Comedy and Tragedy
Despite all the differences that may seem to separate old fashioned newspapers from “modern” news portals, there are some integral aspects that they both share and that, although their importance and popularity may have changed over the years, pretty much stayed the same while most other aspects of media changed: The cartoons.
From classic 1940’s Disney comic strips over the iconic Garfield, Peanuts and Calvin And Hobbes, there are many examples for comics widley recognized nowadays as masterpieces that started as weekly comic strips in newspapers, and it is a world wide phenomenon.
Germany is no exception. Newspapers like the taz have their own iconic comics ( in this case Touché by Thomas Körner), but also online news portals like gmx try to live up to that tradition by posting strips by the (in germany) famous, and as I think hilarious, artist Martin Perscheid
http://www.gmx.net/magazine/unterhaltung/comic/perscheid-comics-30193754
What makes this little part of printed news media ( television has it’s own version of this, greetings to the Mainzelmännchen!) so integral that it overcame years of rapid change and even made the big jump to electronic media? Sure, one can imagine that a hundret years ago, without the nonstop connection to every kind of entertainment one can imagine like we are used to nowadays, something like a funny weekly comic strip was anticipated and popular.
But why is this still a thing today?
It’s a complex topic, and much more sophisticated people that got paid for it worte very good books about it, but I will try to focus on two points I think are important:
The first aspect, and for the news media of course the most important, is their high degree of recognition and through this, customer loyalty. People quickly decide wether they like a comic strip or not and if they do, it’s likely they will remember it and the newspaper/the homepage that published it. The best thing that can happen to a news outlet is if one of their comic strips gathers a cult following, bringing people to identify with the paper/the homepage in a fairly inexpensive way
secondly, it’s a psychological issue.
In a (media-)world dominated by terrible incidents, catastrophies and scandals, those comic strips function as what could be called a comic relief. They distract us from the cruelty around us, even if it’s just for a few seconds. And in contrast to crappy clickbait and celebrity gossip trash, they do itin a very positive and pleasant way.
