No, this isn’t about baseball, even though it COULD be. This is about cartooning.
You may or may not have noticed that the shape of Broadside and Greenside cartoons have changed. This is what they used to look like:
No, wait. That was in 2014, when online versions were 397 pixels wide. In 2015 the web format changed and they looked like this:
The point is that they were square. The originals were 6X6.
Recently, Gannett Government Media switched to new formats in the print versions of Navy Times and Marine Corps Times, and they will now look like this:
Navy Times
Marine Corps Times
No big deal. Besides, it isn’t like the format hasn’t changed in the last thirty years of drawing these things.
The first Broadside cartoon measured a massive 7″ X 10″, mostly because I had no clue what an appropriate size should be for submission.
For the first few years of the panel, the size changed several times as I experimented with what worked. I discovered that the more a cartoon is reduced for publication, the skinnier the lines become. The lettering shrinks too and if you are not careful, the words become unreadable. Eventually Navy Times and I settled on a 6X6 square format that lasted for a decade or two.
During the same time, the way the art was submitted changed too, starting with paper copy by mail, to paper copy by FEDEX, to electronic submission using the new fangled thing called the internet.
And from black and white to color.
The new horizontal orientation is the latest version, and if I have learned anything in three decades of working with the great people at Navy and Marine Corps Times, things will change again some day. They are constantly working to make things better, so change is good.
Besides, the military taught us to be flexible; so if you don’t mind, I don’t mind.
