Existing comment:
Syndication
While Oliphant's home paper was the Denver Post, he contracted with a national syndicate to distribute his cartoons. Oliphant swiftly became the most widely syndicated cartoonist among his peers, a status he maintained for the rest of his career. Syndication impacts the work's subject matter: papers choose whether or not to print a particular cartoon and have a window -- often two weeks -- to decide. Before the digital age, a day or two for shipping meant that a cartoon couldn't easily respond to the news the next day. In the cartoon shown here, the annotation shows that Oliphant chose to roll the dice: he hoped that his cartoon would be on topic the morning after the moon landing. |