice as many bridge columns, NYT crosswords, etc. as well of course.
I used to read more strips online than now. At one time, the online Houston Chronicle (The Chron) allowed you to create custom pages from a whole bunch of comics. No ads or anything.
Comics and news pretty much exclusively online. Subscribed for years to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, until they discontinued home delivery because I lived too far away. After that, 15-20 years ago, I discovered online comics. Now I get several dozen every day between the Seattle Post-Intelligencer site and GoComics, plus a few webcomics. And in the last year or two I finally subscribed to the online P-D edition because they offered me a pretty great deal of $10 a month.
About half-and-half, though there are print comics I’d stop reading if I didn’t subscribe.
And sometimes I read the print comics through my paper’s online e-edition. Not sure if that counts as print or online.
My usual first stop is Mike Peterson’s blog Comic Strip of the Day, followed by CIDU. I subscribe to the local paper, 3Xweek; page 2 with the police log usually the most interesting. Also subscribe to the city paper from 50 miles away. Their comic strip selection is lame enough I don’t mind if I miss it. I usually bring it to work unread, leave it on the break room table. GoComics for a select few (e.g. Non Sequitor) and some oddballs whose sites I access directly. I’m old school and I enjoy the feel and look of a paper, shrunken as they may be. Agree with Andrea, it’s hard to read the tiny type, you’d think it was a product warranty or something. Thanks for your work Bill.
I read comics here. Drifted out of the habit as comics didn’t give me much joy. Most were just dumb. I like the discussions here, though. I check in on a few alternative comics every now and then.
I read the daily & Sunday comics in the newspaper, but weekly will read more strips online that are not in our paper than the number of strips in our paper. Oh, I read “Jump Start” daily in the paper, but they don’t print the Sunday strip, so I read that online. I found that the comics were starting to take too much time for the ones I was reading online, so I also cut three other strips to reading just the Sunday strips online. They are not storyline strips and the one strip visit is enough of a visit to them for me.
“On the other hand, the US price agrees pretty well with larK’s “10x” hypothesis: as a kid, I remember the Washington Post costing 25¢ at newsstands.”
@Kilby: While I’m sort of coming to grips with everything being 10 times more expensive than I think it should be, it recently struck me that of course it won’t stop: in another 40-45 years, things will be yet again 10 times as expensive as they are. So if I should live into my 80s, I’m going to have to be dealing with things being 100x more expensive than I think they should be. A newspaper will cost 25 bucks; a comic book will cost $30; Mad Magazine, if they’re still publishing, will cost $60 a copy…
I have to ask my friend who’s in his 80s about that…
@lark: And stores will have buckets by the cash register with a little sign saying “Need a twenty, take a twenty; have an extra twenty, leave a twenty.”
(Dollars, that is.)
I remember when comic books went from a dime to twelve cents. . .
Comic books managed to stay a dime for a really long time… I think public transportation and stuff like that probably too — payphones! There was huge resistance to raise the price to keep up with inflation, which leads me to conclude that a) when the services were first priced, they were actually a lot more “expensive” that we realize, because the value of that dime was a lot more, and b) we lived well for a long time paying the undervalued price because of tradition, when that dime was no longer worth those 10 cents… Sorta like gasoline, which we’re very price resistant on, even though we think it’s gotten so much more expensive, it’s actually cheaper today that in Lucas’ nostalgic American Graffiti past… Adjust that 50¢ a gallon for inflation (or even just my 10x rule ; – ) — gas today should cost at least 5 bucks a gallon, or, it should have only cost 25¢ a gallon back in the day…
@ larK – As Stahler suggests today, you may not have to wait 40 years:
Often instead of raising prices – sizes get smaller. People don’t generally notice that their can of tomatoes is now 15 oz instead of 16 oz, etc.
When we were looking at houses to buy one Robert’s dad would come to see it if we saw one we thought was a maybe. (You know, children can not be allowed to shop for a house alone – we were in our late 20s the first time we went looking and our mid 30s when we finally bought one.) We would show him a house we saw that was selling for around $68,000 and he would say it was $28,000 as houses sold in the twenty thousands when he was buying one in the late 1950s.
As a philatelist, I base my inflation feeling on postage costs. In 1959, a letter cost 25 francs. In 1960, after the devaluation, it was .25 new franc (1/100). In 2001, it was up to 3 new francs and .46 euro (1/6.55957) in 2002 when we switched. Today, it’s 1.05 euro…
I read comics mostly here (thanks Bill) or from here (interesting suggestions from everybody). French newspapers never really printed comics and I don’t read them anymore (bad writing, worse editing).
I’ve got a hard copy of Calvin & Hobbes home, I’ll probably buy the Basic Instructions books someday and I’d get Bug Martini books if they existed (up to 2016: I think it’s not as good as it used to be since it went from daily to 3-weekly).