Good Grief! That Favorite Comic Strip Is Missing

When The Dallas Morning News pruned its stock tables, sports results and television listings this year, a consequence of sluggish advertising revenue and sharply rising paper costs, few readers felt aggrieved enough to complain.

But when the paper later staged a "Survivor"-style contest to cut a dozen of its 53 comic-strip offerings to save a precious half-page of space in the weekday paper, more than 40,000 readers voted their passions.

They lobbied successfully for comic comfort food like "Peanuts" and "For Better or For Worse," though other chestnuts like "Mary Worth" and "Steve Roper and Mike Nomad" faced a grimmer fate. They also railed against a newer strip aimed at a younger audience, "La Cucaracha," about a group of 20-somethings living in East Los Angeles, while exhibiting indifference toward another, "Jump Start," about a black family. Both comic strips were ultimately cut.

While the excisions in Dallas are among the most severe involving the funnies in recent memory, newspapers across the country have been engaging in similarly agonizing discussions about whether their current rosters of comics (sometimes four pages a day) are a luxury, given the current dreary economics of the newspaper business.

A handful of big daily newspapers - including The Salt Lake Tribune - have, like The Morning News, recently cut the number of comics they run, or shrunk the size of some strips so that they fit into a smaller space. Others, including The Houston Chronicle, have in recent months mounted or at least contemplated surveys like The Morning News's to gauge reader preferences - a precursor, they acknowledge, to possible future cuts.

In grudgingly taking up such questions, editors and publishers face a choice that has long been agonizing for papers that dared to replace longtime favorites. By cutting strips like "Brenda Starr" and "Judge Parker," as The Atlanta Journal-Constitution did this year as part of a comics shuffling, editors run the risk of alienating older readers, who are their core constituency. (Indeed, after a write-in campaign, The Journal-Constitution decided to give "Judge Parker" a reprieve.)

But if editors instead choose to cut newer strips like "La Cucaracha," or fail to make room for more cutting-edge work, they realize they may be bobbling a prime opportunity to lure the younger people who are critical to newspapers' future - and whose love for animated entertainment has been demonstrated by the television programs (including "The Simpsons" and "King of the Hill") and movies ("Finding Nemo") that they watch and the books (graphic novels) that they read.

"I think newspapers need some percentage of attraction to young readers to get them interested, get them hooked, get them off the Internet," said Scott Adams, the creator of "Dilbert," the 15-year-old chronicle of cubicle culture that appears in 2,000 papers worldwide. "The comics page is their portal. And right now, they risk having no portal."

Lalo Alcaraz, an editorial cartoonist for the alternative newspaper LA Weekly, who has been drawing "La Cucaracha" for nearly two years, was more blunt about the generational scrimmage for space on the comics page.

"If only science had not found a way to revive dead cartoonists and keep them alive, that would be helpful to me and a lot of guys coming up," he said in a veiled swipe at, among others, "Peanuts," which remains in syndicated reruns more than four years after the death of its creator, Charles M. Schulz.

Deliberations within newspapers about whether to cut comics, and if so how many and which, are set against a bleak economic backdrop. Not only have newspapers in general not partaken of the advertising rebound some other media, like television, have enjoyed, but publishers also are grappling with the unforeseen costs of covering a war in a year that also has the Olympics and a national election. Meanwhile, ominously, newsprint prices have risen steadily, jumping 10 percent in the last year, with another similar increase expected.

"We're struggling with both the cost of the comics we buy and the cost of the newsprint we use to run them,'' said Amanda Bennett, editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer, which is considering trimming the paper's two pages of comics each weekday. "We think readers still care a lot about the comics. Although in the long term, we're thinking of them in ways like stock agate, which had usefulness, but the usefulness is dropping off.''

The Inquirer cut one comic earlier this year, although that move had more to do with extracting concessions from the syndicates that license such strips - sometimes for as much as several hundred dollars a week per strip - rather than as a paper-saving measure. The Inquirer asked The Washington Post Writers Group, whose offerings include Berkeley Breathed's "Opus,'' to make one of its strips available free to the paper for at least six months, a request first reported by Editor & Publisher. When The Post Writers Group balked, The Inquirer made good on its promise to drop one comic strip, eliminating a relative newcomer called "That's Life,'' said Karisue Wyson, a sales manager for the group.

For The Salt Lake Tribune, which cut its weekday comics section from three pages to two late last year, the issue was not about cutting the number of pages in the paper but about competing priorities in a zero-sum world.

"It was simply consuming, we felt, too much of our news hole," said Terry Orme, managing editor for news and business. "We needed some more space for our features section. And we couldn't go up in space."

Seizing an opportunity to weed out some of its oldest strips, the paper announced late last year that it had retired "Judge Parker" and "Mary Worth," among others. Readers then loosed a fusillade of e-mail messages, phone calls and faxes in response, some of them invoking breakfast-table chatter with their grandparents.

"Some callers said they liked the little stories that continued from day to day, because 'they are like little soap operas that don't take long to read,' " Connie Coyne, the paper's reader advocate, wrote on Nov. 22. "And many readers said they liked the strips because they emphasized American values of hard work, truthfulness, sincerity, loyalty and love of family."

A few weeks later, the two strips were restored. A relatively new strip, "Out of the Gene Pool," was pulled instead.

"You're trying to get the best of both worlds here - maintain your base, and grow," said Mr. Orme. "It's a difficult balancing act."

While acknowledging that comics have long served as a gateway to newspapers for young people, Mr. Orme expressed confidence that his paper could continue to find other attractions for them, including using that space for articles about movies and music.

But at The Morning News, Mike Peters, an editor who writes a regular column on comics, said he worried that his paper was squandering a crucial opportunity by letting a survey of current readers - more than half of them over 55 - wield the axe so disproportionately against newer strips. "It's a fatal flaw of a survey like this," he said. "One of the goals of reaching out to your market and soliciting that kind of input is that you want to have strips in there that appeal to the readers you don't have."

(As part of the process, the paper did add one new comic strip, "In the Bleachers.")

James M. Moroney III, the publisher and chief executive of The Morning News, said he saw no downside for young readers, and instead cited the potential benefits, for readers both old and young, of a thinner paper.

"All the research we do says that to the reader, to the consumer, 'more' isn't necessarily better," Mr. Moroney said. "They want us to edit the paper down fairly tightly."

So passionate was the response to the comics poll in Dallas, particularly among longtime readers, that late last month the paper staged a runoff to restore one of the fallen dozen. The contest was won - by a margin of just 55 of the 15,000 votes cast - by "Love Is ", a treacly one-panel strip of aphorisms that has been pasted to refrigerators for decades.

Among those who cast one of the votes for "Love" was Christopher Kratovil, 30, a lawyer who told the paper he had not paid much attention to that comic, or any other, until falling in love himself two years ago.

"My wife will clip out 'Love Is ' and put it in my wallet, my briefcase, the front seat of my car," Mr. Kratovil said last week in a telephone interview.

Asked how he had felt during the two weeks last month that the strip was out of the paper, Mr. Kratovil said: "It was the moral equivalent of not having a morning coffee. I could live without it, but my life is much more pleasant with it."

My local newspaper did not reduce its comics content, already pretty low at only one page, but it did change out about 10 'less popular' comics, replacing them with so-called 'more timely' strips. The newer comics are uniformly drawn, and quite B-O-R-I-N-G.

> Lalo Alcaraz, ... was more blunt ...
> "If only science had not found a way to revive dead
> cartoonists and keep them alive, that would be helpful
> to me and a lot of guys coming up," he said in a veiled
> swipe at, among others, "Peanuts," which remains in
> syndicated reruns more than four years after the death
> of its creator, Charles M. Schulz.

I have a relative who does single-panel cartoons for a
liberal rag I won't name, but because of dead peanuts,
he's glad he's not in the "strip" game.

One of the local liberal newspapers here runs TWO
different Peanuts strips on Sundays.

"My wife will clip out 'Love Is ' and put it in my wallet, my briefcase, the front seat of my car," Mr. Kratovil said last week in a telephone interview.

I'm gonna hurl!

"La Cucaracha" is a very un-funny anti-Bush strip. "Boondocks" is hilarious in comparison.

"Pearls Before Swine" is the best new strip I've seen lately.

"Cathy" makes me hurl. The only strip in my paper I never read.

I guess they finally have gotten a new plot line, with Cathy getting married to Irving. That only took 20 years.

That's what I like about Jump Start and For Better or For Worse; the fact that the characters actually age in them, and that means different plot lines.

I guess they finally have gotten a new plot line, with Cathy getting married to Irving. That only took 20 years.

That almost got me interested, but in the end I decided that after 20 years of hearing her whine I hated her too much to care.

I read "For Better or For Worse"-it's good sometimes, it's ok sometimes, sometimes it's PC and sucks. Maybe that has something to do with them being Canadian.

I like "Jump Start", because I also have 2 young children, and although the main characters are black, it's not an "it's a black thing, you wouldn't understand" strip. It's about family and friends.

The "Baby Blues" characters are also the same age as my kids and growing. It may be a little closer to our life because the mother stays at home.

Printed newspapers are dinosaurs, and that would still be true even if the editorial boards and reporting staffs were uniformly politically conservative and morally and culturally traditionalist (which they are not!). Why would people want to purchase and read a bulky newspaper when other media provide the same, if not better, information more quickly via radio, television, and the Internet? I dropped my subscription to The Dallas Morning News seven years ago, in part because I disliked its liberal slant. Why should I bother with news delivered by liberals when I can read FR, WorldNetDaily, The Washington Times, etc. on line or listen to Rush, Hannity, Savage, etc.?

1. Comics
2. Crossword puzzle
3. cryptograph
4. word jumble

That's all I can think of. Yeah, they're all available online too, but it feels better with a pen in your hand.

the fact that the characters actually age in them, and that means different plot lines.

I grew up reading Gasoline Alley, along with Little Orphan Annie, Dick Tracy, Li'l Abner, Flash Gordon, the Katzenjammer Kids (or the Captain and the Kids in a parallel universe), Barney Google, Ella Cinders, Maggie and Jiggs, and such like.

But now Skeezix is about 95 years old and Uncle Walt is about 140. They have aged well.

Here's a little free advice for newspaper editors who want to save money and get rid of unpopular comics: drop Doonesbury; it lost its last traces of humor about 1971

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.