Maybe like me you caught Scott’s post today reiterating the latest webcomics mantra of “get Diesel Sweeties in more newspapers, plz KTHXBYE!” His concern is that the syndicate will stop caring about the New Kid On The Block after a couple months and move onto more aspiring projects, like weaseling more buttons and links into comics.com‘s hideous monstrosity of a navigation template.

If you’re local paper doesn’t run Diesel Sweeties, you should write them a letter. Newspaper’s actually care about letters. A little too much, actually. Maybe we can use that in our favor.

DS doesn’t run in our Des Moines Register (not that I ever expected it to), so I decided to jump over to Stevens’ newspaper page to see what I’ve been missing.

Evidently, not much.

I’ve honestly never cared much for Diesel Sweeties (proper). And yes, I get it. That’s the first thing someone who drapes DS in gold and sings its praises will usually claim: you must not get it! That’s your problem. No. That’s not my problem. I get it. I just don’t think it’s funny.

Then, I realized the truth. The dumbfounding, spellbinding, incomprehensible truth. R Stevens is absolutely BRILLIANT. DS is perfect for newspapers because it isn’t funny! No comic in the newspaper is funny (except maybe Get Fuzzy). It should fit right in!

R Stevens posted some hate mail he received the other day from some ambitious reader named Harry Slack who took the time and effort to spill out his hatred of the newspaper DS to its cartoonist. Here’s something he had to say:

So, sorry to be this way, I’m not usually one to send letters to cartoonists… and I guess I still haven’t (the joke being I think you’re not actually a cartoonist)… but your little strip has just incited so much fear in me… fear that comics are going to cease to exist… due to sucky comics like yours.

I think it was nice of Harry to point out the joke for Stevens.

The painful truth of it is that I agree with Harry. I also don’t think DS is funny, and although it might just fit right into the newspaper comics section alongside such marquee crap as Marmaduke, Family Circus, and Dennis the Menace, it might also just pave the way for more sub-par quality webcomics to get noticed by syndicates and get “promoted” to the funny pages.

Honestly, I still don’t understand everyone’s fascination with getting into the newspaper comics. I thought print was dead! I thought the internet and websites were supposed to be the medium of the future! Why is everyone getting hung up on stumbling their way into the syndicates? Aren’t we supposed to be deriding their ancient and forgotten methods? Aren’t we supposed to be mocking their laughable attempts at clinging to relevance? Aren’t we supposed to be heralding the coming of the new age of information superhighwayness? It’s really disappointing to see so many big name webcartoonists still fighting tooth and nail for some space in an obsolete medium.

In any case, good luck to R Stevens in getting into more dead trees. You’re in good company. I heard BC actually made a joke last month.