Ink Pen by Phil Dunlap for April 29, 2010

Ham Hock’s intelligence seems to be adversely affected by that pineapple and brown sugar glaze, but it does make him more tasteful.

SHEIK PETA just put your name on a list and it isn’t the good one.

I didn’t know that there was a bad list from People Eating Tasty Animals. grin

I have to check these earlier. All the good lines are taken by the time I get to them.

Opens at 1 AM. I’m tempted to set the alarm myself, rac. Seems everyone else is just getting home from the bar?

Ever notice the cartoonists are all bitter cause their money sources are drying up? If we’d all buy the paper and read these there, then they could make online jokes.

freeholder1: my local paper used to publish Ink Pen. Then it dropped this strip (along with many others I followed; there were times I thought my liking a strip pretty much guaranteed it would be replaced). Then I found I could read the strips I wanted to read, for free, online. Then I realized the comics were the only part of the paper that I actually liked… and the rest is history…

And hard to believe just four years when I started reading this strip (when it was in the AJC), Hamhock didn’t even know what the internet was!

Edgy strips are a tough sell, because readers either love ‘em or hate ‘em. Comics editors are in a bind because, since they’re already bleeding readers, the risk of losing older readers outweighs the possibility of gaining younger ones. I’ll hate to see newspaper comics go, but online there are no limits for space; the ongoing production of strips I’m uninterested in doesn’t interfere with my following stuff more suited to my tastes…

I will admit I edited a small publication a few years ago. Related to that: “We sell advertising, not stories.” Every inch you use for a comic or news is one that could go for ads.

Fritz is right about wanting to keep one level and not insult another. Doonesbury ends up on editorial pages along with, get this, BC.

And the lousy comics you see in some of the publications are there also cause they charge less for syndication than Garfield or other more popular ones. Some are actually pricing themselves off the market.

BUT like many of you readers wrote into our local newspaper and got some of their favs, Arlo, Zits, Boondocks back. So you can get them back if you protest loud enough.

Ah, for the days when, if one paper wrestled a popular strip from its crosstown competitor, they’d run a headline saying ”WE’VE GOT ‘OSCAR OSTRICH’!!!” and 10,000 readers would switch allegience overnight…