Very interesting article about the decision of the Duluth News Tribune to cancel Blondie (after 76 years!).
Beyond the fact that I absolutely hate the way syndicates keep old cartoon strips alive long after their creator has died (for multiple reasons), I found it interesting to see what the actual money is that different cartoons cost the paper. 12 bucks for Beetle Bailey. 32 bucks for Hi and Lois. That's for the Sunday strip. Which, for Beetle Bailey, comes out to 600 bucks a year. Assuming the cartoonist gets half, that means 300 dollars a year. So for the cartoonist's take to get to $25K means on the order of 100 papers. Which all supports the perception that a newspaper cartoonist needs to have a circulation of at least a few hundred papers to actually make an independent living at it. I'd always had the suspicion that the toons cost the papers 10 to 20 bucks but it's nice to finally have independent confirmation.
