I really, really don’t get how you conclude that PhD Comics are not comics anymore. Even the graphs and visuals are drawn to be humorous. That second pictorial isn’t remotely political; it does reference a real phenomenon, but it’s still jokey. Just because Cham doesn’t use the traditional comic format 100% of the time doesn’t mean that PhD Comics is not a comic. It definitely doesn’t mean that you can compare it to Drudge Report, let alone the New York Times. I mean, for Pete’s sake the NYT is a serious news outlet. PhD Comics doesn’t pretend to be serious or about news.
The only serious comic I can ever remember them doing - that didn’t have a touch of humor to it - was the one after Jorge Cham visited a lab doing cancer research, and drew a comic talking about how cancer research was very different from what most people thought it was.
It is a form of media, but so are television shows, movies, other comics, books, graphic novels, etc. It’s not press (aka news media). You won’t see Jorge Cham clambering to the White House with a press pass or even to a university over some new announcement. He doesn’t seriously cover news. He doesn’t even seriously cover higher education news.
Still, nobody is saying that you can’t criticize him - you can criticize anything, whether it’s a comic or a comedy on television - or a serious literary novel or newspaper. I think the argument here is not that you can’t criticize Cham and PhD Comics, but that most of us simply disagree with your criticisms of PhD Comics. And I personally said that I think that you are taking PhD Comics too seriously - you criticize the comics for making exaggerated claims when I was pointing out that Cham does that deliberately, for humor, just like Dilbert and every other comic poking fun at reality does. I have to say that it’s kind of absurd to conclude that it’s not a comic anymore simply because he uses different formats when drawing it - Bill Watterson did that with Calvin and Hobbes, too, but it was still a comic. XKCD covers geeky stuff and serious stuff from time to time, but they’re definitely still a comic. A comic is not about the content so much as the medium. Comics are allowed to cover serious stuff; they’re allowed to do social commentary. In fact, if they didn’t no one would read them and they’d be boring.
As serious articles discuss the state of academia, they often will reference PhD comics.
When has a serious article ever seriously referenced PhD Comics? And by “seriously referenced,” I mean took as gospel what the strip means and used it as a discussion point in the article (not just used the comic as a funny jumping off point for the article).