Hi everybody, welcome to today's Comic Strip Death Match Live Wire Chat. We're about ready to get started.

We'll start with a little background. On March 30 I wrote an article announcing the Death Match, a project to update our comics section. We selected seven older strips and put them to a vote before our readers with the idea of killing off the lowest vote-getters. We reversed that decision when we received overwhelming support for the classic strips. Then we introduced seven new strips, Cul de Sac, F Minus, Get Fuzzy, Non Sequitur, Pearls Before Swine and Rubes. Ultimately, we decided to retain the seven older strips and add three of the new ones. Voting ends today and we'll unveil changes to the funny pages starting Monday.
I'll announce the three new strips our readers voted in momentarily, once we give everybody a little time to join us.
In the meantime, let's do this. Fire away with questions on all things comics

Oops, Prickly City was also in the list of new strips considered.

So why was the decision made to get rid of or to add new comic strips.

Hi James,
It's been something the paper has tried a handful of times before. We, and I mean a few editors and newsroom employees felt the page was a bit outdated. I went through and found that seven of the 19 strips we run each day are written by people other than the strips' original creators, so we put those seven before readers. Ultimately, we wanted to update the page to provide a few strips for our younger readers.

Another common question I've been getting over the e-mail concerns the difference between our Sunday comics section and our daily one. Zits, for instance, appears on Sundays but not weekdays. That's because our Sunday section is pre-printed elsewhere and delivered to us as is. We don't really have as much control over that section as we do the daily funnies page that we print in-house with the rest of the paper.

How come Zits wasn't included then as a new comic to be chosen? Just for consistency, if nothing else.

That's a good question. In hindsight we probably should have considered adding Zits. We contracted with our syndicates over a year ago to try the seven strips we tested with the votes and Zits wasn't among them. I just spoke with our managing editor Monte, and he said we will probably consider Zits if we make any more changes to our comics lineup.

I'm not involved in the purchasing process through our syndicates though. I understand it was one of our editors who helped select the seven new strips a year back or whenever it was.

I don't mean to dominate this, but who and how were the seven new and seven old chosen? It was a year ago? I'm confused.

Yeah, it is a bit weird, huh? We picked up seven new strips about a year back with the idea we would make changes at some point. Nothing was concrete then. But we purchased them so they would be ready to roll if we made changes. We didn't iron out the details until February or March. That's when I researched the strips we do run and found that seven of those 19 are no longer handled by their original creator. In all of those cases, the original creators are dead, and we decided to ask our readers if the strips retained their validity after the original artist died and new artists took over.
It's been a very unscientific process to be sure. We learned a lot as we went along.

Just got a good question over the phone. It was a two-parter. How much are comics and why don't we run additional pages of comics in the PR.
Well, comics can run $8 to $10 a week, with the expensive, established ones reaching upwards of $17 a week. The reason we don't run more pages of comics is a combination of the cost from our syndicates and the cost and spacing concerns with printing the extra newsprint.

How were the seven new comics chosen? Was there a questionnaire sent out?

There wasn't a questionnaire at all. We didn't get our readers involved until we put them to a vote. One of our editors largely chose the new comics, by looking what other papers use them, how well established they were and by reviewing examples of the strips. That was the least democratic process of the whole project. Though we were limited but what our syndicates offer, and it would have been a lot more of an involved process to track down each of the ones available, purchase them for test runs and ask readers to weigh in on each.

Am I the only one who doesn't enjoy Beetle Bailey? I've never seen that comic strip considered for deletion. I don't think it applies to the current military situation and doesn't have much application to World War II either (when I suppose it originated).

I'm not a huge Beetle Bailey fan, but that didn't meet our Death Match criteria. Mort Walker, the strip's creator, is still alive and kicking as far as I know.

Oh. Thanks, I think.

Yeah. That was the criteria our newsroom agreed on. Putting the strips that are no longer handled by their original creators up for the Death Match. In the end though we're not getting rid of any of the old ones. More on that with the next post.

All right, I'm ready to announce the three new strips we're adding Monday. Voting ends today, but three distanced themselves from the rest of the pack enough that it is safe for me to project winner.
We're adding Cul de Sac, Non Sequitur and Rubes to our daily lineup. I'll post vote counts in a second.

How you decided not to get rid of any? Was this all a big waste of time?

I personally received about 300 letters and e-mail supporting the old strips. We had somewhere in the neighborhood of a few thousand votes online for most of the old strips.
People we're really passionate.
On the surface it seems like it could have been a waste of time, but looking at it from our standpoint it was brilliant. It's easy to sit here, put out the paper and not know how our readers feel about certain things. We asked for their input and you guys came out in droves. It's input we received for free, it helped us change our minds. Basically we could have paid some consultant a truck load of money to send out some complicated reader satisfaction survey, but we did this and got tons of valuable input free.
We changed our game plan halfway through, but I think the process worked beautifully.
We asked

No F-minus? Schucks.

I liked F Minus too, It did not do so well in polling though. Which brings us to the totals...

Cul de Sac, Yes: 790, No: 447
F Minus, Yes: 341, No: 562
Get Fuzzy, Yes: 284, No: 575
Non Sequitur, Yes: 541, No: 359
Pearls Before Swine, Yes: 434, No: 500
Prickly City, Yes: 492, No: 843
Rubes, Yes: 498, No: 330

Anyway, to make this all work we're going to have to do a bit of juggling. Cul de Sac, Non Sequitur and Rubes will join our page in the normal spots on weekdays. There will be no change at this time to the Sunday section. We will move kids spot, Born Loser and Shoe to the games page in the Classified section. Hopefully this all works out for Monday. That should give us room to keep everything, but we had to do a bit of shuffling to make it work.

What did the yes no mean? Did you select by amount of yess and nos, or a percentage?

Yes votes mean "add" no votes mean "don't add"

Those three were the ones that received more "yes" votes than "no" votes.

So it was a seperation from the no votes?

Yeah, they we're selected by virtue of having more support than opposition.

Glad to see everyone participating, and I appreciate all the questions. We've got about 10 minutes to go and time for a few more questions.

How do you sleep at night knowing a World War I veteran might be lurking in the shadows with piano wire because you tried to kill Alley Oop?

I was hoping we'd get a question like this. I was somewhat surprised how passionate people we're about Alley Oop. I mean, someone wrote a computer program to plant thousands of yes votes to save it. If I had killed I might worry.
I'm in good with the Alley Oop front office though, I interviewed the artists, Jack and Carole for a story a couple weeks back

I thought this was a very bad time to 'test' Get Fuzzy. It was kind of a tepid time for the strip. Usually it's a hoot.

I never warmed up to Get Fuzzy, and it's hard to appreciate a strip with only a few examples to base your opinion on, but I understand it has quite a following in many cities.

This was a typical run for "Pearls..." too, too bad it didn't work out.

Yeah, personally I really like two of the new ones we're adding, and I hope a lot of other people will grow to like them too.

Anyway, if you've got any thing else fire away, otherwise I'll let you go. I'm a big fan of the online chats and hope the PR brass continue to offer them on a variety of subjects. If you need anything else e-mail me at ccorbin@postregister.com. I've got two more questions in the que and then I gots to run.
Thanks,
Clark

Get Fuzzy is usually funny I know i read it when i was living in Colorado Springs.

One more vote for Get Fuzzy. The hardest part of the process is realizing so many people have so many different perspectives and different ideas of what "funny" is or what makes a good comic. Clearly the people voting to add Non Sequitur aren't the ones rallying around Ally Oop. It's been fascinating to watch and find out what makes people tick.

I think it's great the P-R runs a full page of comics since I know none of the other local dailies (which really, no one can get unless they're in Blackfoot area) do.

Thanks for plug!
If we've learned anything from this it's how much people LOVE their funnies. I can't tell you the number of letter and calls I received from people begging me to keep this or that, telling me they look forward to their morning paper just for the smile that so and so in the funnies puts on their faces.

Thanks for the plug, err!

That's about it. Thanks again, give the new strips a look Monday and thanks for all those votes and letters.
We'll keep this chat archived on chat.postregister.com for everybody to see later on.
Guess I can't sign off without saying see you in the funny pages, huh?
I know... lame, lame.