# zombie comic strips **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [June 2, 2009, 4:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/zombie-comic-strips/498491 "2009-06-02T16:32:50Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 7\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![planetcory](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/planetcory/32/1032_2.png) [@planetcory](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/planetcory)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2009, 5:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/zombie-comic-strips/498491/61 "2009-06-06T05:23:32Z")
> [@Lynn\_Bodoni](#): > > I don’t know if I qualify as “old” in your view. I’m 51, and I really can’t stand stale comics. Too young. You don’t qualify. I doubt you’d pitch a fit if anyone replaced ‘Crock’ with ‘Get Fuzzy’. ---
**Author:** ![Lynn\_Bodoni](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/e47c2d/32.png) [@Lynn\_Bodoni](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lynn_Bodoni)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2009, 6:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/zombie-comic-strips/498491/62 "2009-06-06T06:47:43Z")
I’d pitch a fit if someone replaced “Get Fuzzy” with “Crock”. However, I do think that Get Fuzzy needs to be replaced, which saddens me. It seems to have lost its funny somewhere, and is now just surreal. ---
**Author:** ![Bosda\_Di\_Chi\_of\_Tricor](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bosda_di_chi_of_tricor/32/16845_2.png) [@Bosda\_Di\_Chi\_of\_Tricor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bosda_Di_Chi_of_Tricor)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2009, 10:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/zombie-comic-strips/498491/63 "2009-06-06T10:20:11Z")
The Web is the only place for good comic strips these days. Period. ---
**Author:** ![John\_DiFool](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_difool/32/19543_2.png) [@John\_DiFool](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_DiFool)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2009, 1:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/zombie-comic-strips/498491/64 "2009-06-06T13:11:28Z")
> [@Lynn\_Bodoni](#): > > I’d pitch a fit if someone replaced “Get Fuzzy” with “Crock”. However, I do think that Get Fuzzy needs to be replaced, which saddens me. It seems to have lost its funny somewhere, and is now just surreal. Agreed about that. Plus the creator doesn’t really have a sense of comic timing/pacing at all-as a result the strip often suffocates from an overload of themes & dialogue. ---
**Author:** ![Hometownboy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/5e9695/32.png) [@Hometownboy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hometownboy)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2009, 5:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/zombie-comic-strips/498491/65 "2009-06-06T17:06:05Z")
Actual editor checking in here to report another discouraging factor: money. Very long post follows: As news editor of a small daily, the managing editor happily hands over responsibility for the comics page to me, because I care about it. The publisher is not particularly a comics fan, but recognizes their importance. She just wants two things: 1. No negative calls from readers and 2. No more money for comics than we are currently spending That’s what makes it tough. We get the majority of our comics from United Media (United Features and the old NEA - Newspaper Enterprise Association.) Its a big package deal. We get the following: Alley Oop Dailies Arlo and Janis Dailies Ask Mr. Know-It-All Astro-Graph Big Nate Dailies Born Loser Dailies, The Byron York Celebrity Cipher Cokie Roberts and Steven V. Roberts NEA Consumer Reports Cow and Boy Dailies Diana West Donna Brazile NEA Dr. Gott Drew Litton Editorial Cartoons Eat In and Save (formerly NEA Food) Ed Stein Editorial Cartoons Etta Hulme Editorial Cartoons Frank and Ernest Dailies Frugal Living Gene Lyons Grizzwells Dailies, The Herman Dailies Jeff Stahler Editorial Cartoons Jerry Holbert Editorial Cartoons Kathryn Jean Lopez Kit ‘N’ Carlyle Dailies Moderately Confused Monty Dailies Morton Kondracke - NEA NEA Bridge NEA Column Closers NEA Crossword Puzzle NEA FULL SERVICE PKG NEA Holiday Gift Guide NEA Holiday Strip: Luann NEA Monthly Update NEA Specials Next Steps (R) NEA On Religion Peanuts Christmas Countdown Peanuts Classics Dailies Peanuts Rock the Vote Peanuts Tall Dailies Robert Ariail Editorial Cartoons Shortcuts Smart Money Soup to Nutz Dailies Sweet Land of Liberty Today’s NEA Billboard Truth About Money Village Idiot World Almanac Databank There’s a tremendous savings to this package over the a la carte costs of the individual features. Of course, it includes many columns, features and comics that we don’t carry, but it does include all our five editorial cartoonists and six political columnists, the crossword, bridge column and medical column. And the syndicate is very clear: no substitutions are allowed. We can’t even trade in two or three mediocre strips for one good one. I know, I’ve tried. It’s a take-it-or-leave-it thing. We do buy a la carte from King Features - Blondie and Dennis the Menace. But those are legacies from decades. The publisher is afraid that if I ask to even switch to a different strip for the same money, they will use that as an excuse to hike our rates. In the nine years I’ve been dealing with the comics, I have only been able to convince the editor to add the cost of one new strip, Leigh Rubin’s [Rubes,](http://www.creators.com/comics/rubes.html) and that was only after a sustained campaign of beautifully parsed logical arguments whining on my part. With declining revenues, that’s not going to happen again. I was able to make one positive contribution though. Our paper took a major reduction in size earlier this year. That made the six columns of our page layout even narrower. And since comics have long been running in a three-column-wide format, they were set to get significantly smaller. So I did a redesign of the page. We are now running the comics four columns wide, which increased the relative size of each strip from what they were before the downsizing. The other two columns we fill with panel cartoons and the crossword. As you can see from the list above, we have a choice of the “classic” or the “tall” Peanuts. Classics are proportioned the way they were before a previous size reduction in the standard newspaper page. The tall ones are proportioned more for skinnier widths. So I’m running the classic Peanuts across the whole six columns at the top of the page. Not only does it unify the page, but it gives readers a choice. The state’s major daily, which has a decent circulation in our town, just 90 miles from the big city, runs the tall Peanuts, which have a different strip each day than the classic Peanuts. It’s a minor thing, but the reader who buys both the big city daily and ours will see two different Peanuts strip. One tiny incentive to buy us as well. People really like the larger sized strips and the way they look on the page, which is some consolation. Now if we could just upgrade the content… One other development. Creator’s Syndicate now offers newspapers the opportunity to run all of their comics on the newspapers’ websites with no cash out of pocket for the newspapers. They send templates which automatically pick up fresh comics every day. All they want in return is to run an ad on each comics page and take the revenue from that. They also provide space on each comic page for us to sell ads ourselves and keep the revenue. Its an interesting model. ---
**Author:** ![Jolly\_Roger](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/91b2a8/32.png) [@Jolly\_Roger](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jolly_Roger)\ **Post date:** [June 8, 2009, 2:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/zombie-comic-strips/498491/66 "2009-06-08T02:38:24Z")
Sreators Syndicate seems to be the most xartoonist friendly of the bunch. Does it seem like that from your perspective, **Hometownboy**? ---
**Author:** ![planetcory](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/planetcory/32/1032_2.png) [@planetcory](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/planetcory)\ **Post date:** [June 8, 2009, 3:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/zombie-comic-strips/498491/67 "2009-06-08T03:05:22Z")
> [@Jolly\_Roger](#): > > Sreators Syndicate seems to be the most xartoonist friendly of the bunch. Does it seem like that from your perspective, **Hometownboy**? Quite the opposite. I’m not informed enough beyond hearsay, but I’ve heard other cartoonists refer to them as “the bottom feeders of the syndicate world.” They’ve been said to offer dirt cheap rates to newspapers for their strips, which, in turn, short-changes the artists. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/zombie-comic-strips/498491.md?page=3)