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 LeeEnterprises 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!
… 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.
Boise Ed submitted this one last year, commenting “Every now and then, Pardon My Planet comes up with a real zinger.” I think I’ve seen it before, but I can’t find it in a CIDU post, and in any case it’s worth repeating:
The not-quite-complete “Arlo” moment in this “Zits” came as a big surprise. Perhaps King Features relaxed their censorship standards when they relaunched the Comics Kingdom website?
… P.S. And what if Jeremy’s mom had not left it out? What then?
Two half Arlos published on exactly the same day do not count as a whole synchronicity, but this Luann was pretty good, too:
… P.S. Note the annoying, but otherwise irrelevant color error in the second panel.
Boise Ed said about this Argyle Sweater: “Perhaps this is the fifth wall, since he’s erasing four“:
Another meta Macanudo:
… P.S. The title panel bears a fair resemblance to “In the Court of the Crimson King“, but it’s unlikely that it was intentional:
Danny Boy sends this in as a CIDU, but rather than post it long after Halloween we’re putting it here. “What, what? “I was making rather scary yesterday.” Is that something like “making merry”? I.e. celebrating and now hungover (and just getting into the office at a quarter to five)?
No, I don’t think I’ve answered my own question. “Making rather scary” is still pretty opaque.”
Or, trying to scare the street urchins?
Danny Boy hopes “that mechanism isn’t set up to treat the TP as reusable!”
Jack Applin submitted this Andertoons as a CIDU, asking “Is the one-eyed robot unable to see the traffic lights? [OR] Is is programmed to ignore them, giving an advantage to “driverless” cars?“
… Mark Anderson’s original title for his comic #9221 reveals that Jack’s first question was right on the money: The gag is a reference to one of the most common anti-robot user verification tests, typically presented by the reCAPTCHA interface:
Later that same month (in 1967):
The punchline is in panel 5, but for many of us it would be a CIDU. The authors conveniently use panel 6 to make the joke clearer.
Today we honor the memory of comics that are gone, but not quite (yet) forgotten, and especially those that faded away (not with a bang, but with a whimper). Some of these may not be completely dead, but all of them are at best only shadows of their former selves. Happily, none of them has been turned into a zombie.
The image above the headline was taken from “The Comic That Has A Finale Every Day“, about which Maggie the Cartoonist once asked, “I just don’t get the concept here. Who would read this? Why would a strip run a finale every single day?” I agree, but the tiresome image was merely a placeholder, the purpose of it all was an experimental exercise in creative commentary. The author (or perhaps perpetrator) was Ruben Bolling, who reported on his Substack site (on Groundhog Day) that the feature had finally been laid to rest at the end of last year. In stark contrast to all of the other strips listed below, I was not sorry to see that one disappear.
The end of Cul de Sac was particularly tragic. Not only did Richard Thompson lose his battle with Parkinson’s (in 2012), he was physically unable to give his brilliant creation the grand exit that he had hoped for, and ultimately selected an appropriately poignant rerun for the final strip:
The recent demise of Real Life Adventures was submitted by Boise Ed, who commented: “Another one bites the dust. I wish Gary Wise and Lance Aldrich and happy retirement, but it’s sad to see another of the good comics go away. I like the way the did it, though.“
Aaron Johnson’s niche comic “What the Duck” ran for ten years (from 2006 to 2016), and was picked up for syndication in 2008 (using the euphemistic title “W.T. Duck“). The GoComics archive began in 2009, but recently ended (without any explanation) exactly fifteen years later (in January 2024). Note that the dates of the strips in the GC archive have absolutely no relationship to the original publishing run. This was the author’s final strip, which seems to apply to cartooning just as much as to photography:
Ink Pen was retired by its author nearly a dozen years ago, and has been stuck in rerun purgatory at GoComics ever since then:
… Phil Dunlap’s tentative plan to release new Ink Pen comics once a week never materialized.
Bill Hinds gave Cleats a fitting sendoff on Halloween Sunday (2010), including some really creative ironwork on the gate:
… According to The Daily Cartoonist, Hinds “decided to bring his comic strip to a close, citing the need to focus on other projects that are more economically profitable.” Wikipedia reports that the strip was in 75 newspapers, which apparently was not enough to make a viable living on, but Hinds did have Tank McNamara as a fallback, which at one point was appearing in 350 newspapers. Cleats is still in reruns at GoComics, and may (or may not) still be appearing in print somewhere, but this is the first time that it has appeared at CIDU in more than 15 years (that was over a decade before Comicgeddon).
Lennie Peterson’s motivation to terminate The Big Picture was somewhat similar:
… When the strip went into reruns at GoComics, Peterson took the unusual step of creating some Sunday format strips to introduce the relaunch, in which he also announced his intention to (occasionally) insert new material among the reruns. I have not yet figured out how often this actually happened.
Bug Martini went mysteriously AWOL after the appearance of the following strip (on 21-April-2023):
… P.S.Chak reported that Adam Huber has resurrected his strip after an 18 month absence, and Chemgal later mentioned (very presciently) that Chak had “figured it out long before me, which shows how infrequently I’ve been checking on my ‘might-be-dead‘ strips“. This is encouraging news, but there wasn’t any official “announcement” (or anything else new) on Adam’s website, except for a vague promise in the fourth panel of the strip that unexpectedly appeared on Sept. 25th:
… Only time will tell whether Bug Martini will really remain alive. The website “caption” still claims “Random nonsense three days a week“, but that has not been the case for years. I think the best we can hope for is one strip per week (teaser ads for pay-per-view Sunday strips do not count). The current tally is four new strips over five weeks.
Pab Sugenis “ended” his “New Adventures of Queen Victoria” on 14-Feb-2021 with a special group photo, but has revived the strip on intermittent occasions since then (sometimes crediting ChatGPT for the “writing”):
… The problem is that there’s no way to know when (or if) any new NAQV strips will ever appear at GoComics (the author’s own website has been shut down).
I just happened to include a Boondocks strip in yesterday’s Halloween post, not realizing (back then) that the strip has been in reruns for over 18 years. Here is the final Sunday strip, dated 26-Mar-2006 (immediately preceeding Aaron McGruder’s “planned for six months” sabbatical, which only later turned out to be involuntarily permanent):
Berke Breathed resurrected “Bloom County 2015” to indulge in some political humor. He periodically incremented the year in the title, but it never got past 2019 (the GoComics title card still says “2015”); nothing new has appeared there since 8-June-2020 (back when CIDU Bill was still with us):
… Although his GoComics feed has dried up, Breathed does post some material on his Facebook page, but virtually all of it is re-runs. It’s simply not worth connecting to Zuckerberg’s sewer just on the off chance of finding a new Bloom County strip. The last new one appeared in August 2023:
The Perry Bible Fellowship still posts new comics on an irregular basis. Here again, the problem is knowing whether it is worth checking back for new material. Please note that PBF is very often NSFW.
Liberty Meadows was in print for less than five years (from March 1997 to December 2001). Frank Cho abandoned syndication in favor of self publishing to avoid repeated censorship problems:
… The Liberty Meadows rerun archive at GoComics appears to start (Jan. 2002) in the middle of the original syndicated run. Cho continued to release book collections until 2006, but after a subsequent deal with Sony Pictures fell through, he finally announced (in 2012) that he had quit working on the strip: “As much as I want to do Liberty Meadows (believe me I want to), the other jobs pay better.“
The latest demise hasn’t even been completed (yet). The Daily Cartoonist just recently reported that Fort Knox (by Paul Jon) published its last daily strip on October 19th, although the last new Sunday strip won’t appear until November 10th.
… P.S.Fort Knox is no longer available at GoComics (although it’s not clear whether that was a recent deletion). The strip is still available at Arcamax, at least for now.
P.S. Please feel free to mention (and link to) other dearly departed comics in the comments!
Comics I Don't Understand 