Comic strips

No More Real Life Adventures – Update

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D. D. Degg November 17, 2023 1 minute 5 comments

Update: Gary and Lance returned for one final original cartoon to say goodbye to their fans on November 17.

original November 12, 2023 article:

From the Cleveland Plain Dealer comes news that Real Life Adventures by Gary Wise and Lance Aldrich will come to an end at the end of this week:

Not even a month after the people behind the Spiderman comic decided to call it quits, resulting in us filling the spot with Hagar the Horrible, word comes that Real Life Adventures, a single panel comic, is going away, too. The finale from Gary Wise and Lance Aldrich will publish Nov. 17.

The daily panels of Real Life Adventures have been in rerun status since October 16, 2023 which means today’s Sunday strip will be the last original content for the feature – unless they throw us a curve and this coming week’s dailies are all new (it wouldn’t be the first head fake from the pair of cartoonists).

Notes:

That November 17, 2023 date mentioned in The Plain Dealer article is a Friday so I’m not totally on board with that.

Writer Lance Aldrich has just celebrated his 78th birthday, so he has earned his retirement from the daily grind.

Close to Home will replace Real Life Adventures in The Cleveland Plain Dealer.

To keep contracts in order, when one comic goes away, we replace it with another from the same syndication service, and the replacement for Real Life Adventures will be Close to Home, which John McPherson began in 1992. It does not have a continuing plot. It is a one-a-day gag. You can read it online at https://www.gocomics.com/closetohome.

The article hints at Advance Publications following the path of Lee, McClatchy, and Gannett in unifying their comics:

I’ve mentioned previously that we want to expand our comic offerings. To do that, we need to partner with our sister newsrooms to have a uniform comics menu. If we can build efficiency into our comics pages across the enterprise, we can offer more comics. We’re working on that.

From March 24, 1991 is the first Real Life Adventures:

[reruns continue on GoComics November 18, 2023 – on]