But, as others have already said, the genie’s out of the bottle, and it ain’t going back. And it is possible to editorialize and strip at the same time; look at Doonesbury (and, heaven forbid, Mallard Fillmore).

I think the (very difficult!) trick is to make your editorials as accessible as possible to an international audience with varying political beliefs without descending into soft edged blandness. It’s interesting to note that the guy who does Filibuster is in his mid-twenties, and thus more typical web-comiccer than editorialiser.

Or did you mean editorial as accompaniment-to-news? Their fate is inextricably tied with that of newspapers I guess (and thus indeed looks dark)

So, everyone stop driving cars, okay?

In the case of the shipmakers, they were stupid in that they did not adopt steam technology, and every last one of them went out of business. In the space of 40 years, the guys who built the ships that all trans-Atlantic trade relied on were relegated to building boats for hobbyists.

What Rall SHOULD be saying is “We (the editorial cartoonists and syndicates) have been stupid in the way we’ve held to the business model of the last 100 years. Somebody else is now making all the money we wanted to be making.”

I’m pretty sure Dave Kellet (to name one recently ex-syndicated webtoonist) is making more money than all but the top 10% of syndicated cartoonists, and he’s doing it with 1/1000th of the readers.

Rall’s “stuff the genie back in the bottle” idea is patently stupid (and not just because he knows it can’t be done.) If all comics were offline, there would be less of a market for comics because fewer people would know they exist. There would be fewer cartoonists, and the craft would be stifled under a fairly oppressive old-boys network, whose favor would have to be curried before a cartoonist’s work could be raised from obscurity.

I don’t doubt for a moment that editorial cartoonists are suffering. It is entirely possible that their particular art-form is one of those niches that the free-content business model can’t support, and will crowd out of existence.

So what? They can still draw, and they can still tell jokes. I bet that if they really WANT to continue to have careers drawing and telling jokes, they’ll find a way to change with the times.

Either that or they’ll be left making sailboats for playboys while the rest of us steam across the Atlantic.

In the early days of comics/porn, only a very small set of individuals and companies were able to make any money off it at all. As the idea caught on, more people started trying to make and sell comics/porn. It gets to be about the late 1970’s, early 1980’s and both comics and porn see a large expansion in business. Porn because of VCRs, comics because of widespread adoption of color printing in newspapers and a perception of the value add - comics sell papers. So comics pages go from five or ten large print comics on one page, to twenty or thirty small print comics on two or three pages - in most newspapers. And Sunday comics pages turn into their own full section.

Come the rise of the Internet, and everyone can make and distribute their own porn/comics or porn-comics or comics-porn or etc… and make money off of it.

So now the market for both porn and comics is significantly larger, and the available pool of money is significantly larger. And everyone who was in the business before should be making more money, across the board. And lots more people are making at least SOME money.

Except newspapers, because nobody wants to buy a paper any more. And nobody will EVER buy a reprint of a year’s run of the New York Times, like they will of Calvin and Hobbes. Not even Gary!

I’m gonna go find me a cave.