ComicStrips

It's no secret that newspapers in print aren't doing so hot these days, a fact that has put the hundred year tradition of comic strips (plus Sudoku and the Junior Jumble) in danger. For some strips, the cold embrace of oblivion would likely be a welcome relief from the horrors of life, but as you might expect, a few others are a little more wary of their impending extinction...

Unlike CA Senior Writer Chris Sims, who steadfastly scours the funny pages each month for his Funky Winkerbean/Crankshaft chronicle, Funkywatch (to say nothing of his inspiration, Josh Fruhlinger at the daily Comics Curmudgeon blog), there's a good chance you don't indulge in traditional comic strips as much as you'd like...

Over the past few months, thanks largely to Josh Fruhlinger at The Comics Curmudgeon, I've become increasingly obsessed with Tom Batiuk's "Funky Winkerbean." For those of you who aren't familiar with it, it's a newspaper comic strip that, since its debut in the early '70s as a high school comedy, has slowly transitioned into becoming a daily oasis of mind-boggling depression right next t

As more newspapers fail and money grows tight, the current "Doonesbury" storyline addresses the smaller and smaller sizes of comic strips in print. As Gary Trudeau points out, nobody wants to make comics smaller -- but it's difficult to avoid as newspapers fight tooth and nail to stay afloat...

Normally, we'd leave this sort of thing to the great Josh Fruhlinger of The Comics Curmudgeon, but DC's upcoming "Wednesday Comics" prompted us to take a look at the newspaper comics page and have a few laughs. Instead, we were surprised to find strips so relentlessly soul-crushing that even Chris Ware would be jealous...

Like every other newspaper in the country, "The Kansas City Star" is looking to bring down its overhead. One of the ways they're hoping to accomplish this is by doing something they should have done a long time ago: canceling comics, "Survivor" style...