Rip Haywire

As every comic strip fan knows, Cathy Guisewite is retiring her comic strip “Cathy” at the end of October. That leaves the door open for NEW strips to take her spot on the comic page. Well, I’m excited to say Rip Haywire will be replacing the retiring Cathy strip in Wenatchee, WA.

Here’s a really great article on the comics changes happening in this WA paper:

Newspapers have long been reluctant to make changes on the comics pages.

Fear drives that reluctance in most cases, I believe. Readers become attached to comic strips and woe is the editor who tells them it’s time to move on to something else.

Who wants to deal with complaints about comics when we need to be focused on the news business?

Thus, old strips that long ago stopped being funny or relevant or even loosely connected to the artist who made them popular continue on. Seemingly forever.

Which leads, rather obviously, to this announcement that we’ll be changing some of the comic strips in this paper.

It of course made me very happy to see Rip added to the paper, but what I was happiest about was that the editor made his choices, and didn’t try to leave it up to the readers with a one week sampling of strips to judge, or by a comic poll. Believe me when I say there’s nothing worse or no greater up-hill battle than having to be everything to everyone in one week or one month of a comic “try-out” when you’re up against a comic strip that has been with the reader for a decade or six!

Happy retirement, Cathy!!!