Print Cartoonists declare Armageddon; Microsoft opens up Infinite Canvas

Sometimes two or three things come at you in the news in the same week which are such perfect expressions of opposing spirits of the times, that the connection simply begs to be drawn between those points.

Take the recent rant on Derfcity, declaring a modern economic End Times for cartoons as a result of the Great Comic Axing at alternative weekly newspaper chain, Village Voice Media…

OK. This is it. We’ve reached the apocalyptic final struggle for the future of cartoons. Village Voice Media is the largest group of weekly newspapers in the biz. It is suffering from the ills that have befallen the rest of the newspaper industry: dwindling ad revenues. Their corporate response, which was delivered to me Monday, is to “suspend” all cartoons across the chain, said suspension to last at least through the rest of the first quarter, and quite possibly beyond. That’s right. NO more cartoons. None.
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This is it, folks. If you don’t speak up now, you’ll have to get your laughs from crappy Youtube videos created by pimply high-school geeks.

And add this to the recent news of Diamond Distribution raising the entry bar for niche comics — from $1500 minimum sales to retain a place in their catalogue, to $2500 minimum, per issue (wholesale!) This “new threshold” will — wait for it… “annihilate many of the smallest publishers and keep a lot of new ones out of Previews […] the single biggest event since Diamond became the monopoly that ruled comics“.

How odd that this week has been such a sheer panic snapshot of cartoon artists in one communication medium, when it’s this very week that a major new frontier appears to have opened up for those self-same artists in a faster, looser medium with fewer stapled-down fiefdoms but requiring more imagination to exploit? Of course, I’m talking about the web, and more particularly, about Microsoft‘s recently announced Infinite Canvas. It looks like Microsoft may be leveraging some of its technology from Photosynth. (WTF there must have been a mutiny of style in the ranks of Microsoft designers who favour the word ‘funky’ lately.) With comic book leading lights Neil Gaiman and Scott McCloud anteing up short tales to be spun up on Microsoft’s new infinite space machine, has McCloud found his durable mutation? Does it Matter?

I feel like snapping my fingers in the faces of all these cartoonists disgruntled at the final climactic insult from a medium that’s already been insulting them for all of Acts One and Two. Dudes! Dudes. Stop thinking about the Klingons, okay? The antidote is obviously going to be developed by either Spock or McCoy. And what was up with that whole loose plot thread from the teaser, with the oddly underutilised alternate, infinite canvas? You didn’t think that was a little strange, maybe? You didn’t think that would… lead anywhere?

Sorry. Didn’t mean to disturb your function in the plot — carry on.

[Submitted by The Laroquod Experiment.]