Dinosaur Comics is a good example. That comic was more interesting/challenging/exciting when it was in its first few years and still having serious fun with the medium/limitations. Now it’s kind of degenerated into a tired sitcom.

This is probably the first mention of webcomics that many of NPR?s audience will have heard

Except for Achewood and Sluggy Freelance and Erfworld and Questionable Content and Megatokyo and Cyanide & Happiness.

I don’t know why everyone thinks NPR caters exclusively to conservative New England retirees.

I would submit there is a greater potential to make a living with a few tens of thousands of dedicated readers, versus a million people that glance over “Cathy” only because it’s in front of them, requires no effort to do so, and is an ingrained habit of decades.

To a certain extent this is demonstrably untrue, since Cathy rakes in buckets of money and the only cartoonists I know of who can afford to light piles of money on fire are the PA guys.

Currently the greatest potential to make a living is to have a wildly successful syndicated comic strip published in thousands of newspapers. This is still true, though maybe in four or five years it won’t be. Second up is to have a wildly successful comic strip on the web with enough readers to get decent paying banner ads and lots of book and t-shirt sales. Then comes everyone else.

But at present, it doesn’t matter how ardent the fans are of newspaper comics because the cartoonists get paid for being printed in the newspaper whether the fans are rabid or not. And you don’t have to be rabid to buy swag (see Garfield merchandise).

None of this should be taken as a ringing endorsement of the syndication method of comic publishing or anything like that. I just don’t think webcomics are quite on that level of success just yet, nor do I think syndication has failed completely. Not yet.

Chris Onstad did a 7 minute interview with Scott Simon on Morning Edition back in October, so the genre is not unfamiliar to our audience.

The problem of the Fruit Fucker is that it contains one of the words we’re not allowed to say on the air…radio being a bit more regulated and constrained format than the Web.

All I’m saying, I guess, is that you shouldn’t generalize. Tastes differ, yes – but I’d bet NPR will get more comments in favor of PA and webcomics than outrage. Give the audience some credit..

Thanks.

Steve