It appears that the end of this month will also see the end of the Nest Heads comic strip.
A Reed Brennan Customer Advisory note posted today:
We have just been informed by Creators Syndicate that Nest Heads ends syndication with the 7/31 strip. If you have that comic on the page we layout for you, please contact us immediately at the number below to let us know what comic you will substitute it with. We apologize for the shot notice, but we too were caught by surprise. Thank you for your understanding.
Yeah, that is short notice.
Nest Heads began on October 5, 1998 by Steve Dickenson from Copley News Service. Steve handed it off to John Allen at the turn of the century. In 2008 Copley shut down and Creators Syndicate picked up the strip.
The last new daily strip appeared on June 20, 2020, while the last new Sunday was on July 12, 2020. The strip has been in rerun status since those dates. (And occasionally before those dates.)
This year has seen more than one instance of a different gag being used with the same art:
So far the lineup of newspaper comic strips to end in 2020 – the year of COVID-19 besides Nest Heads: The Pajama Diaries, Ask Shagg, Retail, Moose and Molly, Cats with Hands, and Stone Soup. Still no official end of all rerun mode Get Fuzzy?
Enough years ago that strips came in hard-copy to be scanned, I was wandering through the backshop and saw layouts for a strip we didn’t carry. Turns out a strip had ended and the syndicate just quietly started sending us the one they thought we should have. A few quick phone calls got us one we actually wanted instead, and y’dam right from someone else. Don’t play me.
About the same time, we were told a strip was ending when I was pretty sure it wasn’t. I contacted the artist who told me he had changed syndicates. Apparently his old syndicate didn’t think we needed to know the strip was still available and the new one didn’t tell us, either — perhaps hadn’t been given a list of client papers?
Short notice is probably shorter now that the strips are downloaded from a website.
Keep your eyes open out there.