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It means that Newspaper comics tend to feel very outdated and that their jokes/storytelling haven't evolved, so Web Comics are more popular among younger readers
Absolute destiny... apeachalypse?
The "tired jokes and premises" line sounds a bit bashy, though.
I do some cleanup and then I enjoy shows you probably think are cringe.
Perhaps written by someone with a dim view of newspaper comics.
By "sitcom lies" it might be referring to the idealized version of reality old sitcoms took place in compared to modern day. They're saying newspaper comics are stuck in stasis of an older, less realistic era.
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It reads to me like a sentence fragment. The post was going for “The chief reason for X lies with Y” but accidentally left out the “with Y” part.
I think the decline in popularity of newspaper cartoons among young people has more to do with the decline in readership of newspapers overall, more than their content.
^^I'm inclined to agree.
^As am I. The current text doesn't make sense to me.
Edited by GastonRabbit You can't always get what you want.
Yeah and here I was thinking it had something to do with politics or something.
Honestly, it's not only because of newspaper readership declining. I mean, Calvin and Hobbes still gets lots of new fans, as far as I can tell. It's because the old people reading the strips are more focused on seeing their old favorites every day than on getting good jokes. Many newspaper comics fans are extremely resistant towards change in the lineup. (Not to mention that a 60-year-old will have a different sense of humor than a teenager.)
Obviously you're not gonna get new readers if most strips get chosen to continue specifically because they've been around for decades, and had time to use up all their standard jokes a zillion times.
I know I sound like I'm whining, but go read the latest couple of weeks' Crock and Shoe strips, and then ask me if they'd have a chance of getting syndicated if they were newly created and those latest couple of weeks' strips were the ones the cartoonists submitted as samples to the syndicates.
Edited by MichaelKatsuro
It's probably a combination. Younger people are more likely to get their news online than from a physical paper, so newspaper readership skews older, and newspaper comics are geared toward older readers as a result. The reason comics like Calvin and Hobbes are still popular is because they were written when newspaper comics had to have a wider appeal. Nowadays there's little reason to make a comic aimed at younger readers because most younger readers don't read newspapers.
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In the Newspaper Comics article on TV Tropes it says “One of the chief reasons comics haven't adapted to the more cynical comedy tastes of the 21st century (or non-English-speaking countries), being seemingly stuck with the tired jokes and premises associated with 50s/60s-era sitcoms lies” and it uses that as the reason why people turned to Webcomics more. I’m curious on what that means specifically.