Tuesday, October 04, 2011

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch Culls the Comics

On Monday morning I was reading The St. Louis Post-Dispatch had dropped six comics from its pages and replaced them with six other comics. The comics dropped were:

"Get Fuzzy", "Frazz", "Lola", "Rose is Rose", "Mallard Fillmore", and "9 Chickweed Lane." I'm not sure why these comics were chosen to "die" because in the small blurb in the paper (on the back of the front page completely away from the comics) it doesn't really say. There was no poll or survey; just an editorial decision. I know "Mallard Fillmore" got a lot of complaints, but so does "Doonesbury" and The Post-Dispatch would never drop that "comic". The paper tried dropping "9 Chickweed Lane" a couple years ago, but there was such an outrage they kept it. I like "9 Chickweed Lane", but it's the only one of the six dropped that doesn't have a large fan base.

Of the new comics chosen to replace the "dead" ones, one is a hugely unpopular one that The Post-Dispatch dropped years ago: "Bizarro". "Bizarro" was a comic that always polled at the bottom of every reader survey and poll the paper had. Yet, the editors kept it for many years before finally dropping it. Now, they've brought it back. Unbelievable.

For a newspaper that is struggling in an industry that is on the verge of collapse, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch sure enjoys edging itself further into decline.

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