If you turn to today’s comics pages, you’ll notice some changes.
Some comics are missing. Some new ones are there instead. And all the comics on the page are bigger!
It’s our new comics lineup, the result of the first complete reassessment and revamping of the comics in nearly a decade.
We have dropped 10 comics, including one, The Quigmans, that was only in Friday’s paper.
The rest that are gone are:
Apartment 3-G
Cathy
Dennis the Menace
Marmaduke
Mary Worth
Pardon My Planet
Sally Forth
Slylock Fox
Ziggy
With reader input, we have added nine comics:
Baby Blues
Between Friends
Cul de Sac
F Minus
Mother Goose & Grimm
Mutts
Non Sequitur
Red and Rover
Speed Bump
Last spring, a few comics lovers in the newsroom told Editor Linda Austin that the comics pages had become stagnant. She agreed, and she told them to form a committee and do something about it.
The committee was just getting started when both Johnny Hart and Brant Parker died within days of each other in April. The committee decided that that was an appropriate time to discontinue B.C. and Wizard of Id. Hart created B.C., and he was the writer and Parker was the illustrator of Wizard of Id.
So before the complete comics survey, the committee ran a reader mini-survey to choose successors to those two strips. Get Fuzzy was the clear winner, but there was no clear second-place strip, so we decided to leave that space open to audition new strips as part of our larger survey.
The committee created a ballot so readers could vote online or by mail. Voters were asked to list as many as five comics they loved and five that they loathed, and to pick no more than two potential replacement strips from the 24 we auditioned over the summer.
About 4,000 readers responded.
The survey was unscientific, and we knew that many people would vote only once, while others would vote multiple times. Still, the survey gave us a pretty good idea which comics were the most popular.
Most voters simply voted, but others included heartfelt letters or copies of their own favorite comics, or they wrote short notes on the ballot itself. We read them all. And thank you for sending samples of other comics to consider.
The most common theme of those letters and notes was that the comics were too small. Over the years, as the pages of the Herald-Leader and other newspapers have gotten smaller, so have the comics.
Well, the committee decided to change that. The strips are roughly 10 percent larger than they were last week. We think you’ll notice the difference.
As for the survey itself, it probably will surprise no one that the most popular comic was For Better or for Worse. Nearly 56 percent of voters listed it among the comics they loved. In our last full comics survey, in 1998, 65 percent of voters listed For Better or For Worse among their favorites.
This time, Zits was second, with 52 percent, followed by Pickles, Blondie and Dilbert. The other top vote-getters were Beetle Bailey, Doonesbury, Family Circus and Garfield.
Here are some answers to other questions you might have about the comics changes:
Question: What have you done to my comics?
Answer: The Herald-Leader has assessed and revamped the comics pages for the first time in nearly a decade.
We asked readers to list the comics they loved most and hated most, and we used the responses as a starting point.
We decided to drop some of the comics that were the least popular, some that received relatively few votes in either the “love” or the “hate” category, and a couple that we decided were no longer carrying their weight.
We also redesigned the comics pages, and we were able to make all the strips — and the crossword puzzle — roughly 10 percent bigger.
Q: Why are you dumping my favorite comic?
A: The first eternal truth of the comics page is that any change in the lineup is going to anger readers, and the number of angry readers is proportional to the number of comics changes. Yet, our comics committee felt strongly that our lineup needed freshening.
Q: How did you choose the new comics?
A: Our committee sorted through samples of dozens of comics, including some that have been around for a decade or more and a few that are brand-new. We narrowed the list to 24, and we began auditions during the summer, running each one for at least two weeks at a time on the comics pages.
Samples also were available online.
Once the poll was completed, we used the results as a guide to help us choose new comics — a total of nine.
The second eternal truth of the comics page is the rule of familiarity: In a comics poll, the leading vote-getters will be the well-established comics — partly because they’re consistently good, partly because they’re familiar to most readers. In our poll, Non Sequitur and Mother Goose & Grimm received by far the most votes in the audition. Both of them have run for years in our Sunday comics.
So we added those two strips daily and three other leading vote-getters — Baby Blues, Between Friends, Mutts — but we also took note of some newer strips that polled well considering that most people had never seen them. They are Red and Rover, Cul de Sac, F Minus and Speed Bump.
Q: How many people voted?
A: We received 4,289 ballots. Given that some people voted more than once, we estimate that 4,000 people voted.
Q: Will the Sunday comics change?
A: Yes. Starting Sunday, the comics will largely reflect the new daily comics. Fox Trot, which became a Sunday-only comic in January, has been dropped. Opus, another Sunday-only strip, will remain.
Q: Why won’t you bring back B.C. and/or The Wizard of Id?
A: Our comics ballot included write-in space for readers to vote for a favored comic that wasn’t on our list of 24 candidates. The committee planned to consider any write-in comic that had a groundswell of support.
That groundswell never happened. The leading write-in candidates, B.C. and Peanuts, received barely more than 100 votes, and The Wizard of Id didn’t even receive that many.
Q: How long will this new comics lineup last?
A: We don’t know. If an originating cartoonist dies or retires, we are likely to discontinue that comic. Also, we will pay attention to reader feedback and our instincts in any decision to drop or add a comic strip.
Q: Where can I find the comics you dropped?
A: You can find most of the dropped comics on www.kentucky.com/comics for at least the next month.
Q: Whom can I talk to about the changes?
A: You can Angela Allen at (859) 231-3214, or leave a message at (859) 231-1368 or e-mail comics@herald-leader.com.
Recent Comments