Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Carping on a comic cop-out

I know I am WAY late on this, but what the hell -- better late than never, right? Besides, since the comic strip that's the topic of this entry is still taking up real estate in quite a few newspapers, I think it's still worthy.

You know what pisses me right the hell off? When you have a cartoonist who draws a comic strip whose characters age in real time, and said cartoonist draws the strip for almost three decades and just decides to wrap everything up in one Sunday strip and then start telling the story all over again with old and new strips. What of those of us who had been reading said strip for at least two of those three decades and wanted to see what happened with the next generation? Sure, we found out in that one Sunday strip, but I am baffled as to why any newspaper would waste space on something that its longtime readers had already seen. I understand the cartoonist wanted to take a break, but that seems like a moot issue, considering that (from what I understand) other people were involved with its production. I was glad to see the Beaumont Enterprise replace the strip with Pearls Before Swine. Would that other newspapers followed suit. God only knows what kind of talent is being denied exposure because of their running those old strips.