This weekend Express-News Ombudsman Bob Richter announced in his column that the local paper is backpedaling on its decision to dump the Mallard Fillmore comic strip because a lot of wingnut dittoheads called the paper to whine and complain. So they are going to take the nauseating and noxious strip and jam into into the comics section, which is already crowded with right-wing fodder like Prickly City and B.C., all so that we can have “balance”. By balance, of course, they mean keeping a 3-to-1 ratio of wingnut fodder to anything deemed “liberal.” Kind of like the 3-to-1 ratio of conservative columnists to liberal columnists that they maintain on the Op-Ed page.
But the worst part of the decision, is that to make room for Mallard they are going to dump “My Cage”, one of the new, up-and-coming strips that they added over the past year.
It is bad enough that they ignored “Rudy Park” after its one-month stint as a “guest comic”. It’s bad enough that they relegated “Curtis” to a Sunday-only slot and dropped the week-day comics. It is bad enough that they don’t have a Sunday slot for “Pearls Before Swine”, but now they are goin to dump “My Cage” which I have come to enjoy a great deal recently. There are not a lot of “must read” comics in the E-N for me - the kind that I will take the time to seek out and read even when I am in a hurry - such as LuAnn, Zits. Pearls Before Swine and Non Sequitur. But My Cage had slowly worked its way up into that pantheon for me.
One of the authors of My Cage was as surprised as I was and left the following comment on Richter’s column:
Wow. I have to say...I’m stunned. I write ‘My Cage’ and we get a lot of really positive feedback from the good readers of this paper. Despite all the other papers we’re in, I’d say 25% of our feedback is from this paper and 99% of that is overwhelmingly positive.
Huh.
In fact, when we held a contest for readers to appear in the strip last year our three winners all ended up being form THIS paper. One reader even baked a cake in the form of our lead chracter. Actually, you can read all about it here:
http://blogs.mysanantonio.com/weblogs/comics/2008/05/expressnews-readers-to-appear-1.html
I’d really hate to lose touch with all the readers we’ve gotten to talk to. The feed back and suppost has been greatly appreciated.
Hopefully if you won’t reconsider the decision, we can at least have a chance to say good bye. Too bad. I really liked this paper. Huh. Very shocking.
-Ed Power
Writer of ‘My Cage’
mycagecomic@yahoo.com
I have tried repeatedly to leave a comment myself without success. I don’t know if there is a technical glitch or if my comments are being singled out for deletion. But I would encourage anyone else who is interested to go and leave the good folks at the E-N a comment about this situation.
No comments:
Post a Comment