After getting his start in alt-weekly cartooning with a strip in the San Francisco Bay Guardian in 1988, Lloyd Dangle is retiring his Troubletown comic.

“I have changed over 22 years, and the thrill is gone. Having to read so much news and opinion to stay on top of events is a grind that I would like to be free of,” Dangle tells Daryl Cagle. “It has nothing to do with the state of the industry though. I’ve been satisfied with my relationships with my newspapers and thrilled that I’ve had the readership I’ve had.”

Still, Dangle — like other cartoonists — has seen the number of outlets running his work drop in recent years (see his blog for an unofficial tally), leaving him pessimistic about the future prospects for his favorite cartoonists (a category that includes alt-weekly faves Matt Bors and Jen Sorensen).

“There doesn’t seem to be much of a future for cartooning with the models that we know. The internet hasn’t been our friend,” he says. “I hope they find a way to make it work.”

Once he retires (his final strip will come at the end of April), Dangle says he hopes to finish his novel, and he will continue to offer his “graphic recording” services, which he explains to Cagle:

It’s live cartooning in front of an audience, which I do at conferences, lectures or brainstorming events. I learned about it from a colleague who had started doing it and I’ve been learning and building a practice. I can draw extremely fast and spontaneously so it’s a good fit for me and it gives me access to people and fascinating worlds I never knew existed. I just did a gig at a university that was all about the intersection between neuroscience and engineering. It’s the exact opposite of the isolation of working alone in a studio.