What percentage of comic strip reading is done online as opposed to in physical newspapers?
Because I’m thinking we might have reached the point where cartoonists should no longer be drawing comics that aren’t readable on computer screens (let alone phones or tablets): either because the text is just too small, or because the panel needs to be rotated 90 degrees to be read.
Comics I Don't Understand 
100%
ONLINE, I meant.
I still get a daily paper, and both in print and in their e-edition the comics are black & white. So the real problem to me is how often the coloring that you only see on comics sites is critical to the joke, or even visual coherence. There are several strips that I avoid in the paper until I can see them on-line. F-Minus, one of my absolute favorites, is a good example.
The rotation is an irritation. And not just 90 degrees — sometimes it is 180.
My local small town paper was failing. Subscriptions had fallen off after a exorbitant subscription price rise. They had been bought by an obviously right wing company that bought out several small town papers. That company failed. My Paper (the oldest continuous paper in California since 1854) was bought out and saved. The old company had sold all the “presses” and now the paper is printed elsewhere. Subscription prices went down but we no longer get the physical printed on paper news paper. We now read it online and so our comics are all online.
There are many online comics I enjoy reading and I always enjoy the CIDU page for comics I miss.
You can get an estimate, but it’s probably not possible to get an accurate count. Online you can get a pretty close estimate, by counting the number of times the graphic file that contains the actual comic is requested. But hardcopies can be, and are, seen my multiple different people. If you just count the number of paid distributed copies of the newspaper, for example, you miss all the other people who ever see the comic where it’s pinned to the cubicle walls, and you have to figure out if the house has 5 people living in it, and we dropped one newspaper in front of the house this morning, does that count as 1 even if the only person who reads any part of the paper is dad, and he just wants yesterday’s football scores? Or is it 5 people, since everybody in the house MIGHT HAVE looked at the comics page? How do you count pages of the paper that get read on the subway, and left there, or in the station? You could have dozens of people who looked at the comics.
Secondly, don’t forget the small but financially significant portion of people who read comics in the collections. You can walk into a bookstore today and find “Calvin and Hobbes” collections still on sale, even though it hasn’t been in a newspaper for what? 25 years?
I normally read online. My mom still subscribes to the paper and I take a look when I visit, but it is not worth it to subscribe personally. There is basically one column of comics in the paper, and no colour supplement anymore on the weekends.
I remember visiting my uncle in Agawam, MA, and the paper (might have been from Springfield) had like a full section of comics.
My greatest joy in the early-mid 60s was visiting my grandparents, who had saved their New York Daily News Sunday funnies for me since my last trip. Fifty+ years later, the difference for me of funnies on paper and funnies on the computer cannot be compared. I no longer take a paper in print, and my exposure to the funnies is limited to this site and one or two more … unless I am in a medical or repair shop waiting room with paper newspapers, and then I am transported back. FWIW, I don’t enjoy Jumble or Sudoku online either – but as a frequent traveler, most hotels have USA Today, and I love the paper and the puzzles there.
Not sure if that answered your question, or just acted like that Grandfather clock. Time to go rewind.
I read 90% online; I go to my parents’ house and read their Sunday funnies every week, and occasionally a daily comics section. But I read my selection of comics (which does overlap with the paper ones) online every day. Sometimes it’s a bit disconcerting, if I read at their house first, to find comics I’ve read intermixed with ones I haven’t.
I don’t care much about rotation – it’s about as annoying on paper as it is on the computer. But there are some really good comics (mostly old ones) that are almost impossible to read on a computer – Sunday Orphan Annies, Sunday Prince Valiant and Flash Gordon, Sunday Phantom…hmmm, I detect a recurring theme (or two). I can expand the image, and sometimes that helps; sometimes it only makes the text larger but so fuzzy it remains unreadable.
If the comics I like are in the papers I read them there.Any others I get online.
My local paper (the Minneapolis STAR TRIBUNE) carries about 35 comics in the dailies (“about” because tomorrow is trash/recycling day and I don’t have a copy of the paper still in the house to check). I read all of them except GET FUZZY.
There are about 15 (maybe 20) others that I read online — several of them, like GIL THORP or SIX CHIX, that I read only so that I can appreciate the snark/snark at them on Comics Curmudgeon (currently I’m taking a break from that timesink because of Life Intervening, but breaking the ‘reading the turkeys anyway’ habit it hard to break).
I prefer reading in the physical newspaper, since I can sit on the soft, drink coffee, and pet the cat while doing so, rather than sitting at the desktop in my office.
“sit on the soft”? Well, yes, but the important thing is my ‘soft’ is in turn sitting on the SOFA.
Online. Just the ability to zoom things makes it worthwhile.
I subscribe to the Boston Globe and read those comics in the paper. That’s at least 50% of my comics reading.
Whenever someone comments on another newspaper going out of business I say “Do you subscribe to it?” The answer is always “Well, no, but…”
I mostly read online. I do read the Sunday comics at my parents’ house in the newspaper. I don’t usually have problems with reading the comics I read online, though I often can’t read Doonesbury in the paper so I have to read it online where I can zoom in. I probably need to borrow my mom’s reading glasses.
I read comics online every day. I do subscribe to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch online version (my local paper), but mostly read news there. Comics are primarily GoComics, plus several from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer website. And a few webcomics. Haven’t had a physical newspaper delivered for many years.
I read the comics in the newspaper and read different ones online. One comic I read the Sunday online as only the dailies are in our regional paper. If we are away, when I get home I will read the newspapers I missed (I stop the paper when away) online including the comics.
Our regional paper got itself into some financial and legal trouble a couple of decades ago due to lying about the number of the subscribers to advertisers. Paper has gotten so small that the Sunday business section was one 4 page sheet this past Sunday. It’s journalism is sorely lacking – due, I am guessing to the fact that they are also online if something in a paper is saying something is to happen on the day of that issue it says the day of the week instead of “today” As in on Monday there will be a craft fair… in the issue that is printed for Monday – I find this terribly confusing.
They cut back to “rip and print” to a large extent to save money on staffing. They have stopped printing the paper and are having another paper print it for them and are selling the building they have been in for decades and moving to smaller space. They push their special editions – things like a “Fun book” which now comes out twice a year with events, museums, restaurants etc. – it is about 80% paid ads (and info is not always accurate – reenactment unit had an event to start at noon – they said it ended at same and started at 8 am). Their other special editions include the Thanksgiving Day paper’s ads.
About, I am guessing, 5 years ago they raised the rates. I called and canceled the paper. I was called back by the circulation manager and asked why I canceled and I told her. She cut the rate back to what it had been. Since then they have raised the rates about annually and each time I call and she puts me back to the rate from back before the 5 years or so that this started. They are desperate to keep customers. I also do not pay for papers when I temporarily cancel – yes, if you say don’t deliver the paper for say 2 weeks – they don’t deliver it, but one has to pay for it.
I pay money to subscribe to the Boston Globe. I don’t pay anything to read comics online.
So why are online comics thriving and print newspapers not?
MiB: Because geezers read newspapers, but geezer eyes don’t do well with the small print and low-contrast. Also, if I buy a newspaper, I have to throw the damn thing away when I’m done.
CIDU Bill: I read comics on your site. That’s pretty much it. I look at Ted Rall’s site and xkcd, and Ruben Bolling when I remember.
@SingaporeBill: “Also, if I buy a newspaper, I have to throw the damn thing away when I’m done.”
Throw away? You don’t believe in recycling? (Are you SURE you’re Canadian?)
Shrug: First of all, residential recycling in Canada is not working very well. Which is common for many places. https://thewalrus.ca/why-recycling-doesnt-work/
However, I still *throw out* things into the appropriate container. But if I’m taking it out of my home and tossing it in a bin, whichever one it is, I still consider it throwing out. When I did subscribe to the paper, I found that what I most got out of the arrangement was a pile of newsprint I had to dispose of, oftentimes unread.
Just as I no longer have to think about what to do with read newspapers, once I started doing puzzles at https://www.jigidi.com, I no longer had to figure out what to do with puzzles that I’d finished. And no, just like one doesn’t read newspapers over and over, I would never do a puzzle over and over.
Our recycling is pretty useless because 1) no glass is allowed anymore; and 2) I saw the two garbage containers – one garbage, one recycle – tossed into the same truck and I quit. NOW the company wants $18/month MORE to collect recycling containers.
I live in a small market. We don’t even get Garfield. I find my long-time favorites on line.
I saw the two garbage containers – one garbage, one recycle – tossed into the same truck
We don’t have that problem because recycling and regular trash are picked up on different days. That’s not to say that they couldn’t take them to same place, but it’s unlikely. People check on that sort of thing.
Locally, there has been a situation with a refuse company that got a number of contracts for large municipalities and the unincorporated county areas. A year or so ago there started being some problems with people not getting pick-ups for weeks in a row. The company was also alleged to have been taking recycling to a facility that doesn’t recycle glass, which is a violation of the contract.
My city started a cascade of cancelling contracts with this company.
The problem with recycling is that what is easiest for the consumer is the least efficient for the recyclers. One city in a neighboring county uses dual-stream recycling. Paper has to be separated from other recycled materials.
Brian in STL: Yeah, I miss dual-stream recycling. I can’t imagine that it was so onerous that my city (Minneapolis) felt they had to switch to “throw everything into one container” and brag about it.
As a feeble gesture of protest, I still keep two different bags going in my house, one for metal and glass, and one for paper and such. But of course they both get emptied into the same container.
Minneapolis does what many European cities do, and incinerates its trash, thereby generating electricity and/or heat for the city. I am coming more and more to the conclusion that this is the only sensible thing to do with trash — if it costs more to recycle than it does to make new stuff from scratch, including all externalities, then it makes no sense to recycle. So, it currently makes sense to recycle aluminum, since it costs less to make new aluminum things from old aluminum that it does to mine new aluminum. But it doesn’t make sense to make new paper from old paper, since it costs more to recover usable paper from old paper than it does to just plant some trees and harvest them (yes — paper trees are a crop; they are not cutting down old growth forest to make paper). The only question remaining are the externalities: pollution, CO2 production… Burning your trash gets rid of it, so you don’t have to worry about land fills, dumping it in the ocean, etc., and it generates electricity and/or heat, so it’s a net gain. The only question remaining is CO2 production. If you have one central plant, you can capture most of the CO2 right there; how much CO2 do you create recycling, and if less than incinerating the stuff, does the difference offset the savings from energy/heat production from incineration? Also, most plastics simply cannot be recycled effectively, let’s stop kidding ourselves. And plastic doesn’t biodegrade, it just stays around forever and eventually gets into the food chain. Burning it actually gets rid of it, so even if you weren’t getting surplus electricity and/or heat, that alone would be worthwhile.
So, sequester the CO2 from your incinerator, and you have the best way to deal with your trash. And as a bonus, your populace doesn’t have to engage in the silly and ever more complex, and yet ultimately pointless, trash separating exercises. (Don’t worry, someone will harvest the valuable aluminum in your trash.) Minneapolis has figured this out, but it seems hard to convince people that this really is better than pointless virtue-signaling trash separation…
There have been articles in that same newspaper that various local communities are stopping or dropping parts of their recycling programs as they can’t get rid of the stuff after they pick it up.
Recycling is inevitable; there are only so many molecules in or near the Earth’s surface, and nature isn’t adding much to the supply. Some of those molecules are so valuable they’re actively sought out wherever they might be found. Go to a factory where they make things out of titanium, and you’ll find that they actively seek to capture any leftover bit of it. Aluminum was once in a similar state, but it turns out to be rather plentiful among the molecules of the Earth’s crust, once we figured out how to pry them loose. Before that happened, aluminum was a precious metal, such that the cap of the Washington monument is made of the stuff. Even iron was once incredibly rare and hard to obtain.