One of the silent victims of the newspaper business dying was the comic strip. I used to love the biting satire of Doonesbury AND the hilarious, and stinging, social commentary of Bloom County.
But for every great comic, there were horrible comics like Nancy, Andy Capp, and Annie, who outlived their glory years by about 50 to 80 years.
Editor's Note: Young Fred remembers doing a cut-rate school production of Annie in the 1970's.
So I did a little research and apparently Annie's popularity peaked back in the 1930's when the comic was adapted into 2 separate Annie movies. Then the run on Broadway. Then the Annie re-boots every decade or so. And a bunch of other Annie Crap I don't want to talk about.
Many tried to glom onto the Annie Legacy....
....but the legacy of the Annie Comic Strip was politics and being unfunny.
I went back and re-read many of those 30's comics - Ouch! Maybe people had a different interpretation of what was funny a hundred years ago. Annie is not, and was not, timeless. Frank Young at the Comics Journal would argue my basic premise: Annie wasn't meant to be funny.
Annie was basically Americana wrapped in noir form.
Which brings us to today. The Nib was a comic website that was sadly unfunny. It was simply a collective of left-wing talking points in illustrated form. For the last year, the Nib had been so painfully unfunny, I didn't even know who their audience was. Ultra-Liberal Automatons? Radical LGBTQQIP2SA+'er's?
At first i wanted to yell: Go Woke, Go Broke.
But before I could create the great Beacon of Speech Rebuttal, The Nib issued this statement:
"I’m afraid I have some bad news. After ten years of publishing, The Nib is going to close down this summer. The new issue of our magazine, the Future issue, will be our last. We will continue to publish online every weekday through August and then shut down.
To all those who have supported us and published with us, thank you. To the readers whom I know this disappoints, I’m sorry, but it couldn’t be avoided."
Disappointed? Hardly, The Nib just sucked. Other than the Big Fat Whale guy, The Nib was a consistently bad read.
Yeah, that's it.
Sorry to waste your time. RIP: The Nib 2013-2023.
Making Fred consistently angry since the start of the pandemic.
Editor's Note II: Man, I need to focus.