UPDATE: Keenspot put out a press release with full information.
Keenspot featured a newsbox today that apparently pictures the new comics page of the Turlock Journal, the local paper for Turlock, California. A September 29th story in the Journal explains how a partnership with Keenspot led to the return of comics to this newspaper:
On Saturday, the Journal launched its new television guide, called Prime Time TV, and announced it was partnering with Web comics publisher Keenspot.com to bring comics back to each edition of the paper.
Among the strips running in the newspaper are Count Your Sheep, Lost and Found, Rumblestrip and You Damn Kid (retitled as You Darn Kid). Although a complete list is not available at Keenspot yet, we have blown up the Keenspot newsbox a bit to make an educated guess at the rest of the comic included.
Ask, and ye shall receive, X! 🙂 Or probably more accurately seek and ye shall find.
Like all comic strips, Keenspot.com’s offerings on Saturday didn’t appeal to every reader, but the page had a positive response overall. One woman was upset because she “didn’t recognize any of the strips.”
“I was happy to read on the front page of Saturday’s paper that comics would be included, but when I got to the Keenspot page, I wasn’t so keen,” she said. “They’re certainly not the comics the Journal has published in the past.”
She then went on to lament the new choice of host for the Tonight Show and pleaded the network to persuade Johnny Carson not to retire just yet.
Wow, a watered down version of You Damn Kid sounds like making Kool-Aid with sweet and low. I just can’t imagine it being as good if it were censored.
Otherwise, I guess it’s cool. I’m going to hold off on celebrating about it until we see if it’s going to last, let alone spread to other papers.
As far as I know, “You Darn Kid” and “You Famn kid” are the same cartoon, except for the name change. The selected strips come from the same archives as Owen Dunne has online, but he skips over some of the more “offensive” material — such as topless nuns and such.
In a completely unrelated note, the “Melonpool” strips that I’ve been running have featured topless nuns in almost every comic.
Steve
Well, hot famn! 😀
I wonder if Keen considers inviting non-keenspot comics to join its newspaper syndication scheme? I’m thinking of artists such as Shaenon Garrity and Chris Baldwin, heck maybe even Scott Kurz if he would go along with it seeing as he already is contemplating to allow syndication for free. It seemed to me that they had to stretch themselves to the limit to fill one page with strips, even creating several new ones in the process.
There’s a full press release out now, with links to full-size sample pages.
I’ve been waiting for something like this to happen for awhile. I was excited when Kurtz made the news about offering his strip for free to papers, and now this is taking it one step further with a good group of strips doing it together.
AWESOME. Much props to the Keenfolk.
FOCUS! FOCUS!
Now we just need to get Modern Tales in the comic shops and we’ll be in business.
Saga of the Ram