Randy Glasbergen has announced that he’s retiring from the feature The Better Half. Randy took over the panel in 1982 from Vinnie Vinson. He tells me that with his decision to not renew his contract with King Features Syndicate, the syndicate has opted to retire the panel completely.
Randy cites that his freelance business has been doing really well and consuming more of his time and the effort needed to produce The Better Half was becoming disproportionally smaller than the financial return. He’ll still produce his other cartoons Glasbergen Cartoons and Thin Lines.
You can see the evolution of the panel over at The Comics Kingdom blog:
The last The Better Half will run on Sunday November 30.
After 32 years of syndication, I decided not to renew my contract for The Better Half because my freelance business and Glasbergen Cartoon Service require 150% of my work time these days. KFS was my biggest single client, but as my freelance career has grown over the years, TBHalf became a proportionately smaller piece of a bigger pie. With all the controversy over “legacy strips”, KFS decided it was better to fill my slots with their other features instead of getting editors to accept a new cartoonist to create The Better Half panels. (Plus I’m not dead, so I’d be pissed if someone else started drawing in my style!) You can still find “Glasbergen Cartoons” and “Thin Lines” on GoComics, plus my cartoon-of-the-day @ http://www.glasbergen.com. Twenty years ago, I could look down my street and see a newspaper delivery box in front of nearly every house…now I see just one or two. It’s a good time to move on. The final “Better Half” cartoon will appear in print on Sunday, November 30th.
Congrats Randy! Hey KFS, gimme a shout~ Lol.
Sorry to hear it’s going away. I’ve always enjoyed the consistent quality of the writing. Best wishes to Randy.
Congratulations Randy! What are you going to do with all that “free time” now? 🙂
A full time free-lance cartoonist with FREE TIME?
Never heard of such a thing…
Congratulations to Randy Glasbergen – perspective is a wonderful thing – now go and make that pie bigger…
Best of luck in all you do, Randy! Your book on the business of cartooning was so helpful to me when I was first getting started, and I’ll always appreciate that you took the time to email me back and answer questions (fifteen years ago – wow!) when I was an aspiring cartoonist looking for advice. A true professional, gentleman, and class act. Hope to meet you in person at the Reubens some day.
Good luck and all my best to you, Randy!!