I’ve hinted at this for almost two years, and on Tuesday it will be reality: The Plain Dealer will feature 65 additional comics on weekdays and Saturdays, with 16 in print and 49 in the digital edition of the newspaper. That brings the total to nearly 100. And we’ll feature 21 additional comics on Sundays, with 15 in print and six in the e-newspaper. Before I get to the details, I offer two predictions. One is that several people will write to criticize me for wasting precious column space on a superficial topic like comics. The other is that I will receive more email about this column than anything else I write this year. Readers love their comics, and they love to share with me which ones they favor and which they don’t like. Some of these you’ll know. Some will be new to you. Some are classics in rerun mode. The reason we can add all these comic strips without breaking the bank is efficiency. We are part of Advance Local, which operates big news websites and publishes newspapers across the country. Until now, each newspaper had its own comics lineup, requiring teams of designers to produce dozens of unique page layouts each night. We’ve wondered about the potential upside for readers if we came up with uniform comics package across the enterprise. Could we efficiently provide more comics, in print and online, if we all used the same pages? The answer, as you’ll see here, is a resounding yes. If you subscribe to The Plain Dealer, you don’t need to do anything to get all the extras. Starting Tuesday, you’ll find all the comics listed here, plus more puzzles and advice columns. If you are not reading the e-newspaper and you love comics, now is the time to switch. Although we are adding comic strips in print, we’re adding a lot more to the digital edition. The weekday and Saturday Plain Dealer will have five full pages of comics, two in the printed edition with three more in the e-newspaper. To the weekday printed edition, we’re adding: Baby Blues, Luann, Hi & Lois, Frank & Ernest, B.C., Dennis the Menace, For Better or For Worse, Bound & Gagged, Red & Rover, Baldo, Mother Goose & Grimm, Animal Crackers, Big Nate, Adam@home, Hocus Focus and Off the Mark. The big gain is in the e-newspaper: Drabble, F Minus, Grand Avenue, Phoebe & Her Unicorn, Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, Mallard Fillmore, The Buckets, Wallace the Brave, Dustin, Arlo & Janis, The Grizwells, The Phantom, Loose Parts, Rubes, The Lockhorns, Ziggy, Daddy’s Home, Momma, Andy Capp, Arctic Circle, Fred Bassett, Marvin, Nancy, Rose is Rose, Gil Thorp, Candorville, One Big Happy, Over the Hedge, 9 Chickweed Lane, Breaking Cat News, Crock, Cul de Sac, Cornered, Reality Check, Heathcliff, Diamond Lil, The Fusco Brothers, Mark Trail, Monty, Six Chix, Take it from the Tinkersons, The Duplex, Tiger, Gasoline Alley, Spectickles, Pardon my Planet, In the Bleachers and Carpe Diem. Rest assured, we’re keeping most of those you already see in print: Pickles, Garfield, Pearls Before Swine, Zits, Blondie, Get Fuzzy, Crabgrass, Hagar the Horrible, Jump Start, Frazz, Curtis, The Family Circus, Marmaduke, Close to Home, Classic Peanuts, Wizard of Id, The Born Loser, Crankshaft, Doonesbury, Sally Forth, Beetle Bailey, Mutts, Speed Bump and Bizarro. We have some weekday comics that will move from the print edition to the e-newspaper: Rhymes with Orange, Mary Worth, Non Sequitur, Free Range, Flo & Friends, Judge Parker, Prickly City and Wumo. For the Sunday print edition, we are adding: For Better or For Worse, The Family Circus, Hi & Lois, Marmaduke, Hagar the Horrible, Mutts, Luann, Dennis the Menace, Close to Home, Frank & Ernest, Curtis, Mallard Fillmore, Prince Valiant, Rose is Rose and The Lockhorns. You’ll also get an extra page of comics in Sunday’s e-newspaper: Tank McNamara, Foxtrot, Mother Goose & Grimm, Rhymes with Orange, Drabble and Rex Morgan MD. Two comics are moving from the Sunday print edition to the online newspaper: Frazz and Mary Worth. Three strips that have been appearing Sundays will drop from the newspaper, but you can still read them through cleveland.com: Flo & Friends, Non Sequitur and Red & Rover. Not bad, eh? How many other subscriptions do you have where, overnight, what you get for your money expands like this? To make this work, we do have some changes you’ll need to get used to, but I suspect that in a month, you won’t remember them. One is that the order the comics appear will change quite a bit. Another is that the daily strips will be smaller in print. We’ve published them bigger in The Plain Dealer than our sister newspapers, and for the good of the order, we need to adjust. Of course, if you read them online, you can make them as big as you need. The opposite will happen on Sundays. As our designers say, our Sunday comics layout has been a “hot mess,” and the new layout will be much easier on your eyes. Third, we are ending the “catch-up” comics we’ve been publishing since 2013, when we stopped home delivery on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Wednesdays and Fridays, we’ve published Diversions Plus, with the comics from non-delivery days. With all the new comics we are publishing in the digital edition, we hope readers will go there when the newspaper is not delivered. But wait. There’s more! Seven days a week, we’re adding the New York Times crossword puzzle to the Plain Dealer, along with the existing Los Angeles Times puzzle. On Sundays, we’re adding a second sudoku game, Quote Acrostic and Jumble Crossword. Look for more advice columns, too: Asking Eric, Dear Annie and Aces on Bridge will appear in the daily Plain Dealer print edition. Dr. Roach will appear in the e-newspaper five days a week, with Megan Leahy on Parenting appearing Saturdays and Everyday Cheapskate on Sundays. Our bridge column and Carolyn Hax’s column will remain in print. Dear Abby and the horoscope will be in the e-newspaper. This is a good day. I love bringing you good news like this. I’m grateful to my colleagues across the nation for making it happen. We set out nearly two years ago to give you a lot more fun in your newspapers, by collaborating on efficiency. All of us had to give up something to get to the target, and all willingly compromised. Come Tuesday, you’ll see the benefits. I look forward to your reaction. I’m at cquinn@cleveland.com Thanks for reading. |
