OC Weekly editor Gustavo Arellano announced the return of Max Cannon’s Red Meat comic strip to the paper:

In 2009 or so, we had to drop all our comics–budget and space constraint in the dead-tree edition. I’ve been lobbying to get Red Meat back ever since, and now that I’m the Mexican-in-Chief, I hereby announce its return to our paper!

“A step in right direction!” responded Tom Tomorrow in a tweet.

In an email, Tomorrow says his cartoon This Modern World still runs in “around seventy, mostly small to midsize, locally-owned” papers.

“It’s about half what it used to be,” he acknowledged. “But times being what they are, I am enormously grateful for the papers which continue to support our art form.”

In an Austin Chronicle story on the future of political cartoons, Tomorrow said:

“This form of cartooning grew up in the alt-weeklies specifically to run in them. It helped them establish their identities. Now, in a lot of cases, it’s been tossed in the garbage can by those same alt-weeklies. If that doesn’t turn around, I think this art form ends when Jen Sorensen and [Idiot Box cartoonist] Matt Bors step away from it.”

Sorensen, who recently moved to Austin, told the Chronicle, “Maybe you need to be a certain kind of masochist to be a political cartoonist.”

In more cartoon news this week, Pasadena Weekly caught up with Matt Groening to talk about the end of his Life in Hell comic strip; and John “Derf” Backderf’s novel, ‘My Friend Dahmer,’ is set to hit the big screen after being picked up by the production company Ibid Filmworks.