Friends:

This is what the Detroit Metro Times editor is telling readers regarding his decision to drop my strip:

We're always glad when people feel strongly enough about the content of Metro Times to take the time to e-mail us. We have received many passionate letters about our decision to replace Red Meat and This Modern World with The Perry Bible Fellowship and The Boiling Point.

This was a decision we did not make lightly. We wouldn't have run the work of Tom Tomorrow for more than 10 years and the work of Max Cannon for more than five years if we didn't like the strips. But we felt that Tom Tomorrow, who has been doing his strip for more than 20 years, has become so widely known and read that we began to question whether our mission was to provide a platform for somebody who is syndicated in scores of papers, has published several volumes of his cartoons, and is accessible on his own Web site. Similarly, Max Cannon has gained a national prominence and has published a few books of his collected work.

The question wasn't whether the strips were any good -- clearly we have carried them so long because of their quality. What prompted the move was a larger debate on the function of alternative newsweeklies. Just as Tom Tomorrow and Max Cannon could never have reached audiences without the help of publications like Metro Times, we feel that we have a duty to present newer, younger cartoonists exploring new styles in the medium.

It was with this in mind that we sought out fresh voices with a quality beyond their meager syndication.

Mikhaela Reid is a 25-year-old political cartoonist for the Boston Phoenix and Bay Windows. Her work has appeared in a handful of national magazines. Editorial cartoonist Ted Rall says that, "Mikhaela B. Reid is, at the start of a promising career, already one of America's sharpest political cartoonists."

Nicholas Gurewitch is a painter, actor, filmmaker and cartoonist living in New York state. Since winning the Baltimore City Paper's comic contest in 2003, his unusual strip has started appearing in several papers, including The New York Press. Last month, the strip won a jury prize at the Small Press Expo in Bethesda, MD for "Best Online Comic."

Thank you for your thoughts on this matter, and we hope you can appreciate the factors that went into our decision.

Needless to say, if you absolutely need your weekly fix of the wit of Tom Tomorrow and Max Cannon, their work is available electronically at thismodernworld.com and redmeat.com.

Sincerely,

The Editorial Staff of Metro Times

It will be no surprise that I find several flaws in the logic here. (And none of this is meant as a knock on the newer cartoonists. Hell, longtime readers of my blog know that I was one of Mikhaela's earliest advocates.)

First, it's a false choice. If a paper wants to try out new cartoons, they should by all means do so. It doesn't mean they have to dump the established ones that people enjoy. There is no rule that says that an altweekly can only publish two cartoons. If I were an old guy who'd been drawing the same bickering married couple for fifty years, I could maybe see the point. Out with the old, in with the new, yadda yadda. But if you'll allow me an uncharacteristic moment of immodesty, I'm doing some of the best goddamn work I've ever done these days. I'm at the top of my game, and I don't appreciate being benched at halftime. I'm widely syndicated because I do good work--and being dropped for that very reason is maddening.

(I'm also not sure why it's a sin for a cartoonist to be syndicated and have published a few books, but not a sex columnist--but as far as I can tell, Dan Savage's column still seems to be running in the Metro Times.)

(And we should probably kept things in perspective here. To be a widely syndicated alternative cartoonist is kind of like being the world's most successful badminton player, or one of the country's top haiku poets. It's all relative. A widely syndicated cartoonist like Garry Trudeau runs in maybe 1,500 papers. I run in less than 150.)

What you have to understand is that editors of these alternative papers see each others' papers each week, and they get together at conventions a couple times a year and critique each other and so on. Sometimes they start to think of the hundred or so other alt weekly editors as their audience-- they lose sight of the fact that their real audience is the local reader who never sees any of those other papers. If you live in Detroit and you pick up the paper because you like reading my work there, the fact is, you don't really give a rat's ass if I also run in other papers. And while it's true that you can always find my work online, a lot of people just aren't going to bother.

The other thing that's disturbing about this argument is that it essentially says, we're not going to pay you enough to make a living (I'm not aware of many altweeklies with a full time staff cartoonist), but if you figure out a way to make a living, then we'll eventually cut you off at the knees. Which is an obvious Catch-22 for the artist. And if enough editors start pulling this "you can always read it online" crap, you can damn sure bet that a lot of cartoonists are going to have to start rethinking their online strategies. Because the truth is, nobody's making a living from the online exposure. I make my living because a lot of papers like the Metro Times pay me a few bucks each. It's what allows me the luxury of being a cartoonist. If having the cartoons accessible online encourages the editors who provide 90% of my income to drop the strip, that's obviously self-defeating.

One advantage I do get from the online exposure is the ability to get messages like this out to you. So once again: if you live in the Detroit area, please keep the pressure on. Be reasonable, be polite, but be insistent. And tell your friends to do the same. Please feel free to repost this message on the local Craigslist or other message boards. Start a letter writing campaign, if you can. Bonus points, and some signed prints or something, to anyone who organizes a protest outside the paper's offices. The editor is obviously a reasonable person who has made what he thinks is a reasonable decision--it's up to you all to convince him he's wrong. There's absolutely no reason they can't run the new cartoons and keep mine in there as well.

Thanks.

--Tom T.