Its already a disappointing Yuletide season for me thanks to King Features.
Neither Popeye or Popeye’s Cartoon Club celebrated the 100th Thimble Theatre anniversary, this week or last Sunday. Not even a mention on the King Features or Comics Kingdom Twitter feeds, or their Facebook page. Tea manages to sneak in the Thimble Theatre words in a Top Ten of 2019 post at the Comics Kingdom blog.
An aside to Tea: Here, from earlier this month, is the best (well, my favorite anyway) Popeye’s Cartoon Club strip of 2019 :
Since I didn’t highlight the Alan Weiss strip two weeks ago,
I thank Tea for giving an excuse to bring it up today.
There’s only one thing that will get my Cheer back – a great Jim Scancarelli Christmas card.
I keep wondering when Greg Evan‘s daughter Karen will get credit on the Luann strip;
now I’m wondering, “Did Greg sneak Karen’s name into today’s installment?”
So did the Joplin Globe editor stress a bit on first seeing today’s Non Sequitur?
It was a Wiley coloring page that was the cause of The Globe dropping the feature.
And here’s another coloring page on the first Sunday back from its suspension.
It is not looking good.
Next Sunday will be the last of the Black Widow/Marvella/Hobgoblin story rerun from the 2015 Amazing Spider-Man story. The next story in the original run will guest Namor as seen in the last panel here:
Nine months ago Marvel and King Features promised, “We’ll be back soon with great new stories and art to explore even more corners of the Marvel Universe for you and your readers to enjoy.”
But I’ve heard no news or rumors about new Amazing Spider-Man comic strips, and whatever is coming has to be in the pipeline now. Are new or rerun Spidey adventures in store for the new year? I guess next Sunday’s final Amazing Spider-Man panel will tell the tale.
On a related note …
The Sunday Tarzan reruns only have 12 weeks until the last Tarzan Sunday strip of the original run. Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. and Andrews McMeel Syndication must decide what to do. All new strips? Doubtful. Running the Roy Thomas and Tom Grindberg strips (my preference) also seems doubtful, though it would be good advertising for the online ERB Comics page. Syndicates seem to have an aversion to going too far back into the past for rerun strips (Peanuts an exception), but I think Russ Manning’s clean lines and great stories from 1968 would be a good place to go back to. The problem there is that all of Manning’s work is easily available overseas, the major market for Tarzan strips
In the meantime, here’s a Tarzan comic strip from the Mike Grell years:
