The New Advance Local Comics Pages Roll Call
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We have had a couple Advance Locals (MLive Media and The Post-Standard) inform us of their coming revisions to the comics pages with Jim Glick, Director of Enterprise Content & Design for Print at Advance Local, giving further details in comments at both items linked above.
Now The Cleveland Plain Dealer/cleveland.com has given their readers a complete rundown of the coming changes to their comics pages with what appears to be the complete Advance Nearly Four Dozen of daily and Sunday print comics for the newspaper group.
The Cleveland Plain Dealer is getting a jump on other Advance Local papers by beginning the change tomorrow, Tuesday March 4, 2025:
I’ve hinted at this for almost two years, and on Tuesday it will be reality: The Plain Dealer will feature 65 additional comics on weekdays and Saturdays, with 16 in print and 49 in the digital edition of the newspaper.
That brings the total to nearly 100. And we’ll feature 21 additional comics on Sundays, with 15 in print and six in the e-newspaper.
In explaining the changes The Plain Dealer readers will experience Editor Chris Quinn lists all the comics that will be appearing in the daily and Sunday editions
The Daily Cartoonist has assembled that roster and lists them alphabetically below for your convenience.
Key to abbreviations: d = daily only; S = Sunday only; d&S = daily and Sunday.
AMS=Andrews McMeel Syndication; CS=Creators Syndicate; KFS=King Features Syndicate; TCA=Tribune Content Agency.
Adam @ Home by Rob Harrell (d) AMS
Animal Crackers by Mike Osbun (d) TCA
Baby Blues by Rick Kirkman and Jerry Scott (d&S) AMS
Baldo by Hector D. Cantú and Carlos Castellanos (d) AMS
B.C. by Mastroianni and Hart (d&S) CS
Beetle Bailey by Greg and Mort Walker (d&S) KFS
Big Nate by Lincoln Peirce (d) AMS
Bizarro by Wayno and Dan Piraro (d) KFS
Blondie by Dean Young and John Marshall (d&S) KFS
The Born Loser by Art and Chip Sansom (d&S) AMS
Bound and Gagged by Dana Summers (d) TCA
Close to Home by John McPherson (d&S) AMS
Crabgrass by Tauhid Bondia (d&S) AMS
Crankshaft by Tom Batiuk and Dan Davis ((d&S) AMS
Curtis by Ray Billingsley (d&S) KFS
Dennis the Menace by Scott Ketcham, Marcus Hamilton, and Ron Ferdinand (d&S) KFS
Doonesbury by G. B. Trudeau (d&S) AMS
The Family Circus by Bil and Jeff Keane (d&S) KFS
For Better or For Worse by Lynn Johnston ((d&S) AMS
Frank and Ernest by Thaves (d&S) AMS
Frazz by Jef Mallett (d) AMS
Garfield by Jim Davis (d&S) AMS
Get Fuzzy by Darby Conley (d&S) AMS
Hägar the Horrible by Dik and Chris Browne (Gary Hallgren) (d&S) KFS
Hi and Lois by Brian and Greg Walker (and Eric Reaves) (d&S) KFS
JumpStart by Robb Armstrong (d&S) AMS
The Lockhorns by Bunny Hoest and John Reiner (S) AMS
Luann by Greg (and Karen) Evans (d&S) AMS
Mallard Fillmore by Loren Fishman (S) KFS
Marmaduke by Brad and Phil Anderson (d&S) AMS
Mother Goose and Grimm by Mike Peters (d) AMS
Mutts by Patrick McDonnell (d&S) KFS
Off the Mark by Mark Parisi (d) AMS
(Classic) Peanuts by Charles M. Schulz (d&S) AMS
Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis (d&S) AMS
Pickles by Brian Crane (d&S) AMS
Prince Valiant by Mark Schultz and Thomas Yeates (S) KFS
Red and Rover by Brian Basset (d) AMS
Rose is Rose by Don Wimmer (S) AMS
Sally Forth by Francesco Marciuliano and Jim Keefe (d&S) KFS
Speed Bump by Dave Coverly (d) CS
Wizard of Id by Hart, Mastroianni, and Parker (d&S) CS
Ziggy by Tom Wilson II ((S) AMS
Zits by Jerry Scott and Jim Borgman (d&S) KFS
Curiously the Hocus Focus puzzle (daily only) is listed among the comic strips but not the Jumble puzzle. And though The Plain Dealer (PD) currently runs Uncle Art’s Funland in the Sunday Funnies section it is not mentioned as being kept or dropped.
The losses:
We have some weekday comics that will move from the print edition to the e-newspaper: Rhymes with Orange, Mary Worth, Non Sequitur, Free Range, Flo & Friends, Judge Parker, Prickly City and Wumo.
Two comics are moving from the Sunday print edition to the online newspaper: Frazz and Mary Worth. Three strips that have been appearing Sundays will drop from the newspaper, but you can still read them through cleveland.com: Flo & Friends, Non Sequitur and Red & Rover.
Which brings up another question – do the cartoonists make more money for their comics appearing in the e-newspapers than the pittance they get from the websites running the Comics Kingdom and GoComics platforms?
The Advance Locals e-newspapers are a major part of the expansion:
The big [daily] gain is in the e-newspaper: Drabble, F Minus, Grand Avenue, Phoebe & Her Unicorn, Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, Mallard Fillmore, The Buckets, Wallace the Brave, Dustin, Arlo & Janis, The Grizwells, The Phantom, Loose Parts, Rubes, The Lockhorns, Ziggy, Daddy’s Home, Momma, Andy Capp, Arctic Circle, Fred Bassett, Marvin, Nancy, Rose is Rose, Gil Thorp, Candorville, One Big Happy, Over the Hedge, 9 Chickweed Lane, Breaking Cat News, Crock, Cul de Sac, Cornered, Reality Check, Heathcliff, Diamond Lil, The Fusco Brothers, Mark Trail, Monty, Six Chix, Take it from the Tinkersons, The Duplex, Tiger, Gasoline Alley, Spectickles, Pardon my Planet, In the Bleachers and Carpe Diem.
You’ll also get an extra page of comics in Sunday’s e-newspaper: Tank McNamara, Foxtrot, Mother Goose & Grimm, Rhymes with Orange, Drabble and Rex Morgan MD.
Losing the continuity strips makes sense since Advance newspapers have only three or four delivery days including Sundays) and the extra “catch-up” pages where delivery editions printed the missing days’ comics are being done away with:
… we are ending the “catch-up” comics we’ve been publishing since 2013, when we stopped home delivery on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Wednesdays and Fridays, we’ve published Diversions Plus, with the comics from non-delivery days. With all the new comics we are publishing in the digital edition, we hope readers will go there when the newspaper is not delivered.
Yeah, not a small number of the gag comics have week long themed connections, and For Better or For Worse is about as much continuity as the soaps at times. Some Advance papers ran the Sunday The Phantom and it is a shame those separate stories weren’t included. But praise to whoever decided to keep Sunday’s Prince Valiant!
Some other comics changes for The Plain Dealer readers:
To make this work, we do have some changes you’ll need to get used to, but I suspect that in a month, you won’t remember them.
One is that the order the comics appear will change quite a bit.
Another is that the daily strips will be smaller in print. We’ve published them bigger in The Plain Dealer than our sister newspapers, and for the good of the order, we need to adjust. Of course, if you read them online, you can make them as big as you need.
The opposite will happen on Sundays. As our designers say, our Sunday comics layout has been a “hot mess,” and the new layout will be much easier on your eyes.
That suggests that the daily and the Sunday pages will have identical layouts across the group.
Another question: Will the Sunday Funny sections, always printed ahead of schedule, all be printed in one location and shipped across the country to the various presses or will the Sunday sections be printed wherever the local papers print their current comic supplements?
The PD goes on to mention the addition of puzzles (when Jumble is finally mentioned being added to Sundays), games, and columns both in print and in the e-newspaper.
Again, go here for the Editor’s Letter.
As for diversity…
Of the 44 print comics three have women contributors: For Better or For Worse reruns are by Lynn Johnston, Luann is ghost written by Karen Evans, and Bunny Hoest produces The Lockhorns.
There are also three of the 44 print comics created by Black cartoonists: Crabgrass, Curtis, and JumpStart.
Baldo is created by Hispanic cartoonists.
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