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Comment by RyanMcGreal | Hacker News Reader

More interesting than the comics (which came off a bit forced to me) is the following:

>I worried that the story would become stale before my comics would work through the pipeline. I think the soonest I can get something published is in about a month, perhaps a bit sooner, but I've never tested it.

A month to go from the final draft of a black-and-white, three-panel, line-drawn comic to publication in a daily newspaper. A month!

And people wonder why newspapers are gradually becoming irrelevant.

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This is more a commentary on the inefficiency of his distributor than it is a commentary on newspapers themselves. It's not like it takes a month to get other things into a newspaper (since by definition 99% of stuff in the newspaper was written in the previous 24 hours).

It may be slow, but the process for comics and articles are quite different. Comics go through multiple layers of distribution (possibly translation, colouring, lettering and the like through multiple hands) before they are published, in many different newspapers simulatenosly.

The process for getting comics published is focused on groups of comics as well, so rather then send one Dilbert comic a day, the distributor will take at least a weeks worth of strips, possibly a month's worth at once, and that bundle will be sent out.

Editiorial cartoons are much faster (next day) but they tend to be done for a single publication, or at least a small family of publications.

(edit: Add colouring, lettering)

I think what he was trying to say is that he has a 1 month worth of comics done that are waiting to be published, and if he would sent a new one it would get it's turn in one month ...

No, he had it right.

"I think the soonest I can get something published is in about a month ... it wasn't worth the extra friction to push them to the front of the line"

So if he had made a big push, he could have gotten them published in a month. He goes on to say when it would be published if he submitted it at the end of his queue.

"And it would be June 18th before they ran in their normal position, which seemed too far in the future."

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