It was the Wild West. Unlike comic books, or even traditional newspapers, for the most part you didn’t buy an alt-weekly newspaper, much less hold on to it. You picked them up from a pile somewhere, read them or didn’t, and then threw them out. And just how many were there? In the years before the Internet how was it even possible to have any idea who was publishing where, especially with papers starting and folding, merging with others, changing names and moving? The industry’s own national trade association kept poor membership records and was (and still is) very selective about who it admits into its ranks. And what counts as an alt-weekly anyway? Some of these papers ran comic strips, but many didn’t. Some of these papers just ran comic strips without letting the artists know and didn’t pay them.
Spooky Comics 