Newspapers Make No Money On The Comics Page. Why Do They Do It? by Rick London.

Ever wonder why newspapers devote an entire non-revenue producing page, every day to a "silly group of pictures" called "cartoons"?

Comics do bring newspapers money. They simply do so in a different way than news pages.

Newspaper comics create loyalty, and usually while the reader is very young and reads nothing but the comics. Newspaper publishers are not ignorant, and they know loyalty sells papers and circulation sells advertising.

Cartoons in many ways are news. They are what could be called extreme editing. They often reflect current news events and do so in a very ingenius way, with a graphic and a few words.

A reader who started reading a paper years ago, may not even be consciously aware that the quality of the paper has gone down (or up), but he/she does know that a cartoon will be there that will make them laugh.

The publisher and editor also knows that even after loyalty has been created, the average reader wants some comic relief as most news is bad news. If the reading gets too rough, he/she can always flip a few pages to the comics and smile.

Most newspaper editors now know that their market demographic is usually very mixed. Whereas once only family-friendly comics were found in most papers, now one will find dark humor, many in the spirit of Gary Larson's Far Side.

Cartoons also can be very influential. Charles "Sparky" Schulz knew that when creating "Peanuts".

Charlie Brown was created by Schulz to show us our "inner loser". We all know, no matter how famous or successful we become, that inner-loser remains. Charlie Brown helped us laugh at ourselves by expressing it for us.

Gary Larson drew what he felt we were thinking. It was offbeat, and it had a cynical and distorted look at the world. But he knew in his mind we would not find it so distorted at all. In fact, the world really was distorted and he simply knew how to point it out to us with The Far Side.

It is not well-known, but most cartoonists do not make the bulk of their money from newspaper publishing. It is from licensed products such as greeting cards, books, t-shirts, calendars and the like.

Cartoons exist because the public wants them to exist. If the public didn't want them, the editor would cut the page in a minute. It is a costly page and no advertising is sold on it. It is only there to build loyalty as I mentioned. To the editor, the fact that it makes us smile is simply icing on the cake; as long as we keep buying the paper.

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