What has become the local daily's weekly Sunday announcement of cuts in product or personnel today takes on the comics section, which has been reduced by 33 percent from six pages to four. Time was when the comics ran into some nice bulk, but time is what it is and that means newsprint is too expensive these days to be frittered away on comics, according to a bog post at the paper. The post didn't mention that comics also bear a certain cost even beyond the paper to print them."Beginning today, our Sunday comics section will be published as four pages instead of six to save newsprint costs," said the post. Last week we heard that longtime columnist Ben Beagle was a victim of budget concerns and for quite a while now we've seen the paper make downward adjustments in everything, especially overall quality.
I've never been much of a comics reader (and these days, I'm not much of a newspaper reader, either), but for those who have three or four pieces of the paper's variety that they lean on daily or weekly, this is yet another take-away. Gil Thorpe and Prince Valiant are gone (just when I get my Milford baseball cap) and kids' puzzles are disappearing (I don't suspect you'll hear a great wailing and gnashing teeth from all those kids breathlessly awaiting paper delivery at 6 a.m. so they can do the puzzle; they're probably under the covers texting).
And next week ...
I will really miss Prince Valiant after reading that comic for 40 years. It was the first "serious" comic I ever read. Of course I can find it for free on the Internet but it is not the same.
ReplyDeleteDan,
ReplyDeletethanks for expressing a concern about the problems newspapers are having. One editor in another community thought it was a danger to democracy when we no longer have newspapers. Will we rely on other media? (I was shocked and saddened when I got to the comics this morning.)