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Wiley Cuts Non Sequitur Workload

Published: July 1, 2026 1 minute 19 comments

GoComics’ newsletter reports that after nearly 35 years Wiley Miller will cut his daily workload in half.

Starting this week, Wiley Miller is adjusting his workload on his classic satire strip, “Non Sequitur.” New strips will still run Mondays and Wednesdays; Tuesday through Saturday will feature selected reprints pulled from the archive, starting with February 2000. Sundays continue exactly as they have for years: all-new, every week.

Miller has drawn the strip solo since it launched more than three decades ago. Asked what’s behind the change, his answer was pretty straightforward: “You mean other than age? ‘Non Sequitur’ will be 35 years old in February and for some reason, I continued to age with it.”

Wiley celebrated his 75th birthday this past April. He has been cartooning, editorially, since 1976.

Non Sequitur by Wiley – July 1, 2026

As stated the new schedule began this week with Monday June 29 new and Tuesday June 30 rerun.

The GoComics notice continues:

But don’t call this step back a retirement. Miller says he’ll use the extra time to focus on new content, along with a few graphic novel ideas that have been swirling around in his brain for years.

As for the reprints, Miller’s leaving the picks up to his editors—he wants to be surprised right along with readers. And after digging through the archive himself, Miller found the material holds up. “I was amazed at just how much of it is still relevant today,” he says. “If anything, things are worse now, which is always fodder for satire.”

Non Sequitur promo February 1992
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Comments 19

  1. One can hardly criticize a brilliant cartoonist who has already delayed his well-earned retirement by ten years, but I really don’t like the idea of yet another 50% re-run feature hogging column inches that could have been awarded to a new cartoonist. I was about to suggest consolidating the newly half-time “Non-Sequitur” with the already half-time “Rubes” to form one feature with 100% new material all week, but Wiley does strips, and Leigh does single panels, so the format logistics would never work.

    1. You can’t merge a strip with another syndicate, Andrews-McMeel owns Non Sequitur and Creators owns Rubes. It could be a Dan Piarro-Wayno Bizarro/Waynovision situation.

      1. Wiley Miller owns Non Sequitur and Leigh Rubin owns Rubes.
        Replacing “distributes” for “owns” in your comment would make it accurate.

    2. I am kind of ambivalent here as I think most folks won’t realize they are being served re-runs 2/3 of the time (dailies, anyhow) but agree that re-run strips make it a LOT harder for new folks to get their stuff out onto the pages.

      1. I agree that most readers won’t realize they’re reruns. (People still don’t know they’ve been seeing Get Fuzzy reruns for years.) But it’s another sign (as if one were needed) of the death knell of the comics page.

  2. He also did a comic strip titled FENTON. Which really ahead of it’s time. Wiley is one of the best!

    1. He also co-created another short-lived with Susan Dewar comic strip in the 90s called Us & Them.

      2. HOMER was part of the Non-Sequoiter strip.

      3. As noted in the provided link Homer spun off of Non Sequitur.

  3. Let me preface this by saying I love Wiley Miller. He has done so much to help other cartoonists, like let them sit in on “Non Sequitur” while he took a vacation. He has innovated comic strips and the way they are created and presented in the newspaper. We owe him a lot of credit.

    That’s why this news is quite a bit disappointing.
    Every time a cartoonist decides running reruns of their strip in the newspaper is the best route for them, other cartoonists are essentially being kept from debuting new comics on the comics pages.
    We can argue the state of newspapers, we can argue cartoonists get no retirement plan when it’s time for them to retire, but what about “sending the elevator back down”?
    No one has answered the question: “Do newspapers pay LESS for a comic strip rerun than a new comic strip?” Do newspaper editors even know they’re being offered reruns?
    If readers cared, they’d demand new content on the comics pages. Why pay a subscription to the newspaper when you can see the strips for free online?

    I’m frustrated comics pages are now the graveyard for what brought me to newspapers in the first place and the cartoonists I greatly admire are the ones who are killing the opportunity for other cartoonists to take their shot on the comics pages.

    Wiley, if you are reading this, I love you buddy. It’s just frustrating.

    1. What equally great new cartoonist do you have in mind to take an unequaled, even with reruns, cartoons place?

      1. Just compare the list of comics that have been selected to replace Big Nate. My two favorites would be Wallace the Brave and Breaking Cat News.

      2. Kim,
        Anything that is not a rerun. Comic strip proposals sitting on a syndicate editor’s desk that are not being considered because getting a new feature in newspapers has a ‘slim-to-none chance’ these days.

        I get it. Newspapers don’t want to pay for comics and these rerun comics (from all of the creators listed in the comments section and then some) are probably sold to newspapers at a discounted rate, which newspapers would LOVE. And I also understand that the average newspaper reader won’t recognize a repeated comic, so it wouldn’t matter. But it does matter. These cartoonists are leaving the comics pages worse than they found them. They aren’t sending the elevator back down. It’s shameful.

  4. Non Sequitur is the latest strip to cut back on new strips mixed in with reruns each week joining Pickles, Zits, and (in some papers daily while it cut back to Sunday) Big Nate.

    2. I forgot to mention Rubes by Leigh Rubin cut back to a few strips a week mixed with reruns.

      1. See my comment all the way at the top. Leigh releases new strips Sunday through Wednesday, the Thursday, Friday, and Saturday strips are re-runs (currently from 2015).

  5. As long as we still get Danae on Sundays.

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