Update: As Jerry Scott informs in the comments below Baby Blues is up at GoComics.
original January 12 post:
Baby Blues, the very popular comic strip by Jerry Scott and Rick Kirkman, has switched teams moving from King Features Syndicate to Andrews McMeel Syndication.
Kansas City, MO (January 11, 2022) Andrews McMeel Syndication (AMS) will assume sales and distribution of Baby Blues by Rick Kirkman and Jerry Scott effective February 1, 2022, announced Brent Bartram, Chief Strategy Officer and General Manager of AMS.
Baby Blues, which chronicles the adventures of parenting and family life, has charmed readers since it began in syndication in 1990. The heartwarming, funny, and true-to-life depiction of raising children appears in more than 1,200 newspapers worldwide, in 28 countries, 13 languages, and more than 30 anthologies and 4 treasuries from Andrews McMeel Publishing (AMP). Written by Scott and illustrated by Kirkman, Baby Blues has been recognized with a Reuben Award for “Best Comic Strip of the Year”
The Baby Blues Partnership has had a book publishing arrangement with Andrews McMeel for years.
From the Andrews McMeel Universal press release:
“We are very excited about joining the team at AMS,” said Kirkman and Scott. “With our long and successful relationship with Andrews McMeel Publishing, it feels natural to blend our Baby Blues syndication efforts into the mix.”
“We are delighted to distribute Baby Blues to its passionate following,” said Bartram. “It is a treasured feature that depicts the joys and challenges of parenting, and resonates with families everywhere. We look forward to many more years with the MacPhersons, and to enable even more readers to enjoy their exploits.”
While AMS/GoComics doesn’t take up the strip for three weeks, KFS/Comics Kingdom has already dropped the strip from its digital platforms, so one of the few places to read the strip online in the interim is at ArcaMax.
This is off-topic: does anyone know what happened to https://v7.comicskingdom.net/
It hasn’t been loading since yesterday. I preferred going there to see KFS strips on mobile to avoid the formatting of comicskingdom.com and to avoid the popups imploring me to become a member.
While Baby Blues is not yet officially “paged” at GoComics (no listing among the A-Z titles), it does seem to be accessible there today *IF* you use the *full* url for the specific date: https://www.gocomics.com/babyblues/2022/01/12
However, there is no stepping back in the archive to prior dates (at least so far). Replacing the 12 in the url with 11 or 10 yields a redirect to a general “That feature could not be found” page, no comic. No idea if this is some sort of weird momentary fluke or glitch or if each day’s BB comic will be accessible that way until it officially goes fully live in February (presumably with the prior few week’s worth of strips then being accessible via the archive).
Baby Blues is now up and running on GoComics. The digi-wizards who put this stuff together are working on adding our archive of strips to the site. Thanks for the announcement, Daily Cartoonist!
Wow, this is quite the news. I think this was a big strip for King. I feel like Zits might follow soon.
For web readers it’s a downgrade in image quality unfortunately. Images on GoComics are usually a good bit smaller than on the King website (but not unreadably so).
I hope there’s a chance of the first 5 years of the strip being in the GoComics archive. King’s website archive only ever went back to 1995, and I understand the strip has been around since 1990.
Congrats on the big move, Mr. Scott (and Kirkman)! I hope it all turns out well.
@Jason Bell: “Images on GoComics are usually a good bit smaller than on the King website ”
Another reason to use the rss . . . images are large (except Cathy Classics and The Big Picture), and if you use View Image, even larger.