Watertown Daily Times Embraces Dark Side

A Finnish horse is among the new characters residing in the comic pages of the Johnson Newspaper Corp.

In October, Johnson Newspaper Corp., which publishes the Watertown Daily Times and other publications, announced that due to an impasse over fees with King Features, owned by Hearst, it would discontinue content from the syndication service.

That provided an opening on the funny pages of the Johnson Newspaper group for the Andrews McMeel distributed Dark Side of the Horse.

The strip is the creation of Samuli Lintula (“Samson”) of Finland, who responded to questions from his home in Helsinki sent to him by a Times reporter.

Mr. Lintula created the comic, which features the character Horace, in 2008 after nearly 30 years in the cartooning business. A couple of years later, Horace found syndication by GoComics, owned by Universal Press Syndicate.

Watertown newspaper readers have taken to the new comic strip so the paper contacted the cartoonist.

Mr. Lintula’s “Dark Side of the Horse” comics usually feature Horace in solo situations, which can be a difficult concept, he said.

“It can be easy if I happen to be well-rested, fed, and caffeinated with no distractions,” Mr. Lintula wrote. “So it’s usually pretty hard.”

Read the full WDN article/interview.

The Dark Side of the Horse by Samuli Lintula began syndication this year, but I have yet to pin down the exact date of it’s debut in U.S. newspapers. It appeared in the Mansfield Sun Chronicle by August 2020, and was in the Batavia Daily News by October 2020. That’s all I got.