Boise Ed called our attention to an entire story arc from “The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee“, commenting: “This takes the Fourth Wall idea to a new level. Starting with Monday, June 24, John Hambrock had a private equity firm take over the strip, first replacing the furniture and then the characters themselves, to scrape expenses. The daily jokes were (intentionally) pathetic…. Basically, it was a two-week screed against the evils of soulless private equity firms….”
It seems a bitter coincidence that Lee Enterprises has been gutting the comic pages (and publication frequency) for a very large number of newspapers. However, this arc appeared before Lee Enterprises announced a mandatory wholesale switch to King Features (the syndicate that publishes Edison Lee).
Here is a selection of strips, including links to the first and last strip of the arc. Because of the way the Comics Kingdom website works, the best way to read the entire story is to open the last strip, then load additional strips until you get back to the first strip, and then read upwards in the window from the first strip to the last.
P.S. Don’t forget to close that annoying popup frame with the lame Popeye cartoon!
This is the way the arc began:
This was the final strip of the arc:
…
At the end, Boise Ed also asked: “I wonder if [we] will see the old characters comment on that, or if the strip will just resume its version of normalcy.”
P.P.S. The arc was in fact self-contained, without any internal reflection after it was over.
Comics I Don't Understand 
Some years ago, Monty did a series of strips on the premise that art and writing had been outsourced to Thailand. Monty became a stiff jointed figure in the style of Thai shadow puppets, and was joined by similarly rendered JR (from Dallas) and Rambo. Their adventure was nominally scripted by somebody who only knew America from cheesy television.
A Pogo Sunday page had Churchy and Owl confronted by a million baby turtles, in a big panel that showed at least a few hundred of them. The next Sunday Churchy was still in a panic over this invasion, but Owl calmly assured him there was no way Walt Kelly would ever draw that many turtles again.
I’m glad that you added the warnings about the Comics Kingdom site. The changes CK have made this year have made viewing, and especially commenting, considerably more difficult, so I have switched to ArcaMax and USA Today where possible. Alas, those two don’t enable comments at all.
Sorry about the delay in this reply; I was out of town and just now saw the post.
I’m glad that you added the warnings about the Comics Kingdom site. The changes CK have made this year have made viewing, and especially commenting, considerably more difficult, so I have switched to ArcaMax and USA Today where possible. Alas, those two don’t enable comments at all.
Sorry about the delay in this reply; I was out of town and just now saw the post.