The Columbus Dispatch has given notice, at the bottom of a column touting its e-edition extras,
that the hard copy will no longer carry the daily Peanuts comic strip.
Reason? – $$$$.
Another change will affect one comic. We are dropping the daily Peanuts cartoon this month. We will keep the Sunday Peanuts strip for now, but the daily strip has run its course.
It has been in reruns since its creator, Charles M. Schulz, died more than 18 years ago — and it remains the most expensive comic strip we purchase (emphasis added) on your behalf.
We can’t justify spending thousands of dollars a year on a comic strip that has been in rerun status for nearly a generation. (We ran this proposal by our Reader Advisory Board, and many said they were surprised we kept it this long. Many other papers dropped it years ago.)
As noted, Peanuts will continue to run in their Sunday Funnies “for now”.
No reason to run any rerun strip. For Better or Worse, Peanuts, Doonesbury, Herman. Let the next generation in
Doonesbury still has new Sundays.
I agree with those who think that such comic strips as Peanuts and such cartoon panels as The Family Circus should be dropped by more newspapers. While I’m a fan of such cartoons as Dennis the Menace and comic strips as Beetle Bailey, I think that both have gone downhill since their creators passed away. Same goes for Peanuts when it began to be published in reruns; one could say that it was the comic pages’ to television reruns such as Here’s Lucy and the Brady Bunch. (If anyone wants to see reruns of Peanuts or any of the others when they were being drawn by their original creators, there are plenty of book collections and websites which have them.)
There’s no reason for newspapers to be printing reruns of ANY comic strip. If newspaper still have any comic-strip purpose, it would be to introduce the readers to NEW strips. And the entire Peanuts archive is available on GoComics going all the way back to October 2, 1950.