Comic page changes for the week

» The Cheboygan Daily Tribune (MI) is adding Doonesbury and Mallard Fillmore to their editorial page.

» The News-Review (OR) has reinstated Beetle Bailey after cutting it four weeks ago after reader protest.

» The San Francisco Chronicle has added Candorville to their daily line-up. Candorville already runs in their Sunday line-up.

» Not a change per se, but an interesting profile of an 82 year-old gentleman who takes his paper (The Gazette in Colorado Springs) very seriously. If you want to know who keeps some of those “legacy” strips in the paper, his name is Bill.

UPDATE: I also have been told that Tundra also runs in the San Francisco Chronicle starting yesterday. Tundra also picked up the New York Daily News last month.

6 thoughts on “Comic page changes for the week

  1. We (The Gazette) ran that column the day after we shrank the paper to 1 section of news, 1 section of sports/business and 1 tab-size section of comics/puzzles/classifieds with a lifestyle-themed, no-jump cover.

    Readers are not amused.

    In order to preserve comics (there was talk of going to 1 tab-size page from 1.5 broadsheet pages) I had to agree to absorb the bridge column and Hocus Focus.

    That put 3 comics on space-available status. I may rotate them; we’ll see how readers react. The first 3 are F Minus, Rose is Rose and Get Fuzzy. So far, the Get Fuzzy fans seem the most ticked off! They miss Bucky.

  2. It’s too bad The Chronicle dropped Brevity. That panel is consistently funny.

    I’m glad they added The Knight Life. I remember years ago Keith Knight said he had been approached by syndicates a few times about his strip but he absolutely no interest in doing a daily syndicated feature. It’s interesting he’s finally made that move.

  3. I just noticed upon looking at the Tampa Tribune’s Sunday Comics page recently, it has been reduced from eight pages to six. I think the change started at the beginning of the year. Two Sunday-only strips were dropped resulting from this change – “Bio-Graphic” and “The Dinette Set”.

  4. “In order to preserve comics (there was talk of going to 1 tab-size page from 1.5 broadsheet pages) I had to agree to absorb the bridge column and Hocus Focus.”

    When the daily I worked for was going through a re-design some years ago, I was tapped to run some focus groups. The first was excellent, but then the people setting them up got lazy and signed up whoever was home when they called, which meant I found myself facing a group of retirees.

    But we had a nice talk and I asked them about the bridge column. They admitted that nobody under 60 plays the game and that people are generally too overscheduled to get up a regular league anyway.

    Now, my mother (83) does enjoy bridge, though I don’t know that she still plays since she moved to an assisted living center. When she was still back in our hometown, she had a group that met, and she used to get annoyed at those who didn’t know what the hell they were doing, but she accepted that, if you wanted to fill the tables, you had to admit the numskulls.

    This is not a hearty endorsement of the bridge column. My mom enjoys it, but, honestly? She doesn’t live or die by it, and, if she could find it on-line, she wouldn’t give a damn if it were in the paper.

  5. The Chronicle dropped all of the single panel strips which included Bliss as well as the ones mentioned in #1. Bizarro, which used to run in color, was moved to the inside of the section and is in black and white and smaller in size.

    For Better or For Worse was also dropped.

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