Lloyd Dangle, who draws "Troubletown," says he was "shit-canned" from the Seattle Stranger and Metro Silicon Valley. The papers, he says, "said that they might bring Troubletown back when things get better, but for newspapers, I don't know anybody who thinks it's going to get better."

Derf, author of "The City," who we dropped last year, is very kind to the "desperate" editors he's worked with over the years. Still, he doesn't buy the wisdom of such cuts: "I believe Weeklies should be ADDING features and content, especially cartoons, which are both popular and inexpensive. Instead the strategy seems to be "let's give our readers LESS to read!" Yeah. Wonder how that will work out?"

He also has some choice words about our situation:

Creative Loafing, parent of four papers across the South, IS in bankruptcy, thanks to its disastrous acquisition of the Chicago Reader and DC City Paper. Those two papers were the finest in the business... and two of the most cartoon-friendly altweeklies... until the Loaf bought them in what was apparently a ego driven move by the Loaf owner to become a big player in the weekly world. Then the economy crashed, the Loaf was unable to meet its debt and all its papers have been gutted like fish in a desperate attempt to stave off extinction. How desperate? The DC City Paper announced last year that it would no longer pay for comix. The only ones they would continue to run would be ones they got for free, presumably drawn by local high school art students looking for extra credit. I had appeared in the paper since 1991.

There are more artists weighing in: Jen Sorensen. Tom Tomorrow. Ruben Bolling.

Each of these artists makes good points. Indeed, running "Red Meat" wouldn't bankrupt us--we're already bankrupt! It really hurts to see good contributors getting gut-punched like this, and I can't believe there's not more pain to go around.

The whole shebang, including some signature comic strip exegesis, below the jump.

Trouble viewing? Try the YouTube version.

You may have seen the bright yellow boxes around town: Bash, a new alternative-comics monthly, will debut Friday. "We're in the air, dropping," says Publisher John B. Van Meter.

The D.C. publication's Web site has information for potential advertisers, a PDF of its prototype issue, and, somewhat less expectedly, a mailing address in Lexington, Ky., a city roughly 500 miles from the neighborhoods Van Meter says he's targeting first: Adams Morgan, Georgetown, Bethesda.

Van Meter divides his time between Georgetown (he has family in this area) and Lexington, where he was an investor in Nougat, an arts monthly that folded in June. "You lose money in one magazine, you'll jump into another," says Van Meter.

Bash has a Lexington address, Van Meter says, because its "computer guy" (Managing Editor Jonathan T. Hampton) is there, but notes that Bash's sales staff is "all Washington."

"Last month I was in D.C. for three months," says Van Meter. He says he's been "up and down Connecticut knocking on doors" trying to sell ads, which he says is "one of the toughest things in advertising for a magazine that's never been put out."

Bash's prototype features strips such as "Tiny Sepuku" and Van Meter's own "Womb Wompers," which stars talking fetuses. Van Meter was a cartoonist for Nougat before he put money into it. He says, laughing: "I'm not a businessman, I'm a cartoonist. Likely, that's starting to show."