What the heck is going on with syndication for the “Edge City” comic strip

By | January 23, 2022

TLDR Edge City is now being syndicated online by two different comic-strip syndicates. I’ve never seen that before and I have no idea what the heck is going on.

There’s this comic strip, Edge City, which ended new strips in 2016, but reruns of the strip continued to syndicated online, and presumably in some newspapers as well, though I haven’t seen that first-hand.

Until partway through January 2022, my comics aggregator was getting Edge City from comicskingdom.com, which meant that if you wanted to read Edge City in the aggregator, you had to pay for a membership to Comics Kingdom. Then, in mid-January 2022, the strip suddenly disappeared from Comics Kingdom.

I posted about this, and a friendly commenter pointed out that the strip was available on GoComics, so I changed the aggregator to get it from there instead of Comics Kingdom.

Today, however, I see that Edge City is once again available on Comics Kingdom, and all the missing days from earlier in January have been backfilled. The strip also continues to be available on GoComics, though the strip published there each day is different from the one for the same day on Comics Kingdom.

In short, the same strip is apparently being syndicated at the same time by both King Features Syndicate (Comics Kingdom) and Andrews McMeel Universal (GoComics). I’ve never seen this before, and it seems rather odd. Either there is no explanation about this anywhere online or my Google-Fu has failed to reveal it.

I’d love to hear from anyone who can shed light on what’s going on here. Feel free to comment here or email me.

In any case, because GoComics comics are accessible to everyone in the aggregator and Comics Kingdom comics are only accessible to people who pay for a membership, the aggregator will continue to pull Edge City from GoComics.

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