Syndication- An american thing

For most comic strip cartoonists syndication is like finding the Holy Grail. I've heard about colleagues who partied all night long with their families after the blessed envelope from a Syndication Company arrived with a front letter from the editor saying " Congratulations you've been syndicated".

I was talking to an editor friend of mine the other day and after a lot of talking I realized one thing... Yenny will never be syndicated at all.

"Oh, but you are syndicated online" you might say. The truth of the matter is that "online syndication" doesn't exist. It doesn't take a big company to promote your comic online. You can do that by just self promoting your strips on every website that you can ever imagine.

Companies like Universal or United Media do have what they call "online syndication" and, yes, it does work and yes, you get paid, (not that much but you do). But if you don't self promote your strip then online syndication on a big company doesn't mean a thing. At the end, it turns out that you can do better on your own. With no restrictions or rules.

Now coming back to what I said before about Yenny never being syndicated, it means that the possibilities of you reading the strip while drinking coffee are very very rare.

Yenny ,however, is published in Primera Hora. It has been in that newspaper since 2003 and thank God it has won a decent amount of followers, locally speaking.

My friend the editor, after a lot of thinking said " You know, Dave...in my opinion, it's a racy thing" And if you think of it, he's right. Newspaper comic strips are all about american culture. We have Garfield living in a nice suburbian american house with Jon. Shoe and Doonesbury are all about american politics while Yenny lives her live in a wooden house in a heck-forgotten land called Puerto Rico. Have doubts about it? Try entering your information in a forum. There you find a mandatory part that says "choose country" . You can actually find Zimbawee or Samoa but Puerto Rico is nowhere to be seen. You end up writing the webmaster or lying.

Yenny is a caribbean comic strip. She walks in short shorts which is totally normal here. Come visit us and try walking the town in long sleeves at 1:15 pm! Puerto Rico accepts her because she's like every average girl. For the US market....she's a ****.

Now here's another interesting fact. When I started the official online distribution, the editors used to tell me " Yenny's shorts are too short" or "try not showing her cleavege so much". i even got an email asking to please not show the Goth Twins molesting Yenny so much because it looked "lesbian".

Then I find comics strips like 9 Chickweed Lane, oficially syndicated by United, which show a gay couple living comfortably together or Pibgorn which talks about sex in an explicit way.

What about Baldo, you must say?

Baldo is a comic strip about a latin family living in an american enviroment. Hector Cantu and Carlos Castellanos are great friends of mine and they found a wonderful formula to introduce latinos to the american market.

So you see, Yenny is all about being a latina girl in a latin world. Would you like to see that on your newspaper? Maybe yes. It's up to the editors to decide this "racy" thing.