Un-Funnies: Cash-Strapped Papers Strip Comics

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ABC News' Web site today reports about another casualty of newspapers' declining ad revenues and plunging circulation--a cutback in comic strips.

The Portand Oregonian dropped 10 comic strips last year, while the Unification Church-owned Washington Times, in a money-saving move, slashed its Sunday comics section entirely (except for "Moon's-bury"). Increasingly, newspapers are shrinking the size of comics to squeeze the strips into a smaller content hole.

Although newspaper Web sites post comics online, the artists who draw the strips reap less compensation from the Internet. Generally, newer strips are the first to be eliminated, but long-established comics, such as "B.C.," are not immune to being dropped by newspapers.

During a newspaper deliverers' strike in July 1945, New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia went on the radio to read the Sunday comics so that youngsters wouldn't be deprived of their funnies.  "TUOL" sadly envisions the day when people ask: "What are the comics?" (For that matter, they may ask: "What's a radio?", but that's for another post.)