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.