I promise that the new webcomic won't take over my whole blog, but temporarily the webcomics medium is on my mind a lot. So I chanced upon this heart-tugging message by Max Cannon, creator of the strip "Red Meat".

Now, I adore Red Meat and all, and I agree with many of the points here, but I'd just like to re-assure those of you who are worried that the recession is going to nuke all of your favorite content online.

Specifically, neither my website nor my comic pays for itself directly, nor do I expect it to. But it's so cheap, I can go on doing it for a hobby indefinitely. I don't know how it is for anybody else out there, but for me I spring (I think I remember) $15 per year for domain registration and then $10 per month for hosting. Granted, not the luxury package that can handle infinite traffic, but adequate for my needs.

Compare my other vices: I blow about $30 per month on coffee (grinding my own for homemade espresso) and $15 per month, tops, on pipe tobacco. Just treats for the kids runs more than the website.

What I'm saying here is, I don't see where people are complaining so much that they can't afford to keep their website going anymore. You could darn near pay for it out of recycling aluminum cans. That's the economic effect of open source, by the way.

I'd also wonder how such a famous strip running in 75 weeklies, with three books published, with merchandise out there, and only drawn weekly, and using very little variation from panel to panel, would be so hard-pressed for resources... But I won't say that, because I'm not walking in Max Cannon's shoes and I have too much respect for him. It's his time, and if he decides it's not worth it, that's up to him.

That's the wheat side for the adult in me. On the frosted side for the kid in me, I do agree that comic strips are the first thing I turn to when I pick up a weekly paper. Weekly papers are an important part of our culture, for alternative news and viewpoints that are too "risky" to publish in mainstream papers, and that extends to comics as well. It was in alternative weeklies back in L.A. that I first discovered Matt Groening - years before something called "The Simpsons" ever came to TV.

It's even crossed my mind that a weekly specifically devoted to independent comics would be a cool idea. If there was a rag like that, with not just half a page but pages and pages of your favorite strips, you'd pick it up, wouldn't you? And electronic age and the death of newspapers be damned - I still grab every weekly I see when I hit the store, the cafe, or the library, because they're free and because we all need to rest our eyeballs from lighted screens once in a while.

So I'd support an effort to encourage weekly papers to keep publishing comics. But remember that every recession brings the doom and gloom predictions of apocalypse - alternative and independent media is always teetering on the edge of financial failure. But it's a bit like Free and Open Source Software - it can survive on almost nothing, and it's important for our culture to keep it around as an incubator for fresh ideas and new innovations. Whether you're talking about Firefox or The Simpsons, those rogue creators sometimes hand us the next big thing that sweeps the world. Because sometimes, the people who do it more for the love than the money are just That Damn Good.