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One Year Until Baby Blues Ends

Published: March 22, 2026 1 minute 18 comments

Rick Kirkman, Jerry Scott, and GoComics are announcing that Baby Blues will go strictly rerun beginning next March of 2027 and will be alternating new and rerun material from now until then.

Rachel DeSchepper for the GoComics blog reports:

All good things must come to an end, and that’s the case for one of our long-standing favorites, “Baby Blues,” which is phasing out new material after 37 years in syndication and more than 13,000 strips. 

Starting last week and for the next six months, newspapers and GoComics will alternate one week of new content with one week of reruns. After that, you’ll get a new Sunday strip every other week. And finally, in March of next year, we’ll officially syndicate the feature in full reruns, just like “Peanuts” and “For Better or For Worse.”

Baby Blues by Rick Kirkman and Jerry Scott – January 7, 1990

Rick Kirkman explains that it is the result of The Cartoonists’ Curse:

[F]or Kirkman, the struggle comes from a physical place. “When we started, my drawing tool of choice was colored pencil, which gave the strip a unique look,” he says. “Unfortunately, colored pencil puts a lot of stress on the thumb and index finger. Over the years, that created very painful arthritis in that hand.” The switch to digital drawing helped ease the pain to an extent, but the workload has simply become untenable.

Also noted is an aside that Zits, Jerry Scott’s comic strip with cartoonist Jim Borgman, is doing the same:

Jerry Scott … is also ending his second feature “Zits” in a similar manner.

Hat tip

Charles Brubaker

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Comments 18

  1. Does this mean Zits is going full rerun or are they just referring to the recent Sunday-only hybrid it’s in? Is this the first time the GoComics blog has mentioned a KFS comic strip? Is the ending of this and the weekday Zits so close together coincidence? It would be the world’s largest coincidence. How much of going rerun is their idea and how much is the syndicate’s? This leaves so many questions we may never know the answers to.

      1. But when will we ever see the official end of Gasoline Alley? There’s a current daily G.A. arc where Walt Wallet is dreaming of going to heaven but is ending up in heck or something like that.

  3. My day is ruined, along with a small portion of every day hereafter.

  4. Isn’t Get Fuzzy still appearing in a handful of newspapers in 100% rerun mode?

    Doonesbury since 2014 is daily reruns and first run Sundays.

    Hope Garfield doesn’t do the same thing when it gets past its 50th anniversary in 2028.

  5. Newspaper comic strip reruns have become the retirement package & health insurance of retired cartoonists.
    The comic pages are becoming the MeTv of the newspaper.
    Unfortunately, do newspaper readers even care if they’re reading reruns? Do they even realize it?
    Off the top of my head, strips that are in partial or full-time reruns: Pickles, Mutts, Zits, For Better or For Worse, Baby Blues, Peanuts, Get Fuzzy, Family Circus (redrawn previously published panels) … and most likely more. I’m certain we see newspaper comic strip reruns that we aren’t aware of.
    The possibility of seeing any new newspaper comic strips is pretty slim at this point. Syndicates are obviously not willing to risk losing newspaper clients by discontinuing a strip that is decades old. Will newspaper editors get a rerun strip for a lesser price? If so, they’ll probably keep it on their comics page to save some money. If a new strip launches, there is now even less open space than ever before.
    If you’re in, you’re in. If you’re not, you’re most likely never going to be.
    I figure this is the point where the Munchkin Coroner comes in and declares the profession of creating a newspaper comic strip “really most sincerely dead.”

    1. Add Doonesbury to that list.

    2. The sad truth is that editors are increasingly made irrelevant in comics decisions. A great many of those decisions are being made at the corporate level in newspaper groups. The days when editors could tailor their comics page with features that they thought would appeal to their readers’ particular demographics and tastes are rapidly disappearing, along with the desire to meet those needs.

    3. Mutts had a brief period of reruns I think last year while Patrick McDonnell finished a book but it’s been all new for some time now and will be for the foreseeable future.

      1. Mutts had 23 new strips in 2024, 7 new strips (and 5 reworked strips) in 2025, and 2 new strips (and 1 reworked strip) so far this year.

  6. How about having The Born Loser comic strip end in reruns or for good? Since it’s no longer a popular comic strip. I think in the near future in the 2030s or 2040s Chip Samson will call it quits and the Born Loser will end in reruns or end for good since the outdated 1960s jokes of The Born Loser about weight shaming, work bullying, outdated women shaming jokes, Mexican jokes are not acceptable anymore.

    Also I’d also like to see Andy capp comic strip end since it’s based on outdated 1950s British jokes that’s no longer acceptable.

    Sooner or later other comic strips like the family circus, Dennis the menace USA will end in reruns.

    1. Another strip I wish ended is Arlo and Janis.

    2. If you don’t like a comic strip, why read it? What good comes from bashing other people’s work?
      I imagine the majority of people read comics online, where it’s easy to pick-and-choose which comics you are exposed to each day.

      A welcomed outcome of all this could be newspapers not wanting to publish comic strips they’ve paid for once before. But if they’re getting reruns at a discount, I wouldn’t count on that happening. The quickest path to that outcome would be for newspaper subscribers to be made aware of reruns and they demand new comic strips.

    3. What makes you think it is “no longer a popular comic strip.”
      The Born Loser was once said to be in “over 1,000” newspapers, that had been downgraded to “approximately 1,000” newspapers. With the death of newspapers and some newspaper groups going King Features exclusively that has probably cut the circulation figure down to seven or eight hundred (maybe less). Still among the upper echelon of newspaper comic circulation figures.

      In Jeffrey Lindenblatt’s latest Paper Trends of 2005 The Born Loser was in the top 20:
      https://comicstriphistory.com/category/paper-trends

  7. Maybe all major newspapers may drop in the future the comics pages and be like 2 major newspapers not carrying comics – The New York Times and the New York Post.

  8. As I’ve said before, when Schulz had his stroke, I prepared my editor, given that Sparky had been clear that he didn’t want anyone else doing his strip. When it ended, we were one of the five percent who offered readers something new in their NEWspaper. Oh well.

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