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So I Guess Comics Kingdom Sucks Now...


So, I guess Comics Kingdom sucks now. The website run by King Features Syndicate hosting a bunch of their licensed comic strips from classics like Beetle Bailey, Blondie, and Dennis the Menace to great new strips like Retail, The Pajama Diaries, and Edison Lee (as well as Sherman’s Lagoon, Zits, On the Fastrack, etc.) underwent a major relaunch early last week that is in just about every way a massive downgrade. The problems are numerous. The layout is distracting and cheap, far more space is allocated for ads so the strips themselves are displayed too small, the banner from which you could formerly browse for other strips is gone (meaning you have to go to the homepage to find other comics you like or discover new ones), the comments section is a joke –not refreshing itself daily so that every comment made on an individual strip remains attached to ALL strips, there’s no more blog or special features on individual comics pages which effectively barricades the cartoonist from their fans, and the tags, which were useful especially in navigating serialized storylines, are gone. But I guess that last one doesn’t matter because most egregiously, the archive for every strip is locked behind a paywall.
Yes, strips older than a week are now exclusive only if you pay for a subscription to Comics Kingdom and it’s frustrating for those who can’t always keep up with their daily favourites. Last September in my Comic Strip Month I talked about how binge culture has affected the consumption of comic strips, how fans can read months or years of their favourite comics and get a better sense of the world and a firmer attachment to the characters, stories, and humour. I guess it was a luxury that’s now no longer possible for King Features strips. Decades worth of cartoons are now inaccessible and with them, the chances of drawing in new readers is much more slim -how engaged in a comic can one get if they can only read seven strips? Is that enough to get an idea of a strip’s identity? It’s not clear, by the way, how much a subscription costs without signing up for the standard free trial -another of this site’s fatal design flaws.
This has gotten a lot of people frustrated. If you go to any of the ridiculous comments sections on this new site, they’re inundated with complaints, and the site’s Twitter account claims it will respond to them. And while I share in that anger I do sympathize to a degree and understand at least why they prohibited the archives, tacked on ads, and removed the blogs, features, and individual comic sites. For a long time the comic strip industry has been struggling to find a way to survive and make a profit in a digital landscape. And they haven’t quite cracked the code, with many strips not aligned with syndicates having to rely on Patreon to support themselves as pure webcomics. More people read comic strips online now as the newspaper industry is in decline, and so I get the need to find a way to make money when readers don’t have to pay for the content like they presumably used to. But this isn’t the way; gatekeeping the comics everyone loves only discourages investment, restricting dialogue between the cartoonist and their fans it need not be said is a bad move, and it’s such a sharp and sudden change on Comics Kingdoms’ part that it’s certain to alienate way more people than bring in. The website needs to be of better quality and needs to offer more if it wants to attract new comics fans. This is liable just to drive more people away, and not just readers, but possibly cartoonists. Creators like Jeff Corriveau and Jonathan Mahood (of Deflocked and Bleeker the Rechargeable Dog respectively) had already jumped ship to GoComics, a site with its own issues, but a far better, more reliable, and more comprehensive home for numerous strips.
So why does this matter? Because comic strips have never been better. There’s so much more variety, so many more voices, and so many more unique styles in the industry today than there were fifty years ago-even if some strips from fifty years ago are still around and refuse to die, but that’s another rant. And these strips deserve better. They deserve more than homogeneous web pages, they deserve to be available in full, and they deserve to be read in a format that caters more to the individual strips than the bottom line. As a comic strip fan and specifically as someone kind of reliant on archives to experience strips, my hope for now is that my favourite cartoonists at King Features like Norm Feuti, Terri Libenson, Dan Pirraro, or Jerry Scott and Jim Borgman consider GoComics or opening their own sites or some other option that can allow their cartoons to be absorbed universally or at least at some fairer price. It’s a shame book collections are mostly out of fashion now, because for many, digital access is all we have for the comic strips we love; and a move like this by Comics Kingdom is a stark reminder of how impermanent digital content is.
It’s a good thing I did Comic Strip Month when I did.

Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Jordan_D_Bosch
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Comments

  1. Leta29 June 2023 at 06:31

    You forgot that it is still nothing more than a platform to post propaganda. You can report the False news as false as many times as you want, nothing will happen. You can report harassment or a double standard of allowing propaganda site names allowed while actual news is immediately removed when mentioned, but nothing will happen. You can complain, but all you will get is a bot response repeating the rules to you.

    It is obviously a thinly-veiled propaganda site pretending it is not and I feel sorry for most cartoonists, as most just want you to laugh at animals, not spread hate speech.

    ReplyDelete

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