Update On Philadelphia Newspapers Cutting Strips

Mark Tatulli wrote into CR to clue me on to this article at a Philadelphia-focused blog that better details recent cuts in the city's newspaper strip offerings. It's apparently more than one paper, and there have been more than four strips feeling the axe if you broaden the context past this week into recent history.

The article reports that the Inquirer cut Sally Forth, Overboard, Non Sequitur, Hagar The Horrible, Ziggy, Rex Morgan, MD and Tatulli's own Lio. The Daily News rid itself of several cartoons including Family Tree and Candorville.

The post also says that Tatulli is local (I don't have any reason to disbelieve them, although for some reason I thought he was in Vermont), which when combined with the fact that they even supported his early offering Bent Halos makes the decision to drop Lio particularly loopy. Signe Wilkinson does Family Tree, and she is of course a huge editorial cartoonist presence in that city. There was a time when a local cartoonist doing a nationally syndicated strip not only stayed in the paper, they received prime position and the page was built around that effort. I'm also particularly sad for Non Sequitur and Candorville, two strips in the prime of their syndication lives that contrast sharply with pleasingly done legacy strips.

It seems to me, and this is just a hunch, that there's such a massive disconnect between readers and the newspapers now that almost anything can be done on the comics page without passionate reprisal. Where 30 years ago dropping what the newsroom considered a paper's least significant comic would trigger a flurry of letters and phone calls, now people just shrug their shoulders and, over time, read fewer papers.
 
posted 4:30 am PST | Permalink
 

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