All-purpose newspaper strips discussion

[Emerkeith Davyjack]

I didn't entirely get the intended construction of the jokes in the Sunday Bizzaro (Sp??) strip yesterday .   ( The strip appars to be not online , as it is a King Features Syndicate strip , who - Gasp !!! - appear to think they're in the comics business to make money , and keep their strips behind a wall . )

  The joke was " variations on ' I Love New York ' "...but was the panhandler's shirt supposed to be saying " I Owe New York " ?"  I Have Zero , New York " ?

  The yokel , in Middle Ages garb...Was his shirt suppost'a mean " I Love York " , as in the English county that New York was indeed named after ??? ( And Prince Charles is now considered the Duke of , if I recall correctly . )

[Richard Willis]

Dick Tracy gets propositioned on the Moon.

[The Baron]

There's a sentence you don;t see every day,

Richard Willis said:

Dick Tracy gets propositioned on the Moon.

[Jeff of Earth-J]

For a while I was reading the strip online every day but I stopped in 2020. I heard that Joe Staton wasn't doing it anymore. 

[Richard Willis]

Mike Curtis is still the writer. Joe Staton left the strip in October 2021. Shelley Pleger, who previously inked Staton, took over as the artist, inking herself. Occasionally there is a very brief interlude of a different artist, but Curtis and Pleger handle the overwhelming majority of the strip. IMO, it's as good as when Staton was there.

[PowerBook Pete, the Mad Mod]

Curtis was a horror movie host on a Jackson TN TV station in 1974.

[ClarkKent_DC]

Lee Enterprises, which owns about 77 daily newspapers, has opted to provide a standard slate of comics in all of its properties. All of the comic strips it will carry in those papers will come from Andrews McMeel Syndication, which effectively means dropping any strips that come from any other syndicator. From The Daily Cartoonist: "LEE PAPERS GO UNIFORM COMICS COMPANY-WIDE"

It means most of these papers will lose some old standbys and may get a few different old standbys in their place. For example, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch will lose 24 of the 34 comic strips it used to carry as it cuts the comics section down from two pages to a half-page of comics and a half-page of puzzles and such. Here's how the Post-Dispatch explains it: "Changes Coming to Post-Dispatch Comics and Puzzles"

This comes a couple weeks after News Corp. has killed the comics pages in all of its newspapers in Australia. 

[Jeff of Earth-J]

"The St. Louis Post-Dispatch will lose 24 of the 34 comic strips it used to carry"

This is not going to be a popular move, I guarantee. 

"We hope you give these changes time," asks the P-D. That won't happen.

I lived in the St. Louis area for most of my life. Both the (now defunct) Globe-Democrat as well as the Post-Dispatch ran periodic polls of their readership every five years in order to gauge interest in strips before making a change. (I have taken the Dallas Morning News for more than 20 years now and have never seen such a poll.) Generally, these polls would result in only one or two changes, but they were never popular. Always among the most popular strip (and usually #1 for reasons I do not understand) was Beetle Baily (which is among the strips being dropped). But the loss of 24 strips? There'll be rioting in the streets.

[ClarkKent_DC]

This is a move that only a bean-counter could love. Only a bean-counter would think it's a good idea to take away what is distinct in each community and plop the same page, singular, in six dozen papers.

Jeff of Earth-J said:

I lived in the St. Louis area for most of my life. Both the (now defunct) Globe-Democrat as well as the Post-Dispatch ran periodic polls of their readership every five years in order to gauge interest in strips before making a change. (I have taken the Dallas Morning News for more than 20 years now and have never seen such a poll.) Generally, these polls would result in only one or two changes, but they were never popular.

That's because editors take the wrong tack with these things. We've discussed this kind of thing before, and somebody mentioned that one newspaper hit on the right way to handle it: Don't drop the strips that draw the most complaints, cut the ones that have the fewest defenders.

Jeff of Earth-J said:

Always among the most popular strip (and usually #1 for reasons I do not understand) was Beetle Baily (which is among the strips being dropped). But the loss of 24 strips? There'll be rioting in the streets.

Riots? No ... but they have just handed readers one more reason to say "It's not worth it to get the paper," since it is taking away something without adding something of equal or superior value.

As for Beetle Bailey, it's an American institution. People grew up with it. So did their parents.

[The Baron]

And their grandparents....

ClarkKent_DC said:

As for Beetle Bailey, it's an American institution. People grew up with it. So did their parents.

[Jeff of Earth-J]

"Riots? No ..."

Metaphorically speaking.

[ClarkKent_DC]

Ted Forth of Sally Forth directly addresses readers about the Lee Enterprises move in this Sunday's strip:

[Jeff of Earth-J]

This past Sunday or this coming Sunday? (I can assure you that that strip didn't run in the Dallas Morning News on Sep. 25.)

Here is a list of newspapers affected by the Lee Enterprises decision.