Cartoon publishing

Newspaper Cartoonists Engage Audiences (Including Haters) Online

What it is about?

Nowadays, entertainment is increasingly popular in our daily life and cartoon comics are one of the popular divisions of entertainments for people to kill their time. Younger generations as young as pre-school are equipped with mobile phones that allow them to communicate with friends, online, watch movies as well as read online comics. Consequently, readers were fed up with the daily newspaper cartoon ever since they do not have the chance to comment on it. For that reason, comic blogs and online comics have been formed so that readers do have the chance to make their voices and cartoonists are also able to make respond.

One of the best known cartoonists - Josh Fruhlinger (Source: Pbs.org 2009)

Besides, the web is a useful medium for generating reader interest due to vary in reader’s preferences. In today world, there are many popular comic blogs such as Silent Penultimate Panel Watch, Joe Mathlete Explains Today’s Marmaduke and Comics Curmudgeon. Cartoonists will update the blogs everyday without fail to give readers a lot of time to increase their favourites with those comics that published. Readers are free to access to those comics website through the web or mobile devices.

A very special poignant, heartwarming silent penultimate panel (Source: Penultimate-panel.blogspot.com 2010)

On the other hand, online cartoon shows allow audiences access easily compared to television viewing. Parents do not allow children to watch television late night shows and it will diminishes the chances for children to come across the shows. The reason is because late night shows will impact on children’s health and academic achievement (Steadyhealth.com 2007). However, children can view an online cartoon shows at anytime they wish. Furthermore, Walsh (2007) stated the combination of audio and visual can increase the effectiveness of the cartoon shows. Below is an example of most popular comic with the combination of audio and visual to engage audience online:

Cartoon show about Classic Garfield (Source: Youtube 2007)

Nevertheless, cartoonist do have the responsibility to ensure the cartoon they produced do not bring harm to children. Innocent children are not able to differentiate what is good and bad. They are not able to make decision and they may easily get carried away from the harmful cartoon shows. Therefore, cartoonist needs to omit those harmful scenes when the cartoon shows are broadcasting in television.

In my opinion, audiences prefer online cartoons rather than cartoon publish in newspaper which will satisfy audience expectations. With a proper way to get the meaning of cartoon effectively, children will not easily influenced by harmful contents from the cartoons blogs and online shows that have been produced by irresponsible cartoonists.

Reference List

Ronsen, MM 2009, Newspaper Cartoonists Engage Audiences (Including Haters) Online, viewed 11 June 2010, http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2009/03/newspaper-cartoonists-engage-audiences-including-haters-online089.html

Steadyhealth.com 2007, Television impact on children’s knowledge and behaviour, 13 August 2007, viewed 11 June 2010, http://www.steadyhealth.com/articles/Television_impact_on_children_s_knowledge_and_behavior_a680.html

Walsh, M 2006, Textual shift: Examining the reading process with print, visual and multimodal texts', Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, vol. 29, no. 1, pp. 24-37.