According to a post on his Facebook page today, Kelton Sears will no longer serve as “Culture & Comix Editor” for Seattle Weekly, nor will that section continue to exist as it has for the past few years. Sears, a gifted musician and journalist who also once contributed to The Stranger, took time to thank Weekly editor-in-chief Mark Baumgarten and “the talented, dedicated weirdos who contributed” to the section with “so much care, thought, and joy” under his term. “We got to write exclusively about the local arts and music community at length, we got to fill our pages with the illustrations and comics of amazing regional artists, we got to champion GIFs as a journalistic form, and then I got to write a 4000+ word piece about memes?” Sears wrote.
He added that he didn’t know exactly what he would do next, he intends to take “a break from journalism for a bit to focus on GIFs and animation this next year.”
Neither Sears nor Baumgarten responded to requests for comment. I’ll update this story if and when they do. The full statement he made on Facebook today is below.
~Today is my last day at Seattle Weekly~
Today is also the last issue for the comix and culture section as you know it, as well as many of the talented, dedicated weirdos who contributed to what that all meant.
Newspaper-ing is hard and exhausting and strange right now, kind of across the board. But I leave so grateful for some of the truly wacky stuff our editor-in-chief Mark let me and our contributors do under the banner of the Weekly these last four years. We got to write exclusively about the local arts and music community at length, we got to fill our pages with the illustrations and comics of amazing regional artists, we got to champion GIFs as a journalistic form, and then I got to write a 4000+ word piece about memes?
I really really want to thank all the culture and comix contributors who infused so much care, thought, and joy into making this newspaper and exploring this city with me. When I found out that this was happening, the saddest thing to me was the idea of not getting to work with them anymore.
I’m not 100 percent sure what I’m doing next—I have some solid leads—but one thing I’m positive about is that I’m going to be taking a break from journalism for a bit to focus on GIFs and animation this next year. Even though I won’t be writing as much, expect a lot more squiggly lines from me soon.
