Tea Fougner (‘'Tea' like the drink, 'FOOG-ner' where 'Foug' sounds like 'food' with a g on the end instead of a d!"), who can be found at teaberryblue on LinkedIn, Bluesky and their website, is the former Editorial Director of Comics, at King Features Syndicate (KFS). On Jan. 3, 2025, she announced it was their last day at the syndicate after a 16 year+ tenure.
Fougner outlined their personal and professional comics background for Publisher Weekly’s 10/15/2020 More to Come #443 podcast: As a child, she read newspaper strips with their family; she especially liked comics because they’re easier to read with dyslexia than prose. As an adult, after an internship at DC Comics — which was not a good fit — she worked for Playgirl magazine as an art director. After a stint as designer and community manager for a mobile software company, Fougner segued into project management at ComicSpace (an early days webcomics portal, supported by ad revenue and promoted via social media) and, upon many people’s recommendations, was hired by KFS to help strips reach online audiences.
In 2008, when Fougner began at King Features Syndicate, the era for print newspaper comic strips as a mass medium had ended. Though there was a renewed interest in and critical reevaluation of classic comics, thanks to bestselling comprehensive collections of Gary Larson’s The Far Side (2003), Charles Schulz’ Peanuts (2004) and Bill Watterson’s Calvin & Hobbes (2005), the newer strips that had made an impact in that format were either concluding (Aaron McGruder’s Boondocks ended in 2006) or struggling. In his 2008 introduction to his TCJ #294 interview with syndicated strip cartoonist Mark Tatulli (Liō; Heart of the City), Andrew Farago noted syndicates rarely launched more than three new strips a year; new strips launched in 30 or fewer magazines; and to make a living at it, cartoonists had to juggle multiple strips, since payments hadn’t gone up since the 1980s. The advent of smart phones in 2010 contributed to the death of local alternative paper weekly strips and, in general, sales of print comic strip collections declined, cutting off yet another source of income.
Fougner graciously answered TCJ’s questions about all of this and what came next in the following interview, conducted via email.
The Industry
TCJ: In your experience, how has the role of a syndicate changed from 2008–2009 to now?
TEA FOUGNER: I’d just like to set the stage a little bit for folks who aren’t familiar with how syndication works. Syndication is a way for syndication clients (usually newspapers, but increasingly websites and other digital clients) to bring content that they could not afford to pay an individual writer or artist to produce. The basic concept is, if it costs (for example) $100 to produce a comic, maybe only the biggest newspapers would have the budget to pay individual cartoonists to produce custom comics for their readers. But if 10 papers can pay $10 for a comic via a syndicate, then carrying comics becomes a lot more viable for a lot more publications. And if 20 papers can pay $10, now there is a decent profit to be split between the syndicate and the cartoonist, so the cartoonist is making more money than they might have made if they were just producing their comic for one client.
When I first started working in syndication, the syndicates worked a lot as tastemakers, telling the clients what they needed based on what the syndicate saw in the market. It’s become a much more consultative business, where clients who have been experiencing drops in circulation and a loss of staff tell the syndicate what their pain points are, and the syndicate responds with potential solutions.
As far as the role a syndicate plays with cartoonists, it’s still very much the same. The syndicate finds clients for a comic, provides editing and coloring services, and also helps find book publishing or merchandise opportunities for cartoonists. The biggest difference is that print isn’t always the main driver of an audience for a new comic — or even some long-running comics. In my time as Editorial Director, we piloted “digital first” syndication, where we would take a comic out to our digital clients, and offer it on our website, before finding print clients. Some comics that started in digital first have gone on to be published in print, while others haven’t — and that’s fine, not every comic is right for print. Today, a syndicate helps a cartoonist find readers online and might advise cartoonists on social media strategy or special considerations to keep in mind when creating comics for a digital audience versus a print newspaper audience. King Features has a publishing department that works much like a literary agency, representing our cartoonists’ book proposals to publishers. At King Features, we also built our own online shop and worked with cartoonists to design merchandise that would appeal to their readers.
You began work at King Features as the internet was taking a firm hold on the general public and newspapers were starting to feel its effects. What were the specific challenges you faced in adapting to a burgeoning online news market and a shrinking print market?
A big challenge — that everyone who transitioned from print publishing to online publishing in any medium has experienced — is that digital advertising simply does not make up for revenue lost in print. The number of viewers you need to amass to see a decent return on digital advertising is truly massive. Fortunately, I think, the past five years or so have seen a change in online reading habits. It used to be impossible to get readers to pay for subscriptions to read anything online. Now, more and more readers are willing to spend money to read material of quality — whether that’s news articles, fiction or comics. In my last few years at King Features, we saw a significant bump in subscriptions to Comics Kingdom, which had had a very consistent number of subscribers for my first ten years with the company. It never went down, but it never went up, either — toward the end of my tenure, we really saw those numbers going up for the first time. It feels like a good sign that even in a world with sites like Webtoon running thousands upon thousands of comics for free, people are willing to pay for the comics they care about.
You read cold submissions, aka the slush pile, for eight years. What qualities were you looking for? What made for a good comic strip during your tenure?
I actually returned to reading the slush pile in my last year at King Features. It’s a job I love doing; I love seeing all of the different comics people come up with, even if they’re not ready for syndication. We looked for comics that were a good combination of funny and relatable, with art that stood out as unique and appealing.
In those first eight years of reading the slush pile, there’s only one comic that made it to syndication that way — that’s Take it From the Tinkersons by Bill Bettwy. His original pitch was a bit different: it was primarily about the little boy, Tillman, and Tillman’s dog. It had a very dry, self-deprecating sense of humor that was different from other offerings on the comics page, and a really appealing, goofy look to it. My predecessor, Brendan Burford, worked with Bill to expand the focus of the comic to not just Tillman but the entire family, which broadened the types of jokes that could be told. But the sense of humor, the eye-catching character designs — all that was present in the initial pitch.
Were there any significant changes to King Features’ public submission guidelines?
Oh, yes. When I first started reading the slush pile, the submission guidelines were very long and very specific. We also didn’t accept digital submissions at all! If you wanted to submit your comics, you needed to send them in on 8 1/2”x 11” paper, paperclipped, not stapled … and the guidelines themselves were very meandering and difficult to read. I remember basically taking an editorial machete to them at some point and really getting them down to their bare bones. Then, later, I was able to start accepting submissions by email, which saved on so much work and made it a lot easier to respond to every submission.
Were there any significant changes in how many slush pile submissions KFS received over the years?
Yes, the number of submissions dropped significantly over the years, especially when we were only accepting submissions by mail. When I first started at KFS, I received a few hundred submissions a month. It was pretty overwhelming to handle them all. I’d usually wait until I had a big pile, and then go through all of them at once, and I’d have to wash my hands multiple times during the process — sometimes submissions would be sticky or have stains on them, or other unappealing things. I’d say now it’s down to a few dozen a month, which is a nice, manageable number that felt like I could really spend my time with each one and send constructive feedback in cases where it felt like it might be helpful — and it’s much easier to track digital submissions. We don’t get many by snail mail now that we accept them digitally. Of those few dozen each month, the entire editorial team would look at usually 5–10 that showed potential, and then we’d generally contact about half that number to discuss potential syndication.
Would you walk us through the process of acquiring comics, “refining” and launching a strip?
There are two main ways comics came to us: a cartoonist would contact us with a pitch, or we’d see a cartoonist whose work we liked, and we’d contact them. In the digital-first era, this was a much quicker process than it was when comics were solely going out to print.
Print launches were a very big deal. Cartoonists we chose to work with were given development contracts to work on getting their comic ready for “the big time.” A comic might go through several iterations of character designs and tonal adjustments. Once the premise was ready to go, the cartoonist would design character sheets for each character, and our marketing team would write introductory copy to promote the comic to print syndication clients. The cartoonist would need to have somewhere between 20 and 60 strips already in the can, and a selection of those would be printed out and put in a specially designed folder that our sales team would hand-deliver to print syndication clients all over the US and Canada. There would be a big “launch day,” when all the signed clients would all publish the first strip on the same day.
In the digital-first era, we worked on the premise that the cartoonist would be able to refine their work as they go from digital launch. The amount of feedback we gave the cartoonist to get them ready for launch varied depending on a bunch of things — for example, working with someone who had already been working on their strip for a few years and already had an established audience wouldn’t necessarily want to change as much as someone pitching us a brand new idea. But we might work with them on doing a few weeks of “introductory” comics that would familiarize the new audience with the characters and premise without being a drag to longtime readers. Dee Parson of Rosebuds, for example, used the “launch” of Rosebuds with King Features to give his characters a redesign that he had wanted to do anyway.
During your tenure, did KFS ever end or cancel a strip? Are you able to give any concrete reasons why?
We ended and canceled many strips during my time at King Features. One of the first strips I worked on, Ali’s House, by Marguerite Dabaie and Tom Hart, never launched because the sales team could not get enough sales to support the strip. It was a really charming comic about an Arab-American family, and the story I heard was that newspaper editors were resistant to a comic strip with Middle Eastern main characters, which was pretty disappointing. You can read it on GoComics if you’re curious.
We also cancelled Apartment 3-G, which I was really sad about — I always thought there was so much potential for Apartment 3-G to be rebooted with contemporary sensibilities. Frank Bolle and Margaret Shulock, the creative team on the strip, were heading for retirement — Frank was 91! — and rather than get a new creative team, the powers that be of the time decided to retire the comic.
Would you talk about the “audition process” for taking over legacy strips?
Absolutely! When we had a position available for a legacy strip, I’d solicit pitches from a number of cartoonists — usually about 5–10 to start. I’d do a short informational interview with them to introduce the project and what we were looking for and gauge their interest. If they were interested and available, I’d ask them to do a short pitch with their premise and the direction they would want to take the strip in, and a couple of character sketches of the main character(s). From those, I’d usually pick no more than two pitches that I’d ask for a more formal “audition” on. I’d usually try to pay cartoonists for auditions — I feel pretty strongly that if you’re asking someone to do finished work that they can’t sell elsewhere, it’s important to pay even a small fee if possible. I’d take the finalists’ audition pieces and pitches and present them to a larger group of stakeholders at King Features and get feedback. Sometimes we’d ask someone to redo part of their pitch or audition, sometimes I’d solicit more pitches if we weren’t getting what we wanted. But generally, we’d find a good candidate among those finalists. Then I’d work together with the cartoonist to develop their first story — we’d work very closely on the first several weeks just to help the cartoonist get in the groove, but further down the line, I wouldn’t be watching over their shoulder as much.
What can legacy strips do that other comics can’t?
One of the really great things about legacy comics is that there’s a wealth of history to pull from and the right writer can tell stories that introduce current readers to a rich history beyond what they’re looking at today. It’s one of the reasons Randy Milholland’s Popeye is so good: Randy’s knowledge of the strip’s history — and, honestly, comic strip history in general — means that he can plumb the depths for characters or backstory that hasn’t been brought to readers’ attention in years. People love tearing back the wrapper on a character or story and feeling like they’ve been given a sort of privileged inside look; it can make you feel a little bit like you’re part of a special club, and there’s a real excitement I see from readers who make the leap from realizing they’re seeing a reference to some decades-old plot line to digging in and reading those old stories for themselves. Randy and Shadia Amin re-introduced Cylinda Oyl, a character who had not been seen since 1928, and it was so much fun to watch readers digging up the pre-Popeye Thimble Theatre strips that featured Cylinda, I think.
Dan Schkade is doing this very well for Flash Gordon, as well. One of my favorite little callbacks in Dan’s Flash Gordon story is when he took a bit character from Alex Raymond’s original run, Rena, a young woman who spends her time in the story dressing up as a young man, and decided to take Rena’s story a step further and have the character actually transition in-story, renaming himself Reno and joining the Power Men. It makes perfect sense from what we see of the character initially, and readers were so excited when they realized Reno wasn’t just a brand new character being introduced to the story, that he actually had a many-decades-old history.
Another really cool thing that we were able to do with a legacy strip is support the science and nature community with the reboot of Mark Trail. Ed Dodd, the creator of Mark Trail, had started the comic with a mission of bringing nature education to the public through an entertaining comic strip. When I hired Jules Rivera to take over Mark Trail, one of the reasons we chose her over the other folks who auditioned for the role was because she had a STEM background and was already a committed environmentalist who occasionally covered nature and environmental issues in her autobio comic, Love, Joolz. Her pitch for Mark Trail didn’t just focus on Mark but set up a structure for dealing with global environmental issues through Mark’s work as a nature journalist, while also highlighting smaller environmental actions people could take in their communities and at home through Mark’s wife, Cherry.
Because Mark Trail already had a home in newspapers, these contemporary stories, and particularly the Sunday strips, which Jules calls “Science Sundays,” purely educational strips where Mark tells the audience about a specific environmental issue or natural phenomenon, had a built-in audience. There was some backlash from people decrying this new take on Mark Trail as “woke,” which is a bit absurdist given that the comic has always been about conservation and issues impacting nature, but the really exciting thing was that we started getting fan mail from scientists, environmentalists, nature educators, and other people who had a vested interest in the topics Jules was covering. People would email us to thank us for bringing attention to their specific field of research that was often overlooked. Outdoor America Magazine ran a huge feature, including a fictional interview with “Mark Trail” (Jules and I wrote the answers), about Jules’ work promoting environmental education. That’s the kind of thing that couldn’t have happened without the platform a legacy strip like Mark Trail had already amassed.
What is your opinion about comic strip “dynasties,” i.e., a cartoonist’s family, maintaining multistrip “real estate” on a crowded newspaper page? For example, the Walker family and Hi & Lois and Beetle Bailey, etc.
To preface this statement, I think it’s a shame that there is less space available for new comics to get a footing. It locks out comics from women, BIPOC cartoonists, LGBTQIA+ cartoonists and others whose work was overlooked by previous generations, in particular. That said, most readers who read comics every day in their local newspaper are expressly looking for familiar favorites: the readership wants to check in with characters that they think of as “old friends” like Beetle Bailey, Blondie, Dennis the Menace, and more. It’s a big part of the appeal of the comics section for many readers, as we see these classic comics consistently score high in reader surveys and spur many letters to editors when a paper cancels one of them.
I don’t know that ending these comics would necessarily translate to more space in comics sections for new comics: there are also a number of strips that are entirely run in reprints, and the majority of readers don’t seem to complain about these reprints, either, as long as they are seeing those familiar favorites. In general, if papers are going to elect to run older comics, I’d prefer to see them running comics that employ skilled creative teams who work hard to keep these decades-old characters relevant, rather than running reprints of comics that have already run before. Ideally, the solution would be for papers to add space to their comics sections, but decision-makers at newspapers are concerned about rising costs and shrinking readerships and more focused on cost-cutting. I wish there were more space in papers for new comics to thrive but given the decline in newspaper readership among younger generations, I don’t know that newspapers are the place where new comics are going to find an audience that will stick with them for the next 20 or 30 years.
Payment and Sustainability
Are there any significant changes in how (or how much) artists were paid? For example, did more clicks equal a higher rate, etc.?
Comics that were developed for print came with a weekly guarantee, where cartoonists would be paid a flat rate every week. King would earn back to meet the guarantee, and after the guarantee was reached, all additional revenue was split between King and the cartoonist — the revenue split was determined on a contract-by-contract basis.
With digital-first comics, there isn’t a guarantee, but revenue is split between King and the cartoonist starting with the first dollar they earn. Cartoonists do get paid based on the ad views on their comics: the comics that get the most views get the largest share of digital revenue. The subscription revenue to Comics Kingdom is split evenly among the cartoonists for users who subscribe to the entire site.
One thing we instituted during my time at King was individual comic subscriptions on Comics Kingdom, where a reader could pay a smaller fee to subscribe to one comic they really love rather than the entire buffet of comics. We’ve seen how readers are willing to go out of their way to support a specific cartoonist on sites like Patreon and Substack, and we wanted to offer that option to readers on Comics Kingdom, as well. Those subscriptions are split only between King and the cartoonist whose comic was subscribed to, so readers could know that their favorite comic is getting their support.
Based on your varied experience, what is the most sustainable way to host many different comics?
One thing that was very important to me was that cartoonists make money, no matter how little, from the minute King Features made money from their comic. A lot of other sites, like Webtoon, have minimum views that need to be reached before a cartoonist starts making money. For a lot of digital-first comics, the payments they receive from Comics Kingdom are too low to make cartooning a full-time career, but they are enough to make cartooning a sustainable hobby. I hate the idea of people pouring all of their love, energy and free time into making a comic only to get nothing back. And it’s absolutely not reasonable for the company hosting the company to be enjoying revenue from a comic if the person who created the comic isn’t.
I talked earlier about ad revenue: in the current market, digital ad revenue is not really a realistic way to support a comic. Digital ad sales are very market-driven, and they are seasonal; you might get very high rates in November or December as holiday sales dominate the market, but very low rates in January and February when those sales are over. A single direct sale might boost your ad rate up to $5–6 CPM for a month, and then it might be down to $.80 the next month. It also takes a lot of readers to make money. A $5 CPM means you need 1000 views to make $5, and 20K views to make $100. Meanwhile, if you charge $1/month per reader per subscription, you need 100 readers to make that same $100. To get the same $100 from those 100 readers, those 100 readers would each need to look at your page 200 times in a month.
This is why I think subscriptions are the way to go. There are a number of cartoonists who are making decent income on Patreon, Substack and other similar sites, where their readers can support them directly. But not every cartoonist is also a great marketer or good at self-managing deadlines, or the other many skills it takes to crowdfund directly, and I think there’s a big white space that could be filled by services that help creative people with the non-creative parts of running what is essentially a small business.
Are you able to talk about any significant changes that occurred at KFS during your tenure in how strips are owned, copyrighted and/or licensed?
There really weren’t any big changes in this arena during my time at King. All cartoonists who were signed to KFS during my time there fully own their work, which is as it should be, in my estimation.
In the time you were at KFS, print newspaper strip and editorial strip collections declined. Now, print publishers like Andrews McMeel focus more on Instagram comics with large follower counts. Did this affect KFS?
It is definitely harder to get a comic strip collection printed than it was 20 years ago. It used to be that even a moderately successful comic strip would have a collection printed; now, it is really only the most popular strips that have collections, though occasionally one will break through — as you know, Fantagraphics publishes collections of the critically acclaimed Macanudo, by Liniers. Some of the King cartoonists have found success in graphic novel format: Bill Holbrook of Safe Havens and On the Fastrack has a series of graphic novels featuring On the Fastrack’s Dethany, for example.
Did the culture at KFS change when CJ Kettler became President?
Yes. CJ likes to refer to King Features as a “110-year-old startup,” and I think that is a good summation of the energy she brought with her to King. Working with CJ felt a lot more like working at digital startups, as I did early in my career, than working at King Features had felt before. CJ has an extremely democratic attitude; she will listen to anyone’s ideas, no matter who they are or what kind of seniority they have. I also felt a lot more connected to the rest of Hearst. In the years prior, we had worked in the Hearst Tower but felt very siloed off from the other divisions at Hearst. Not long after CJ’s arrival, we were moved from Hearst Entertainment to Hearst Newspapers and got to work much more directly with the teams that ran the Hearst newspapers, which was extremely helpful, because we had a lot more resources to draw on and people to collaborate with. And it helped us understand what our newspaper clients were seeing in their day-to-day business better, which helped us serve those clients better.
As a superfan and steward of Popeye’s legacy, do you have any comments about the 1929 version of Popeye entering public domain?
I am a huge proponent of fanworks, I’ve written a lot of fanfiction as a hobby, and as such, I love the public domain. Popeye has been in the public domain in some other countries for some time already, and Olive Oyl has been in the public domain for 10 years, and they are still very popular licenses internationally. King Features still owns the trademark on Popeye, which limits what others can do with the character. That said, I really hope that this will ignite curiosity in Popeye’s earliest days — the original Dice Island storyline is so great, and I love when people learn about Bernice the Whiffle Hen, Castor Oyl, Ham Gravy and the world Popeye was born into. I also think that people who read the original stories come away with a renewed interest in Olive Oyl, who was really reduced to a damsel in distress and later a fickle girlfriend in the cartoons that everyone is so familiar with. Olive is a force of nature in Thimble Theatre and really deserves to be remembered as one.
I also really hope that if folks are going to create their own Popeye-inspired material, that they get a more creative idea than a slasher movie with an evil, murderous Popeye. There are two movies in the works, neither of them look like they are using a 1929 version of Popeye, and they have practically identical titles: “The Slayer Man.” Randy Milholland has done a couple comic strips about the upcoming slasher movies featuring Popeye, and how this seems to be the trend with popular characters entering the public domain. I’m personally a big horror movie fan, and I think there’s potential to do a great Popeye story in the horror genre, but these movies look more gimmicky than like something that wants to honor Popeye’s legacy, which is a shame.
I love to see different artists’ takes on classic characters, which is one of the reasons I put together Popeye’s Cartoon Club, a series where a different cartoonist wrote and illustrated a Popeye strip once a week for a year. Seeing what is important about a character through different people’s eyes is so exciting to me, especially when it’s a character who is an international treasure, like Popeye. Everyone knows Popeye, everyone has taken something away from Popeye, everyone has their own picture of Popeye in their mind and getting to share those is so precious. I hope that if we are going to see independent work that features Popeye, that it’s the kind of work that shares that individual vision.
What do you consider your greatest success at King?
My greatest success was expanding our roster and bringing in new perspectives that were missing at King Features. Projects like Popeye’s Cartoon Club and Flash Forward were a big part of that, but I’m also proud of bringing on cartoonists like Olive Brinker, Bianca Xunise, Jules Rivera, Randy Milholland, Shadia Amin, Emi Burdge, George Gant, Dee Parson and more. I get especially excited about giving someone an opportunity to bring their voice to a classic story, and in the process, excite and engage new readers who might not have given that comic a second look otherwise.
Production and Format
Were there any print production hiccups when many artists transitioned to creating art digitally?
The only real hiccups I saw were in teaching cartoonists not to use rich black! For those of you who don’t know what rich black is, rich black is a black that is printed with cyan, magenta and yellow inks in it, which make a deeper, richer color on the page. It also causes registration errors on comics pages! So, we use standard black, or 100% black with no other ink colors, for line art and text on comics. Getting cartoonists into the habit of checking their blacks took a while, but we eventually got it!
In 2020, when we went into lockdown, we actually had several cartoonists who were still drawing on Bristol board and mailing their comics in to our Orlando office. But no one was going to be in the Orlando office to pick up and scan the artwork. I worked very quickly to get those cartoonists to start scanning their artwork themselves and sending it in digitally — it was hectic, but it went very smoothly and now the KFS art delivery is 100% digital. And most of the cartoonists who had to switch prefer the new way to the hassle of paying postage and dealing with the post office once a week!
Post 2010, webcomics tended to reformat for the vertical scroll and then, later on, panel by panel for Instagram. How did this affect King Features and Comics Kingdom?
King Features’ production team actually cuts every comic into individual panels — when possible, we don’t cut comics if cutting them would hurt the narrative — so that Comics Kingdom can display the comics in a vertical scroll when you read on your phone. We also offer some of our comics that are consistently four panels long in a square, again, because it’s a more appealing format to read in on a mobile device. We talked a lot about meeting readers where they are: if digital comics readers are used to reading vertical comics or square comics, then we want them to be able to read in a format that feels familiar to them. In some ways, it’s a return to our roots: if you go back and look at newspaper pages from the 1910s and ’20s, you’ll see six-panel daily comics formatted in all kinds of ways to fit specific papers. You might see a comic in a familiar horizontal strip, but you’re just as likely to see it in a 1x6 or 2x3 panel vertical going down the page.
Narrative
In 2020, you noted renewed interest in serialization, which was borne out in 2022, when there was an obsession with Mary Worth’s Wilbur Weston going overboard. Artist June Brigman said:
“It is kind of a strange phenomenon that the continuity strips are hanging in there. Because people generally have shorter attention spans, and yet these story strips require your attention: they require an investment of time to keep up with them. And maybe that is a quality people kind of like. It almost seems like there’s a little club of people that follow the strip. And maybe some of them are a little snarky. Well, actually, most of them are pretty snarky. But they enjoy the snark. And there’s almost like a little community of readers that follow the strip, and they comment on each other’s comments. And there is sort of a little community there.”
Would you talk about how communities form around comics?
It’s not really any different from the way communities form around other media and interests online. People don’t want to simply consume media; they want to think and talk about it with other people. And I think particularly with a strip like Mary Worth, the stories revolve around characters making mistakes — often pretty big ones — which can be like watching an accident in slow motion. A character like Wilbur Weston, who is constantly mucking things up in his personal life, leaves people itching to say, “I can’t believe he did that!” to someone else. You want to ask “Am I the only one who saw that? Am I the only one who is this frustrated by this character?” And of course, the answer is no, and like-minded people find each other, whether it’s on a website like Comics Kingdom, or on Bluesky (which has fast become the place where comic fans converge), or on sites like Something Awful or Comics Curmudgeon. Different communities tend to have different tones to them, some are snark-only while others are more sincere, and people sort of converge in the one that talks the way they want to talk.
One really fun thing has been watching new communities emerge around comics like Mark Trail, Popeye and Flash Gordon. Mark Trail always had a thriving snark community of people who made fun of the strip, but Jules Rivera’s tenure on the strip has brought in new readers whose love for the character is much more sincere — it’s so much fun to see people in their 20s and 30s dress up as Mark Trail for Halloween or change their social media avatars to Mark Trail. Popeye’s community had sort of languished without a lot of commentary until Randy came on the scene, and Flash Gordon had not had any new material in 20 years, so a whole lot of people came to it fresh. The older communities were more snarky but these newer communities are a lot more earnestly invested in these characters.
Since you also participate in event organizing, how do you go about translating those online communities into real-world conventions, etc.?
I’ve worked on the programming committee for Flame Con for a number of years but recently took a break while I was pregnant and then parenting a small baby. I’m hoping to get back to it this year. I also co-organized Drink and Draw Like a Lady, the comics networking event begun by Raina Telgemeier and Hope Larson, for a number of years.
A lot of cartoonists are very isolated in their day-to-day: people who are working full-time as artists or writers don’t leave the house much! I remember at the beginning of lockdown, calling a number of King Features cartoonists to check in and see how they were doing, and getting the response, “Well, I always worked from home in my pajamas so nothing’s really changed for me.” That means that the relationships cartoonists build online can be really important to them — online friends are their REAL friends. Cartoonists only really get to see each other a few times a year, so comics events can be really important: you’re finally getting to see the people you talk to every day face-to-face! One of the most amazing things about event organizing is getting to meet someone in person whom I’ve never met before but talk to online regularly. It’s a testament to how powerful online relationships can be.
In a post-lockdown world, where a lot of people are still very much impacted by COVID, there are often even fewer events where people can get together. I know many people who can no longer attend large events because they are immunocompromised, or, like me, have respiratory issues (I have 9/11 asthma), and events organizers are no longer taking precautions to protect people from contagious diseases. One thing that becomes really important to organizing events is accessibility. For Flame Con, we ran an entirely virtual event in 2021 and made sure that the virtual event was accessible for blind and low-vision attendees as well as D/deaf and hard of hearing attendees. I’m really proud of the work we did that year. Flame Con has continued to host a mask-mandatory event in the following years which enables people who simply cannot attend other large gatherings to participate in something and feel a little more included.
Most conventions are focused on comic books, manga and comics that are more heavily part of the zeitgeist than comic strips currently are, but I’ve had some great success talking about comic strips — especially comic strip history — at conventions. I’ve done multiple panels and talks on depictions of gender in early 20th century comics, and some great talks and panels about Popeye and Krazy Kat in particular. Like I’ve said elsewhere, people are really curious to know more about comic history, and they’re always so appreciative for the opportunity to learn.
Aesthetics/Rhythm
Have you seen any shifts in art styles, blocking/staging, and techniques, and in people’s basic visual syntax? What would you like to see more of? Less of?
I think we’re seeing a lot more cartoonists influenced by animation — the generation that grew up with Saturday morning cartoons and weekday after-school cartoons are in their 30s and 40s now and you can see those influences at work among professional cartoonists. Beware of Toddler by George Gant looks like it could be an animated cartoon; there’s a lot of frenetic motion and rubber-hose-style visual gags at play. We’re also seeing visual vocabulary from manga come into Western comic strips. I’d actually love to see more cartoonists lean on semiotics from manga: younger readers devour manga and because of that, their comics literacy is informed by the visual language of manga in a way previous generations in Europe and the Americas weren’t, and Western cartoonists can use that language to communicate a wider variety of emotions and sensations.
One thing that I’d like to see more cartoonists do is really build their artwork on the strength of their inked line-art. Now that digital coloring is everywhere, a lot of cartoonists draw their line art in ways that rely heavily on color to anchor the artwork on the page or differentiate fields of space in their comics. And one might say that when comics are going to be primarily read digitally, that this is a fine evolution. But there’s a lot to be said for building a strong image with black and white first even when one plans to add color — not just because a lot of newspapers still print their daily comics in black & white.
Have you noticed any changes in joke structure/rhythm/pacing/conceptualization?
Social media has honed a lot of cartoonists’ skills in drawing single-panel cartoons — there are a ton of incredibly talented single-panel gag cartoonists out there now, doing everything from erudite New Yorker-style gags to gross-out humor.
We’re also seeing more four-panel strips where three panels had become the standard due to the shrinking size of newspapers. I think this is in some ways a function of social media: like I mentioned above, four panels fit neatly into an easily shareable single image in ways that three panels do not. It also offers some different options for print clients to run a comic in either a panel or strip format depending on their space constraints. Jules Rivera and Dan Schkade both opted to do four-panel strips for Mark Trail and Flash Gordon, even though four panels is a lot more work, because it allows for faster-paced serial comics and an additional beat (or even two — Mark Trail was frequently two panels before Jules took over) each day.
One thing that seems to be on its way out — and that I won’t miss — is the fourth-panel denouement. A lot of the time, with four-panel strips, you’d see the punchline hit in the third strip, and the fourth panel would be a reaction to the punch line. It’s not a structure I’m fond of because it feels like wasted space to me, and a little bit like the cartoonist doesn’t trust the audience to react the right way and thus feels the need to show the audience how to react. I’d rather see more buildup to the joke, or a one-two punch of a second joke in the fourth panel. And I feel like things are trending in that way, which lets to better pacing of jokes and also just gives cartoonists a bit more room to be playful as they build to their joke, or to their end beat in the case of story strips.
How do you see comic strips, especially those solely online, evolving in the coming years, if at all?
If I’m right in that subscriptions are going to be the real driver of income for cartoonists in the next several years, I expect we’ll also see a growth in serialization. People are more likely to subscribe to something if there’s a hook to keep them curious about what happens next. I also expect to see communities forming around specific cartoonists and their unique voices, more so than around characters. You can already see this happening with cartoonists like Liniers; Hilary Price and Rina Piccolo of Rhymes With Orange; Dan Piraro and Wayne of Bizarro — they’ve been able to cultivate an audience that wants to hear directly from them as cartoonists and cares about the cartoonists as people. Cartoonists who are able to connect with their fans and spark that feeling of a relationship with their readers are the ones who are going to succeed the most in the digital arena — you’re not giving two dollars a month to read a comic, you’re giving two dollars a month to your cartoonist friend who lets you peer into their unique mind every day.
I think we’re going to see — we’re already seeing — a return to individual websites as homes for comics. Some cartoonists Patreon or Substack pages already serve as “home bases” for comics that didn’t have websites of their own and primarily were shared on social media. I’m seeing creative people actively working to become less dependent on social media platforms and returning to old school web tools like webrings and link exchanges, and readers returning to RSS, and I think we’ll continue to see that as social media engagement becomes less predictable.
Audience
Popularity tends to favor relatability (i.e., more readers respond, “I, too, clip my toenails in the bathroom,” to paraphrase John P.) over punch lines. Do you agree or disagree?
Relatability plays a huge role in what becomes — and remains — popular. At King Features, our most popular comic online was consistently Zits, and the comment we heard most often about Zits was that “it feels like the cartoonists (Jerry Scott and Jim Borgman) have a camera in MY house, pointed at MY teenager.” I think Zits is also a great strip with great jokes and phenomenal artwork, but people really, above everything else, want to be seen. It’s like I was saying about communities — people just want to know they’re not alone in the world, and a comic that can do that in a couple of panels is really reassuring. Being a parent of a toddler has really made me appreciate comics like Baby Blues, Daddy Daze, Beware of Toddler, and other comics about parenting young children so much more than I did before I had a kid. Because I used to think those comics were funny, but now I GET IT. I never understood poop jokes until I had a baby, now I think they’re a totally under-appreciated form of humor, because little kids get a lot of poop in a lot of places, and sometimes you just need to know that it’s not just your kid who’s pooping everywhere. I do think a comic has to be funny — a badly written comic isn’t going to find an audience even if it is relatable — but it’s that magic formula of humor and relatability that makes a comic a star.
You think there’s been a genuine shift, or has it been ever thus and algorithms just make it more apparent?
We can look back at big shifts in the comic pages from 1929 into the 1930s, from the rough-and-tumble Popeye becoming the breakout character in Thimble Theatre, to Blondie and Dagwood getting married and disowned and having to figure out how to live as an ordinary middle class couple, to poor-but-happy hillbilly Snuffy Smith taking over Barney Google’s comic strip. We were in the throes of the Great Depression and people didn’t want to read about get-rich-quick schemes or millionaires anymore. They wanted to read about working- and middle-class people living happily without a lot of money or fancy things to show for it. It’s why Beetle Bailey struck gold when he joined the Army and service members and their families could find a touchstone in the foibles of the troops at Camp Swampy, where Beetle hadn’t been relatable as a ne’er-do-well college kid. It’s why the best comics and characters evolve to meet the time their readers are living in, because people want to see themselves in the stories they read.
Now that there’s very little mass media, pop culture and political references are even more of a challenge for artists. What is your advice for navigating that?
Pop culture and politics each have their own specific challenges right now. Politics are incredibly difficult. People are really polarized politically and especially if you’re looking to get syndicated into newspapers, editors don’t want to have to deal with angry letters or face subscription losses due to a cartoonist’s political viewpoint. We just saw Ann Telnaes leave the Washington Post because the Post shied away from sharing her perspective, and a lot of newspapers have simply stopped carrying political cartoons. Many editors request substitutions when a comic strip that isn’t typically political runs something that could be seen as political commentary.
Political comics on the internet obviously have a better chance of finding their audience, but they also have a better chance of “escaping containment” and going viral with the wrong audience, which can paint a target on a cartoonist’s back. Online mobs can be disgusting and honestly quite scary, and you never know if someone who threatens you is just blowing hot air or might actually try to follow you home. I think it’s a very difficult environment for political cartoonists right now, but they’re doing important work and deserve all the support we can give them.
Pop culture is miles easier — we might be talking about a shattered pop culture landscape where there aren’t a lot of big touchstones or water cooler moments that everyone is talking about, but the great thing about publishing digitally is that you can focus on something very niche and find your audience. It’s no coincidence that some of the most popular first-generation webcomics were about things like gaming and other geek culture phenomena: these aren’t topics that appeal to everyone, but they have a dedicated and enthusiastic fanbase who were also online early. Now, you can find audiences for even the most niche subjects online, and people who are truly fans of something more niche will be so thrilled to see comics about the thing they love. King Features had decent success with comics like Gearhead Gertie by Mike Smith, which focuses on NASCAR fandom. The people who care about those subjects care very strongly about them, so even if they don’t appeal to everyone, there’s an audience that wants those comics. My advice for people who want to do comics about pop culture is to choose your subject and understand who the fans of that subject really are. You’re creating your comics for those fans, so really honing in on what those fans like, what tone is going appeal to them, is going to matter for the success of your comic.
Circling back to political comics, as with pop culture, choosing a specific subject to specialize in, rather than creating comics about general U.S. or world politics, can be a good choice. King Features represents Arctic Circle by Alex Hallatt, which focuses specifically on climate change, and Legalization Nation by Box Brown, which focuses on cannabis legalization. These cartoonists are able to be experts in their field and approach talking about their specific political issues from an educational perspective rather than punditry, which makes them extremely useful to their readers.
What effect, if any, did posting online and instant feedback have on comics?
There are definitely some cartoonists who are impacted by the instant feedback. Some people are very sensitive to comments on their work, and not everyone can look away from reader comments. A lot of comments can be quite mean-spirited, and I think in particular we see nasty comments targeting women, BIPOC cartoonists and LGBTQIA+ cartoonists that are not acceptable — during my tenure at King Features, we would remove comments that seemed bigoted in nature, but we received thousands of comments a day and certainly missed some of them.
In general, though, if a cartoonist was especially affected by reader comments, I would encourage them not to look at the comments. Some cartoonists were really swayed by reader comments — positive and negative ones both could influence the direction they took their comics in. They’d do more of what readers liked or wanted, and less of what readers didn’t like. And some cartoonists were very oppositional and would do more of the things that readers complained about.
My personal feeling is that reader comments really shouldn’t impact a cartoonist’s work unless the readers are pointing to something that is a legitimate criticism and not just a question of taste. For example, “Blondie should wear tighter sweaters” — a comment we got all the time — is a question of taste. “Sarge is abusive to Beetle and this kind of casual violence isn’t funny,” is a legitimate criticism that the late Mort Walker took very seriously. I remember when Mort started getting complaints about violence in Beetle Bailey in the early 2010s, and Mort’s response — paraphrasing here, because it’s something he said to me over the phone — was “Well, in the 1950s, Milton Caniff told me the comic needed more violence, so I added more violence, but I guess if it upsets people now, it’s time to take it out.” He was very deferential to his readers about it, and didn’t seem to take it personally at all. I think it’s very hard to get to a place where you can observe criticism of your work without taking it personally, and I don’t fault people who can’t arrive there. But I do think cartoonists should exercise self-preservation and stay away from comments sections in general.
What effect do you think Comics Curmudgeon, memes, etc. had/have on King Features and its creators?
I’ll start by saying that I, personally, am a huge fan of The Comics Curmudgeon. Josh Fruhlinger is a smart, talented, and funny person who deserves credit for building a vibrant community that is now decades old. And I really think he’s inspired a lot of people to read comics that they otherwise would have overlooked — particularly story strips. I’m paraphrasing here, because I don’t have the quote right in front of me, but Josh has talked about how much he loves the comics he reads and pokes fun at — you have to love the comics to spend that much time reading and thinking about them.
I think the humor of The Comics Curmudgeon comes from a similar place as MST3K — engaging with something that you love by teasing at it — and it’s a very younger-Gen-X, older-Millennial phenomenon that I grew up with and so it feels comfortable and familiar to me. It isn’t that way for everyone, and some cartoonists are very offended by it.
The larger community that comments on Comics Curmudgeon is made up of a lot of different people, and some of them are neither funny nor loving in their approach. There’s definitely some outright nasty mockery in the comments section over there from time to time, which can be really upsetting to read for someone who pours their heart into their work. Again, though, I think communities like the Comics Curmudgeon are for the readers, not the cartoonists, and it’s best for cartoonists to know their limit and step away from reading things that could upset them.
How has social media affected KFS either editorially, in terms or marketing, or both?
We’ve definitely considered whether comics will play well on social media when we are looking over submissions. We did look at whether a cartoonist has a big social media presence already, and it could give us a nudge to offer a contract to someone our editorial team might have been split on, if someone had already established a large following, but we never let the lack of a following discourage us from working with someone whose work we really loved.
The shareability of a comic can translate to a bigger audience for that comic on social media, which in turn can mean more clicks to a website, which directly impacts the number of ad views and can lead to more subscriptions, so we encourage format decisions that make a comic more shareable, for sure — like the four-panel layout I mentioned earlier.
Over the years, our various social media managers have found success with different comics on social media. It’s not always the most popular comics in print or even in digital syndication that make a splash on social media. Relatability is definitely a factor, but the average age of social media users is younger than that of the typical comic strip reader, so what feels relatable to them might not be the same things that are relatable to that older longtime readership.
One thing that was incredibly fun to do was run Popeye’s social media accounts. We typically had a social media manager to do this, but occasionally over the years, I’ve gotten to take them over, and I built Popeye’s YouTube channel from the ground up. I love getting to write from Popeye’s POV and especially having the opportunity to share comic strips from E.C. Segar, giving folks a glimpse into Popeye’s early days. A recurring theme in Segar’s strips was Popeye calling himself “amphibious,” and explaining that this meant he wore men’s and women’s clothing (which he did, frequently), or that he was both a mother and father to Swee’Pea. Popeye expressed a sort of joyful gender fluidity that wasn’t just a “man in a dress” punch line. He’d put on a dress and beat up chauvinist men just to teach them that women were not the “weaker sex,” or play “mother” to an orphan. I posted one of those panels for International Nonbinary People’s Day, and the internet went absolutely wild, with very little negative response — people were so excited to see that side of Popeye, and it generated a number of articles on pop culture blogs. I’ve loved getting to show people who might only know Popeye from the cartoons what Popeye is truly all about.
In the past couple of years, changes to algorithms and demographic makeup of social media sites has really made social media a tough nut to crack. Twitter used to be the biggest home for comics creators and readers, and most of that community has left Twitter and been scattered to the winds — a lot of it is finding a home on Bluesky, however, but Bluesky is still relatively nascent. As I mentioned earlier, a lot of cartoonists are taking this opportunity to get re-established with their own individual websites, which is something I’ve helped several cartoonists with and hope to continue doing. So I think social media’s influence on comics is waning at the moment.
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