Kevin Allman continues his bloggings on Kevinallman.typepad.com, this time with musings on the state of cartoons in the alt industry:

“At the Tugboat Brewing Company party on Saturday night, I ran into Shannon Wheeler, creator of the strip “How to Be Happy” (formerly “Too Much Coffee Man”), along with his hilarious friend Sandra “Smartest Woman in Portland” Cho. We tucked in for a couple of beers and started talking about the state of the media and Portland in general. Soon we were joined by his friend Matt Bors, whose strip “Idiot Box” (above) is running in a few alt-weeklies around the country (none in Portland). Both Matt and Shannon had come to the conference hoping to hook up (not that way) with some editors who might give them work.

What’s up with that? Hyper-local coverage is the only way any papers — the big dailies or the alt-weeklies — are going to survive. Local stories, local writers, local concerns. So why not local cartoons? As Matt wrote to me the next day:

Not to bitch (but yeah, to bitch) not many alt-weekly papers seem to support cartoons, especially local ones, enough. There is basically a whole genre of cartooning people dub “alt-weekly cartoonists” that has risen from the industry, but only people like Tom Tomorrow that run 150+ papers can make a living at it.

It goes for the web too. Some run comics, but huge sites like the Huffington Post have blog entries by unqualified celebrities, but not a daily political cartoon or anything. I don’t get it. I know I’m biased, but people like cartoons and it seem like a relatively cheap way to keep a lot of people coming back to a site or altweekly.”