Comic strips

SF Chronicle discusses their comic selection

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Alan Gardner April 16, 2008 1 minute 3 comments

Executive Datebook Editor for the San Francisco Chronicle, David Wiegand, has written a column about how his paper is trying to find a suitable replacement for the vacationing Doonesbury. They’ve been running Darrin Bell’s Candorville and have received mostly positive feedback. The feedback has also revealed other interesting opinions about Lio, which features readers want out of the paper and how Candorville is perceived, racially speaking.

Mark Tatulli’s Lio continues to be decisive – either readers love or hate it. In this case, 80 percent of the Chronicle’s readers hated it.

Not citing numbers, the editor mentions that the feedback included requests to remove older features such as Blondie, Dennis the Menace and Peanuts.

Since the February cartoonists of color “sit in,” I’ve been looking for evidence of some kind of response. This one case doesn’t prove anything, as we don’t know the editor’s views before the “sit in,” but he shares with his readers that they are on the look out for a feature with diversity.

In the meantime, there’s Candorville, drawn by Darrin Bell. A few readers said or implied that one of the reasons they like it is because its lead characters are African American. That was one of the reasons we were first attracted to it, to be sure. We want to find strips that reflect the diversity of the Bay Area, but that’s easier said than done. For one thing, there are a lot of strips of every kind out there and you’d be surprised how few of them are very good, or funny, or even well-drawn. Several times a year, we’re visited by very nice people representing the comics syndicates and they all tell us how certain they are that some new strip will do well in our market. And several times a year, I look at them and wonder if they have any idea of what our market is. Or, in a few cases, what planet that market is on.

We’re going to continue to scout the horizon for new strips and, in fact, we’ve got a few in the bullpen already. Diversity will count heavily in our selection. So will quality. But if we find something new, it’s probable that the only way to bring it to you every morning is by eliminating something else. That’s where the tough choices come in, but we won’t make them without your participation.