Finally, a newspaper syndicate gets it right. United Features has taken a nod from the webcomics world and made a move in response to the declining sales of newspapers by offering all of its content (including years of archives) at comics.com online for free. And not just that, but its RSS feeds which once only contained links, now contain the cartoons themselves.
Signing up for an account allows you to create your own custom RSS feed or homepage featuring whichever features you’d like. Now, the golden age of comic strips has come and gone, and United’s lineup includes some duds to be sure, but there are a few diamonds in the rough worth subscribing to. My custom RSS feed includes Dave Coverly’s Speed Bump, Jerry Van Amerongen’s surreal Ballard Street, Darby Conley’s Get Fuzzy, and editorial cartoons by Pulitzer-winner Mike Luckovich:
Perhaps the greatest thing to come out of this is that United’s free comic library includes all 50 years of Charles Schulz’s Peanuts — that’s 21010 individual strips. If you can’t afford Fantagraphics’ 25-book reprint series, this should do you fine.
There are a few criticisms, still. First off, the site is BUTT UGLY. Sure they’ve adopted social networking features like commenting, star-ratings, and embed-codes, but it ain’t pretty. If you’re partial to nice, clean design, do yourself a favour and stick with their RSS feeds. Secondly, single-panel features are presented at the same width as strips. After years of complaining that comics in the newspaper are too small, here’s a case when they’re actually too big. On my laptop, I have to scroll to see the entire thing. There are links to higher-resolution versions of all the comics anyhow; the default size for the single panel titles could benefit by being slightly smaller.
But those are minor quibbles, and this is great news for anyone who wants to follow some of their favourite “print” comic strips online easily and without limitations. One can only hope that the other big syndicates follow suit and stop hiding their content behind outdated subscription models and text-only RSS feeds. I’m looking at you King and Universal.