FitzSimmons: Comics are serious business for many readers
Sunday, August 10, 2008 9:51 AM PDT
By Cal FitzSimmons
Editor
Printable version
E-mail this articleIt probably won’t come as sad news to some of you but one of our comic strips is going away.
“Diesel Sweeties,” which features a robot in love with a human, ends its run today. It’s the newest strip on our Comics page and was designed to appeal to younger readers.
The “Diesel Sweeties” artist found fame of sorts on the Internet before creating a newspaper comic strip that was picked up by United Media. According to that syndicate “Diesel Sweeties” was being published in about 75 newspapers, which is pretty good for a strip that young, but the artist decided he’d rather go back to strictly online.
I’ve heard from several people who believe it was the worst strip in this paper. I thought the humor was consistently good, though admittedly a little strange at times.
Now, we’ll be trying another strip starting in Monday’s paper called “It’s All About You.” This comic isn’t particularly well drawn — intentionally so, I think — but the samples I’ve seen are consistently funny. It’s set mostly in a coffee shop. As I always say, give it a little time before lodging your complaints with me.
In the past, people have urged me to add older strips like “Hagar the Horrible” or “Marmaduke” but I think we already have enough of the classic strips like “Blondie,” “Family Circus,” “Peanuts” and “Beetle Bailey.”
Newer artists deserve a chance to have their strips become the next “Calvin and Hobbes,” or “Far Side.”
Something you might want to complain about right now is the absence of “Doonesbury.” We stopped running the strip last spring after creator Garry Trudeau took a lengthy sabbatical. We planned to continue “Doonesbury” after his return but decided to just let it go away for good.
I’ve heard from some people who aren’t happy with this decision, some saying we got rid of it because we didn’t agree with Trudeau’s politics.
That’s true only in the sense I think comic strips shouldn’t really be all that political. I think they should be funny (“Pearls Before Swine”) or touching (“For Better or for Worse”). Sure, there have been good political messages conveyed through comic strips over the years but when they become so entrenched in one side or the other of the political spectrum they become less interesting.
“Doonesbury” had other things about it that made it a candidate for the chopping block. It was more expensive than most of the other strips yet Trudeau took numerous vacations each year and we were too often paying a premium price to rerun old strips.
Also, “Doonesbury” ranked dead last on a comics survey we did a few years ago. It probably should have been dropped then but those political considerations kept it around. Still, I admit true “Doonesbury” fans are a loyal bunch and probably aren’t happy about it no longer being in The Daily News.
The strip that ranked first in that survey was “For Better or For Worse.” The artist who draws that strip, Lynn Johnston, originally planned to retire this fall and offer old material. I planned to drop the strip at that point. Fresh material is always preferable and we’re already rerunning old “Peanuts” strips.
But it now appears Johnston will continue to draw “For Better or for Worse,” offering a mixture of the old stuff and new material. We’ll see how that goes. If she continues to take her characters in new directions it’s worth sticking around to see what happens. If she’s planning to use mostly the old stuff we’ll need to look at it again.
I know comics can be serious business with readers. We need to offer a mixture of types that appeal to as broad an audience as possible and we’ll continue to do that, even if you’re less than amused by some of the decisions we make.
Originally published Aug. 10, 2008.
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