Hot news

OK, so it's maybe it's not the hottest news, but I love comic strips and believe they have suffered from benign neglect from uptight editors who never appreciated them because they don't have either a sense of humor or sense of history.  Comic strips became popular during a period when newspapers faced rigorous competition -- from other newspapers. 

Anyway, Berke Breathed's wonderful Opus strip has been retired (here's the last printed strip) has got many newspaper editors thinking about comics. Some, of course, are just not replacing it to cut their costs. But others are adding such great strips as Get Fuzzy, Pearls Before Swine or Daddy's Home. (The last is a shameless plug for what really is a good comic drawn by my friend Gary Markstein who is also a very talented editorial cartoonist.) Columbia Journalism Review has a nice roundup of the comics news.