Thank you all for the time you spent going through the submissions for Unfit. Your comments are hugely helpful.
The next step will be for Mike Belkin to narrow down the submissions to the top ten (maybe fewer) and ask for comments again. This isn’t an election per se, except to the extent that I noted a lot of obvious voting irregularities. In the end, it’s Mike’s decision.
This process will take a few days. While we wait, I’ll share with you a few relevant tidbits you wouldn’t otherwise know about comics.
In my vast experience (some people call it half vast, or at least it sounds that way) I have determined that comic readers fall into the following groups.
Gag Lovers: This group looks for classic cleverness in their comics. They don’t care that much about art, as long as it isn’t distracting. Nor do they care about the comic’s relevance to their life. “Funny is funny” would be their motto. They’re about 20% of the population at most. If you laughed at my “half vast” pun, you might be one of them.
Visual People: This group cares so much about the look of a comic that the writing becomes secondary. The people in this group would never admit that their sense of humor is influenced by the art, but their lists of favorite comics will always be the ones that are the most artistically accomplished. They’re about 20% of the population too.
Relevance People: This group cares the least about the art and cleverness of a comic. They look for comics that are relevant to their own lives. They want to know they’re not alone in their peeves and viewpoints. This group is the largest, probably 60% of the population.
When Dilbert first launched, I was aiming for the gag lovers, and they responded. But there weren’t enough of them to make the comic a success. Dilbert was published in fewer than 100 papers and it stalled. But I noticed – thanks to readers sending me e-mail – that the Dilbert strips people liked the most were the relatively few that showed Dilbert at work. So I took the hint and moved the focus of the strip to the office. That’s when I hit the mother lode – the Relevance People. Dilbert shot to over 1,000 newspapers in just a few years. Now it’s in over 2,000.
Since the time Dilbert was launched in 1989, the comic market has become far more impenetrable. New comics have to compete like never before for dwindling newspaper space. That’s why artwork matters now more than it did in the days of crappy artwork such as Dilbert, Doonesbury and Cathy. In my opinion, none of those strips would succeed if they launched today.
There was a popular saying when IBM ruled the computing world. “You can’t get fired for buying IBM.” Even if your project went bad, your boss wouldn’t blame you for choosing IBM products because it was considered virtually risk free.
In today’s tough comic market, the last thing a newspaper editor wants to do is take a chance on a crudely drawn comic, even if that crude artwork helps the humor. If the new comic doesn’t succeed – and most new comics don’t – it’s hard to explain to your boss why you didn’t pick a comic with good artwork. So that’s the context of this exercise to upgrade the “artiness” of Unfit.
Plus it’s a lot of fun to see if we can collectively make it work.