Short Day, End of Eras

Today is the shortest day of 2009. It's also the day news broke that the Crosbys killed Keen. Good. They had been killing it for years.

I've been on-again off-again cartoonist wannabe for 9 years, and a voracious reader, and the one thing I learned is, like everything else, cartooning has politics. Shit storms go all the back to the Yellow Kid and they got more press when things hopped online, simply because the buck no longer stopped behind syndicate memos and cartoonist associations. They became very public, and often personal.

Keenspace, and later Keenspot was instrumental in the same way all hosting sites are - they are the gold pans that hold flakes of precious metal. They are the Sunday comics section of internet, where good and the bad are presented along ads for what have you, and god bless capitalism. It was the portal where brave new pioneers of webcomics could cut their teeth, and then get the freaking hell out.

Why out? Because Keen, from what I gather from survivor accounts, is a little like being on a runaway truck that's about to collide with a series of tubes. It's not a business run, it's flung like crap to a wall, seeing what sticks. And now, it's cutting and running on the people who made it great in the first place - its cartoonists. That is, what cartoonists they haven't alienated to the point of breaking off and starting up on their own.

I don't claim to be an 'insider'. I love webcomics, just like I loved the comic strips I read as a grew up. I don't claim to be a cartoonist, either, because there are people who are, and have worked long and hard to get there. Some of those people used Keenspot for hosting, and they are being cut loose, so the people who ran things into the ground can work on their personal projects.

Professionalism in any industry needs to be kept at some kind of level, particularly when so many others depend on you for so much. Instead, it's being used as a personal playground, and when the game started getting too rough, you're taking your ball and your best friends, and going home. Or in this case, kicking everyone ELSE off the playground. And then acting surprised at the resulting fallout. I won't even get into the name-calling aspect, or how you treated some really nice people rather poorly for poorer reasons.

This is a shitty thing you're doing, Keen. Not for shooting the shaggy dog, but for leaving its corpse for other people to clean up.