The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel will be replacing Doodles with Steve Breen’s Caption It.
Steve Breen would like your help.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist is the artist behind “Caption It!”, an interactive comic strip that asks readers to supply the captions to his drawings. He thinks they’re funnier that way.
“If one person had to write the captions every week, it might not be as funny,” Breen said. “But crowdsourcing it, you really come up with some funny stuff.”
“Caption It” joins the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Sunday Comics section this Sunday, Oct. 3.
The Journal Sentinel announcement continues with this:
It takes the place of “Doodles”; that interactive puzzle strip ended its run with the death of cartoonist Christopher Foote, who died in July of a pulmonary embolism at age 62.
Which makes it sound as if the Doodles Sunday page is being discontinued by Creators Syndicate rather than finding a new cartoonist to carry on the feature, or to go on distributing reruns as they have done for three weeks now.
Of course it wouldn’t be the first time a newspaper has hinted that a comic was dropped because the syndicate no longer offered it, though still being distributed. Only the near future will tell.
Back to Steve Breen:
Breen is no stranger to the Journal Sentinel’s comics landscape. In 1999, he created the strip “Grand Avenue”; the Milwaukee newspaper was one of the original papers to pick up the comic. Cartoonist Mike Thompson joined him on “Grand Avenue,” and completely took over the strip in 2016. (“Grand Avenue” still runs daily and Sundays in the Journal Sentinel.)
Breen received Pulitzer Prizes for editorial cartooning in 1998 at New Jersey’s Asbury Park Press and again in 2009 at the San Diego Union-Tribune. He started “Caption It!” two years ago “because it allows me to be creative.”
“I’m an editorial cartoonist by day, and I’m using a different part of my brain in this,” Breen said.
© Creators Syndicate
