Syndication Speed

Editorial cartoonists, by the definition of their job, use their artistic talents to comment on current topics. Not surprisingly, many of the recent editorial comics lately have been touching on the jokes surrounding Kamala Harris' presidential campaign and/or Donald Trump's responses to it. Several I've seen speak more specifically to the blatantly fake crowd numbers he's been touting the past couple weeks and also provably false claims that Harris used AI to enhance the appearance of her crowd sizes. I even saw one this morning specifically with Trump complaining about the protest sizes at the Democratic National Convention that began yesterday. With electronic communications, it's incredibly fast and efficient to get a piece of art from an artist's drawing table to a wide number of people.

Of course, that's true of webcomics too. That was one of the originally one of the more novel things about webcomics; that they could and did so much faster than traditional syndicates. Syndicates were used to dealing with newspapers, who ran on a much slower (relatively speaking) schedule than the real-time updates of the web. But, to their credit, they seem to have largely caught up and there's very little delay caused by the middleman beauracracy that webcomickers don't have to deal with when publishing their work.

But here's what I don't get...

Why do newspaper strip cartoonists still work on a 4-6 week schedule?

With Garry Trudeau in semi-retirement from Doonesbury, Lalo Alcaraz is currently (I think) the most topically current comic strip artist under syndication. Today's strip, for example, touches on Colin Kapernick's announcement about starting a company to make grpahic novels using AI. But that was a news story from a few weeks ago. Trudeau also had a lead time of about two weeks, but over the decades, he had become very astute at getting extremely early reads on news items and predicting where the stories would go in a week or two, so he often seemed to be more current than he was actually working.

But in a world where events unfold in front of our eyes via multiple sources in real time -- where nearly everyone is armed with a camera and an internet connection -- and where it's not only possible but relatively common to post both written and aritstic reactions in just as real time, why can't comic strip cartoonists work closer to their publication date? Why do they still need to adhere to a syndication schedule that's even outdated within the syndicates themselves?

I could see if there was a greater danger of offending the wrong group and the syndicates wanted to exercise some editorial control, but it seems editorial cartoonists are more likely to do be offensive (intentionally or not) these days, just by virtue of the subject matter. I could see if there was some worry about cartoonists keeping a regular schedule, but they're already doing that just several weeks earlier that publication. I could see if there were more time needed to prepping the cartoons for print, but digital pre-press makes jobs go super quickly and many artists supply their work already prepped. I honestly can't think of another reason why syndicates would require such a lengthy lead time. Anyone have any answers for me on that?

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