The Comics Curmudgeon

60 responses to “Metapost: Two quick quickies”

1. Gene
   August 13th, 2008 at 4:06 pm [Reply]

   Newspapers are too important to be left to the editors – Charles de Gaulle

2. Muffaroo for hire
   August 13th, 2008 at 4:07 pm [Reply]

   People care more about comics than anything else in the paper, it seems, but the editorial response is always to try and cheap it out on the back of the strips. Cut ‘em down in size, cut down how many they carry… sooner or later, the paper will be a single 8-1/2 x 11 sheet with ads on the front and back, and they’ll wonder why nobody buys it.

3. Twinkles the Elf
   August 13th, 2008 at 4:08 pm [Reply]

   Pittsburgh Post-Gazette still holding at a page and a half… The morning would NOT be complete without Mary Worth, nossir.

4. commodorejohn
   August 13th, 2008 at 4:18 pm [Reply]

   I just don’t get it. Why cut back on the one thing most people read the paper for?

   What we need to do is start a print magazine that runs a wide selection of good comic strips at full size, and nothing else. By all rights it should sell like hotcakes.

5. krazykat
   August 13th, 2008 at 4:25 pm [Reply]

   I became so disgusted with our local paper The State that I finally let my subscription lapse about six months ago–and I’ve never felt better. Now I find out my son has been buying a copy from the box every day since. For what? You guessed it–the comics–and the selection sucks!! Can you imagine what a good selection would do for circulation. Why this is lost on editors I’ll never know.

6. Squirtle
   August 13th, 2008 at 4:31 pm [Reply]

   The Morning Call in Allentown, PA dropped a bunch of comics and puzzles a month ago, but they conducted a reader poll beforehand to determine which were the most popular. I’m happy to say “Mark Trail” survived, but “Cathy” did not. We’re now down to a single page.

7. Sequitur
   August 13th, 2008 at 4:32 pm [Reply]

   In the early 90’s, “The Dallas Morning News” bought out rival “The Dallas Times Herald.” The News then decided to carry all of the Herald’s comics along with their own. It was glorious! 7-8 pages of comics every day! (Frankly, it was tough to read them all as I was wont to do and still take care of the rest of life such as family and work.) However, I bravely read them all each day as well as working two crosswords. That didn’t last too long since it was probably quite expensive to carry all those comics. Eventually, the comics got pared down to the current 4 pages they offer today. Still not too shabby. The Morning News website carries only a few comics. I guess they want you to subscribe. They don’t do much with the soaps. MT, JP and Prince Valient (Sunday only [I hate that strip. It's the only one I refuse to read]) are the only old standbys. They have plenty of the “modern” serials such as FOOB and FW, Cr’nksft, etc. I get the rest online from the Houston Chronicle and Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Oh, and Comics.com for Alley Oop (I like the Oopster. What can I say?) Stay thirsty my friend (not a reference to Hi & Lois).

8. Uncle Lumpy
   August 13th, 2008 at 4:35 pm [Reply]

   #4 cj –

   . . . print magazine that runs a wide selection of good comic strips at full size, and nothing else.

   It was done a couple years ago — I found it through the Rules of Attraction site when it was still active (if you haven’t seen it before, there goes your day). Memory fragments are that it was trying to launch from a base in central or western Wisconsin (Wausau?), planned to distribute by mail, and looked undercapitalized. I can’t find any trace of it now.

9. Uncle Lumpy
   August 13th, 2008 at 4:39 pm [Reply]

   Oh, man. Rip frickin’ Kirby — there goes my day!

10. evil_bacteria
    August 13th, 2008 at 4:42 pm [Reply]

    I was going to brag about the state of the Dallas Morning News, but Sequitor beat me to it. Sure, it doesn’t carry Apartment 3G, Mary Worth, or Rex Morgan, but we get four pages of comics (two pages, front and back), and one page is in color! Hell yeah!

    Of course, garbage like Dennis the Menace, Family Circus, and Pluggers take up the color page, while gems like Pearls Before Swine and Get Fuzzy are stuck in black and white, but that’s still a lot of comics.

11. saxman
    August 13th, 2008 at 4:43 pm [Reply]

    When the Houston Chronicle bought out the Houston Post, they decided to carry all of the Post’s comics, so for about a decade we had four pages of comics (with some puzzels and astrology). They are down to two full pages now, plus an additional page with three strips and the rest puzzles and other entertainment features.

    I’ve always wondered how a weekly “comics only” broadsheet would do. The ideal would be about six pages of comics, seven of ads, two of puzzles, and one for masthead and commentary. (As a weekly, this would allow about the equivalent of a page or two of daily strips.

    You could distribute it free or charge a nominal fee for mail.

    I bet the licensing fees would kill the idea. One of the reasons the Chron still offers all those strips on their web page is to prevent their weekly competitors like the Houston Press from featuring them.

    I’m firmly convinced that’s why they briefly featured and then relegated to “web only” some of the edgier comics like My Cage and the now-web-only-again Diesel Sweeties.

    Sigh.

    The Texas Lotto is up to almost $25 million tonight and if I win I’ll have to have SOMETHING to do with all that money.

12. Tybalt
    August 13th, 2008 at 4:45 pm [Reply]

    The only problem with Runners is that way too much is happening for a soap opera strip. Those two panels were a whole week’s worth of Judge Parker.

13. Islamorada Girl
    August 13th, 2008 at 4:47 pm [Reply]

    I was still a columnist at the Sun when then lord high features editor Steve Proctor made the decision to drop Brenda Starr. My (editorial page) editor wrote a column called Requiem for a Redhead in farewell, and the Sun got about 1000 calls, letters and etc. protesting the droppage.Did they restore our beloved Brenda? Hell no! Steve blamed my editor for the kerfluffle! It’s been downhill for that poor ghost of a paper ever since. Today, it’s nothing but crab wrapper holding the ad inserts together. Print media may be dying, but no one said it had to shoot itself in the foot to hurry along the demise.

    They also hired a prissy, supercilious book editor away from the (NY) Daily News. Now I know when I want to read book reviews,
    I always go right to the Daily News, don’t you?

    Thank you. Thank you very much. I feel better now.

14. Calico
    August 13th, 2008 at 4:52 pm [Reply]

    Bats wrote yesterthread:
    “Avril Lavigne: listens impatiently to April’s “special” wedding song for Liz and Asshathony, then jumps up and pushes April off the stage while screaming “That fuckin’ SUCKS!” She does her own improvisation/improvement on April’s song, mostly involving unhappy new wives shooting nebbishy new husbands.”

    That’s quite the hoot, as I just finished watching an early Sopranos ep where Janice S. shoots Richie Aprile at the dinner table. Then he’s chopped up and disposed of.
    God, that would make FOOB SO much more interesting.

15. saxman
    August 13th, 2008 at 4:55 pm [Reply]

    13 Islamorada Girl

    Back when I was a (non-newspaper) Journalist, I speed read the Houston Chronicle, Houston Post, Wall Street Journal, and Christan Science Monitor every day. And the NY Times on Sunday.

    Now I read the Chron, the Journal and most days the (online) NY Post and the (online) Washington Post.

    Also the Sunday Seattle Post soley for My Cage and Judge Parker.

    Is this all an indication of the decay of print journalism or an indication of the decay of my touch with reality?

    You have me going now. As soon as I log off here, I’m going to check the NY Post just to see what their book reviews are like.

16. fuzzmaster
    August 13th, 2008 at 4:57 pm [Reply]

    Speaking from the inside:

    – Advertisers are generally not interested in the comics pages. They do not have the huge or attractive readership that dedicated fans like the Mudges would think. What, you think papers are DELIBERATELY not selling ads there now?

    – The soaps do have a small but vocal group of supporters who complain loudly whenever anything is threatened. But so did the stock pages and the bridge column, and those aren’t long for the print world, either. The secret papers finally figured out: The main reason to be a Mary Worth fan is that you’re set in your ways. And if you’re set in your ways, you’re not going to drop your subscription, no matter what we do.

    – The fact that so many folks here read their comics online gives you one big reason why they’re cuttable in print. Papers are trying to focus their offering on things that are unique to each paper, which generally means local, and that are cost-effective. (So why don’t papers have locally-oriented comics? Because the cost of a cartoonist to fill just a few column-inches per day is hard to justify.)

    I’m here, so obviously I’m a comic strip fan. But I don’t believe in false nostalgia, especially when it comes to how wonderful things were in the olden days when comic strips ran large daily and filled whole pages to themselves on Sundays.

    I’ve read those old strips. Like 1950s TV shows, they’re best appreciated if you don’t actually look at them. (Oh, ‘Naked City,’ you were so much better in my memory! And you, too, Smokey Stover.) With a few exceptions, they’re slow, repetitive, and not very funny. When their competition was silent movies, the comics were general entertainment. Today? C’mon.

    And as to the notion that papers killed the comics by running them smaller and smaller: What you got in return were more strips, which allowed the pages to retain their bulk readership even as individual strips attracted smaller and smaller niches. Without that compromise, today’s comics pages might be filled with nothing but dead-cartoonist-sketching strips, rather than being almost filled with them.

    Most people are not into meta, so strips have to rely on people who actually think they’re funny or stirring. Those who find RMMD stirring are dying off, literally. Don’t kid yourselves: A “good” comics collection would not boost circulation.

    Yes, I’m touchy about this. It comes down to your local paper making a choice between paying for Mark Trail to keep some crotchety fans from writing nasty e-mails or paying one of your neighbors to cover the local school board. Me and my retirement plans hope you’d vote for the school coverage.

17. UncleJeff
    August 13th, 2008 at 4:57 pm [Reply]

    I agree with everything that has been written.
    I’m in the radio business so I keep an eye on newspapers for many reasons.
    The comics section is one of the reasons people read a newspaper rather than just go to the paper’s web site (not all newspaper websites are like The Chron).
    I get the St. Paul Pioneer-Press and many days it is almost illegible to these tired old eyes because of they way they have shrunk the comics to put them on the page (Zippy the Pinhead is a prime example. Of course, Griffy uses far too many words when he should know better about the size allotment his strip gets).
    The newspaper business is dying before our eyes. The papers are shrinking. They’re discarding the writers who are the reason for having a local paper rather than just a piece of foolscap with wire service copy.

18. infallible
    August 13th, 2008 at 5:00 pm [Reply]

    11. saxman:
    I was also in Houston when the Chronicle took down the Post, and those were good times for the comics page.

    As I’m sure many of the readers here also do, I consider myself a pretty intellectual dude. Even so, when it comes to the daily paper, the comics always gets the first look. I think Josh hit the nail on the head about expanding comics to retain or gain readership. They could tear it up with four or five half-pages of comics on every other page in the already-fluffy entertainment section. That leaves a page and a half for stories and ads that are almost certain to be seen by every reader.

19. Captain Thunder
    August 13th, 2008 at 5:01 pm [Reply]

    Re: Baltimore Sun — You maniacs! You blew it up!

20. Sequitur
    August 13th, 2008 at 5:05 pm [Reply]

    I’m a Media Distribution Coordinator for the marketing department of a large national insurance company. I think a life insurance ad next to a strip like Funky Winkerbean may be just the ticket. Now if only I could get the big boys to agree…

21. athena
    August 13th, 2008 at 5:05 pm [Reply]

    When I lived in New York the only reason I bought the Daily News every day was because of the comics. Now that I’m in England, where the newspaper comics are truly dreadful (don’t believe me? take a look), I hardly ever buy a paper, despite a 45-minute bus ride to and from work.

    Brill interview, btw!

22. willethompson
    August 13th, 2008 at 5:08 pm [Reply]

    The Sun wants to drop A3G? Cripes, if that happens, how do they propose to draw people’s attention from the suckitude of the Orioles?

    (Josh, as a former resident of The City Of No Expectations, do you recall the glory days of having the Buffalo News running the color funnies on Saturday and the Courier-Express running them on Sunday? Ahh, life was sweet…)

23. saxman
    August 13th, 2008 at 5:08 pm [Reply]

    16 Fuzzmaster

    I think you’re right so far as mass marketing goes. Maybe any salvation for traditional comics will come from niche markets.

    It’s pretty much the same story for comic books. Amazing how low their circulation is. All the more so when you look at how well the Batman movie (for instance) is doing.

    All the elements are there for a customized subscription-based newspaper, grabbing content from a bunch of web pages, normalizing the font and style and stuff to each reader’s preferences, and then delivering to a cheap electronic book about twice the size of my Kindle.

    I think we’ll just miss achieving that, and future generations will get their news using something like an iPhone, but it will be “pulled” and not “pushed.” Therefore it will stay ad-based.

    It’s no joke that newspapers don’t exist to deliver content to consumers.

    Newspapers exist to deliver consumers to advertisers.

24. Old School Allie Cat
    August 13th, 2008 at 5:09 pm [Reply]

    The crap comics page is the least of the Nashville Tennessean’s problems. For a city this size, it’s a paper I wouldn’t leave out for the dog.

    When I was living in Atlanta, the Atlanta Journal Constitution was a decent rag – especially the Lewis Grizzard years, and even today, they have a decent comics page and a political cartoonist, Mike Luckovich, who I still follow.

    But I’ve been reading the funnies online since 1997 – starting with the San Francisco Chronicle, then moving to the Houston Chronicle.

    I haven’t read a “real” pulp newspaper in months. Although, I enjoy getting the Sunday paper – for the ads.

    That said, I’d be willing to wade through all kinds of ads if it meant I never had to see Rose is Rose again.

25. saxman
    August 13th, 2008 at 5:12 pm [Reply]

    24. Old School Allie Cat

    Hmmm. That could be a niche market in my niche market.

    “For $5 a month, we’ll deliver every ‘Rose is Rose’ comic to your door.”

    “For $10 a month, we won’t.”

26. Sequitur
    August 13th, 2008 at 5:13 pm [Reply]

    #21 athena

    That’s pitiful. Although that pop out method of reading them is pretty cool.
    I not sure a strip like “Mandy” could run in the US of A.

27. Sequitur
    August 13th, 2008 at 5:15 pm [Reply]

    “I’m not sure” – shoot. I was starting to speak like the Crocs in P before S.

28. Joolz
    August 13th, 2008 at 5:18 pm [Reply]

    Runners: Tad & Jeff: Is Tad is the one in the singlet, making Jeff the one with the cleft chin? I like their matching beads of sweat in panel 2 and await further installments.

29. Old School Allie Cat
    August 13th, 2008 at 5:21 pm [Reply]

    #25 – saxman – throw in no more “Love Is…”
    and we have a deal!

30. commodorejohn
    August 13th, 2008 at 5:24 pm [Reply]

    #16 fuzzmaster – Which is why I think a comics digest might work. Those of us who really like the funnies but don’t really care about school board coverage and fluff pieces on the Great Lakes Aquarium would be willing to pay for a publication that offered the strips we like at a decent size if we didn’t have to pay for all the stuff we’re not going to read on top of that.

    #21 athena – Wow. That is truly apalling.

31. Daily Comics Reviewer
    August 13th, 2008 at 5:27 pm [Reply]

    That was a great interview Josh and it’s great to see you’ve inspired another mindless hack to write about their opinions on comics.

32. Skeltometer
    August 13th, 2008 at 5:28 pm [Reply]

    Regarding the response in Josh’s interview with the New Yorker editor, I don’t think that a Predator drone could take out MW. She’d likely nag the Hellfire missile into self-destructing.

33. PeteMoss
    August 13th, 2008 at 5:44 pm [Reply]

    The Sacramento Bee recently shrunk the paper but it also switched to daily color comics. (I’ve seen the Margoin’ teal cummerbunds for a couple of weeks now.) It publishes two pages of comics, which ain’t bad. The first thing I read over breakfast is the printed comics, just the way God intended comics to be read. Then I go to the Chron and GoComics for those strips not printed in my paper.

    After I’ve lightened my spirits with the likes of Crankshaft and For (the love of Gawd, Stop) Worse, I will then allow myself to peruse the front page and those sections of the paper that tend to increase my blood pressure. If it gets too much for me, I’ll jump to the Sports section or the Jumble.

    I’m a hardcore, habitual newspaper subscriber and have pretty much read one daily for about 25 years. I’ve yet to even consider canceling a subscription because some newspaper wrote something I didn’t like or didn’t print something I did like. I can’t really relate to that. I suppose if the paper was running a series of exposes on how I should be run out of town on pole or if it started advocating lynching or fascism or something, I might reconsider.

    Coincidently, I hate local TV news and I’m none to crazy about national TV news, either.

34. BeatrixPotter
    August 13th, 2008 at 5:59 pm [Reply]

    That was a great interview, Josh! Was it conducted via email, or are you that funny on the fly? The Trebek part was hilarious.

35. Paul1963
    August 13th, 2008 at 6:02 pm [Reply]

    I did drop a paper once, partially because it didn’t have any comics and partially because I got a little weary of the letters on the editorial page that said all would be right with the world if everyone would just go to church, read the Bible and do what the President says.

    Three of the comics I read online are newspaper comics not available in the Sun: Gasoline Alley, Funky Winkerbean and Sherman’s Lagoon (whose colorist keeps forgetting that Hawthorne is wearing a clerical collar, incidentally). I don’t know if I care enough about A3G, Rex Morgan or The Phantom enough to follow them, though.

    I usually read the paper after I get home from work, so sometimes I’ll see comments about a strip here before I’ve actually read it.

36. odinthor
    August 13th, 2008 at 6:34 pm [Reply]

    (Bit of a necro-post here; but might as well keep all of the journalism remarks in the same thread…)

    My observation is that editors and those others in the various journalistic occupations tend to engage in the now-antique fantasy that people read the newspaper in order to gain social and political awareness from the hard-hitting reportage tendered by their carefully-trained stable of racehorses investigative reporters who supply us with tough, well-researched articles which motivate us to root out criminals and vote out corruption and Make Society A Better Place for Us, Our Children, and Our Children’s Children. But this doesn’t happen, because the readership does not have the same mentality as have those in the present-day journalistic fields. The readership has not changed; Journalism has changed. Talk about nostalgia, there was indeed a time in the good old days when the papers provided good, thorough reportage grounded on experience and understanding of local concerns. As a daily reader of newspapers since approximately 1965, I can say without hesitation that the quality we once appreciated and depended upon is no longer there. The papers are directed by conglomerates operating from distant cities, who put in charge of their various newspapers editors who have no clue as to the local zeitgeist, and who never do learn it because of their usually-short tenure in their positions. Meantime, journalism in general has taken as its great guiding light, since at least about 1990, the attitude and practices of TV news: flashy, breezy, quick, and lacking content. The readers consequently have turned their interest from (the now-unengaging and lame attempts at) hard news and entertaining features such as comics and advice columns to focus only on the latter. It makes the editorial brain hurt to think, however fleetingly, that the readership ignores their staff’s stories in order to read the likes of Apt. 3-G and advice columns, and so they pretend that what will make people return to reading the newspaper is to make more space for . . . articles . . . by cutting down on the comics and columns. If professional journalists really care about saving print journalism—and they don’t—they should go from the ground up and re-acquaint themselves with quality. Mary Worth, Rex Morgan, and Miss Manners may not be Walter Cronkite or Edward R. Murrow; but at least they give us the product we expect from them.

37. boojum
    August 13th, 2008 at 6:46 pm [Reply]

    Dear Zachary Kanin:

    A noble start. I’ve already written my local newspaper, threatening to cancel my subscription if Runners is ever dropped.

    One tiny caveat: To the characters in a soap-opera strip, everything they say or do is endlessly fascinating. This is part of the essential disconnect between their world and how we perceive it.

    Think exclamation points. Many, many exclamation points. And, of course, a slightly less exhilarating pace to the action and character development.

    Have you seen Meredith lately?!?
    Yeah! I saw her during my run the other day!!
    YEAH!! I saw her while I was running also!!!

38. Lloyd S.
    August 13th, 2008 at 6:48 pm [Reply]

    Ah, the Sun. Never great on news, there was at least that comic section. Now, the only accomplishment they can boast of is the shift to a color format. “Light for all,” my *ss!

39. Alfred E. Neuman
    August 13th, 2008 at 7:00 pm [Reply]

    Excellent New Yorker interview, Josh, but I almost wish you hadn’t done it. It will most certainly bring a large number of erudite New Yorker readers into Comics Curmudgeondom, further reducing my already feeble chances of getting a COTW mention.

40. Lisa
    August 13th, 2008 at 8:34 pm [Reply]

    Years ago the Washington Post foolishly tried to remove Mark Trail from the comics pages. It elicited an uproar from local fans. Ben Bradlee recounted the incident in an interview, recalling that the people in the office building across from his own office hung a banner outside that read, “Bring Back Mark Trail!” to which he replied (with his own banner, “Okay!” They asked back, “When?” and he answered, “Soon!” When the Post brought back Mark trail after about a six-week absence, they included all the missed panels in a special section. (You think Mark Trail is slow, try reading all those strips with feverish anticipation only to realize at the end that nothing really happened, after all.)

    So public opinion can work. Keep those banners coming!

41. Mars
    August 13th, 2008 at 9:00 pm [Reply]

    #21 Athena: As long as England has exclusive English rights to “Nemi,” they’ll always be better than us.

42. Mars
    August 13th, 2008 at 9:02 pm [Reply]

    By the way: I’m glad to hear many of you people are actual comics fans, and not just snarks who prefer laughing AT strips to laughing WITH them.

43. Sed
    August 13th, 2008 at 9:19 pm [Reply]

    Runners: Those two are easily the beefiest marathoners I’ve ever seen – we tend to have more XKCD-like physiques

44. CanuckDownSouth
    August 13th, 2008 at 10:12 pm [Reply]

    Dang. I am so late to this. This kind of serialized comics thing sort of exists – in France. Spirou (a weekly available at newsstands) publishes destined-to-be-BD (bandes dessinees – graphic novels) stories few pages at a time, and some 1-page gags (which are often later collected). It’s not quite the collected newspaper comics pages, but it’s the closest thing I’ve heard of.

45. texas buddha
    August 14th, 2008 at 12:04 am [Reply]

    Hmmm… A soap-opera comic-strip renaissance?

    I don’t know about that.

    I always thought of these comics as more of an incurable disease akin to herpes. Once you get it, it never really goes away. Sure, maybe between outbreaks you might forget that you have it, but the viral infection still lurks somewhere back at the base of your spine between eruptions.

46. Dr. Weird
    August 14th, 2008 at 12:30 am [Reply]

    44 Canuck-

    Comic strips were invented in the US yet seem to get much more respect worldwide… an editor for Disney comics once told me that the circulation of the Disney comics magazine in France was 100%… every copy in the region bought at least one copy. BD albums sell in huge numbers. Tintin was created for a Belgian newspaper, for instance. And Japan makes even those pale in comparison, with 1,000 page weekly “phone book” manga having sales in the millions and a readership of many times higher than that.

    It’s a mystery why there’s not that sort of respect for the medium here… no one though it odd that Action Comics sold more than Time or Life back during WWII. There could be GOOD soap opera or action/adventure strips for people who like romance novels or men’s adventure novels (Ah, those taught me so much about nudity and guns as a youth).

    The difficulty of distribution is one reason… it’s harder to move something economically from New York to California than from Paris to the rest of France, but still.

47. kanomi
    August 14th, 2008 at 2:51 am [Reply]

    That New Yorker interviewer was terrible, he just emailed some questions, did no follow-up questions based on your answers, didn’t introduce you or the material with any clarity or intelligence. Total phone-in.

    His jogging strip was equally pointless and inane.

48. James Brooks
    August 14th, 2008 at 6:43 am [Reply]

    Speaking as a daily newspaper copy editor and layout designer, I have to agree with Fuzzmaster’s comment (16). I’d also mention that our comics page comes pre-designed, loaded with the comics that the newspaper pays for, all nice and ready in a PDF that’s dropped on the page before we get started working on the rest of the paper. It’s just one page, and it’s black and white — the easiest page of my day to create.

    The Sunday comics don’t go through us — they’re simply printed ahead of time by the magical press faries. I’d love to see us run more comics, but at the same time, I imagine that it costs quite a bit of money in terms of licensing, etc. to get them in the first place. I don’t know much about that, and I can’t say much about that. But as Fuzzmaster said — papers nationwide are focusing on unique, local coverage, and comics can easily be found online. I imagine that we’ll eventually find an equilibrium where the syndicates realize they can’t charge as much because folks are reading them online and papers are willing to cut them from print, but until then, comics sections are going to continue to shrink, I think.

49. rotts
    August 14th, 2008 at 7:07 am [Reply]

    I grew up reading the comics in the Chicago Tribune in the 40s (but the Herald American and Sun Times also had plenty of them, and the Daily News published its comics section on Saturday since it didn’t offer a Sunday edition). I was a paper boy, could you tell? Have been a daily reader for almost 60 years. Yes, “Smoky Stover” sucked, but I loved “The Teeny Weenies” as a child.

    FYI – the Columbus (OH) Dispatch still offers a page-and-a-half of comics daily, and some additional ones on Sunday. It periodically reviews the slate, and recently offered its readers a choice of comics to replace one that they were retiring. Options were: “Frazz”, “Pearls Before Swine” and one other I can’t remember. Readers chose “Pearls”, althought I voted for “Frazz”.

50. rotts
    August 14th, 2008 at 7:08 am [Reply]

    OOPS, that’s “although”, not “althought”.

51. Sandy
    August 14th, 2008 at 8:01 am [Reply]

    I haven’t seen it in about a year, but the Record in Bergen County, NJ used to have 2.5 pages of comics. I didn’t realize comics sections were so skimpy normally, until I tried reading other papers!

    “Runners” looks quite promising, hahaha. A new classic.

52. Ducky
    August 14th, 2008 at 8:07 am [Reply]

    #4
    Comic Relief and Funny Stuff were both great mags in the 90s, if I remember right. I have a pretty decent collection.

    They printed some of the more popular strips of the time, Calvin and Hobbes, Dilbert, FBOFW, and a lot of small time stuff and some good editorial cartoons.

53. JonboyDC
    August 14th, 2008 at 9:23 am [Reply]

    Comic Relief! I’ve been trying to remember the name of that magazine for weeks.

54. billytheskink
    August 14th, 2008 at 9:49 am [Reply]

    Another Houstonian here.

    In the last 5 years, I’ve watched the Chronicle comics page shrink by half (4 pages to essentially just 2). I haven’t watched my comics dissapear quietly, but my angry letters and e-mails have all been answered with a form response saying “read the comics online”.
    I’m near the point to where I’ll do that, and near the point where I will cancel my Chronicle subscription.

    I grasp the economic problems facing newspapers andwhy that’s lead to the shrinking comics page (in fact, I had it explained to me by a Chronicle sales rep when I griped at him about not being able to read PreTeena…), but I really don’t understand how some other stuff remains in the paper.

    Shelby Hodge’s columns about hobknobbing with rich people or Mary Worth?
    They are both boring, but only one is entertainingly so.

55. The Party Sim
    August 14th, 2008 at 11:23 am [Reply]

    Poor Sunpapers. I heard on the radio yesterday that they were dropping the Maryland section on weekdays, and combining the Business section into the Main News section. And dropping 100 jobs. Yet they use this time frame to launch “b” — obviously they saved money on naming it.

    OTOH, I dropped the Sunpapers five years ago, read all my comics online, get news from tv and radio and online, and if I need a paper, pick up an Examiner. So I have no great love for Baltimore media. Or perhaps I should say Baltimore media has no great love for us.

56. Kilgore T.
    August 14th, 2008 at 12:20 pm [Reply]

    Josh, I cannot believe you failed to mention the late, great Aldo Kelrast! Have you forgotten him already?

57. Sister Sestina
    August 14th, 2008 at 1:18 pm [Reply]

    The Sunday L.A. Times has two four-page comic sections — completely separated by the multi-page sheaves of advertisements obscuring them from view. The management is obviously counting on the determination of the comics-lover to plough through the commercial dreck, and selling the space based on that theory…but honestly, the strips get buried so deep you’re lucky if you find one section, let alone both. (Mind you I haven’t checked on the Sundays lately, and the newspaper has been doing such radical cutting and compressing of sections that this may no longer be true…)

58. baltolibrarian
    August 14th, 2008 at 2:28 pm [Reply]

    Josh,

    I LOVE loved your interview with Zach. So perfect.

    What will you do with all your fame now?

    Baltolibrarian

59. Michael
    August 14th, 2008 at 8:20 pm [Reply]

    Great New Yorker interview. But a key reason lots of us stopped reading FBOFW was because she killed off that dog without a backward glance. (No, we still haven’t forgotten.) Worse, it was done to save that most tedious and annoying April.

60. Wendy
    August 16th, 2008 at 9:00 am [Reply]

    Josh, that interview: Priceless!

All the cool kids…

…buy Comics Curmudgeon merchandise!

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