Antelope Valley Press made changes to their comics page earlier this month with a notice that indicates all the dozens of Horizon Publications newspapers that run comics will be switching to a company-wide standard comics page in the near future. A company-wide standard comics page of only King Features Syndicate comics.
The Antelope Valley Press front page notice from June 8, 2024:
New look for AV Press comics, puzzles pages
Your comics and puzzle pages have a new look starting with today’s edition of the Antelope Valley Press. Horizon Newspapers Inc. newspapers are adopting a companywide comics page, so some comic strips will be added, and others removed.
Horizon is joining Gannett, McClatchy, Lee, PostMedia, and Wick in instituting a comics page standard for their entire line of newspapers. Also in not including women cartoonists in their lineup.
As June 2024 ends we find only a few of Horizon’s newspapers that run a comics page have made the switch. The Antelope Valley Press and The Bakersfield Californian, which are both printed at the Antelope Valley press, and the Northern California Grass Valley Union have made the switch.
It is unknown how long it will take for the rest of the line to make the switch (it took Gannett months).
Above is the AV Press comics half page from June 8, 2024 before, below is the page after the change.
>> note: unlike the GV Union and the AV Press The Bakersfield Californian carries a short stack (Classic Peanuts, Pearls Before Swine, Pickles, and Baby Blues) of Andrews McMeel comics on another page. <<
The new Horizons comics page consists of
Beetle Bailey
Dumplings
Zits
Blondie
Never Been Deader
Hagar the Horrible
Insanity Streak
Dennis the Menace
Family Circus
What stands out from this grouping of King Features Syndicate (KFS) comics is the ones that are new. By now we expect a corporate decided comics page to be a collection of 20th Century creations; but here we have Dumplings, Never Been Deader, and Insanity Streak which have all joined the syndicate and made available to newspapers in just the past year.
Insanity Streak by Tony Lopes is the newest of the three to join KFS but is the oldest of the trio. An Australian strip Wikipedia says that it first appeared in 1995. Insanity Streak showed up last year at Comics Kingdom’s door as a refugee fleeing the comics-adverse newspapers of his homeland.
Never Been Deader by Tommy Devoid arrived at Comics Kingdom in August 2023 after originating as a webcomic earlier in the year. Never Been Deader had appeared in print in October 2023.
Dumplings by Victor Van Acker also arrived at the Kingdom in August of 2023. I think that was the strip’s first appearance. Soon after the Dumplings’ arrival at The Kingdom it was being offered to newspapers for print.
It brought a smile to see these new comic strips spread among the ones from the 1900s.
Of those nine strips, only four of them are still being written by the original authors (but two of those strips are already in their late 20s). Except for the two brand new strips, the average age of the remaining seven strips is 59 years. Once again, an archaic paper medium decides to feed predigested zombie pap to its rapidly ageing readership. Even worse, the space they wasted on those idiotic horoscopes could have been filled by four or five other (newer) strips. (Let’s face it, they could hardly have found anything older.)
(note: “HAGAR THE HORRIBLE” credits in some of the images of this article)
Which is how the syndicate credits the comic strip:
https://comicskingdom.com/hagar-the-horrible
The Sunday title panel continues to credit Dik Browne.
I keep waiting for a Monday strip to show up with a Gary Hallgren signature.
But who does Hagar the Horrible nowadays? Dik and Chris are deceased.
What could be next? The Tribune owned newspapers (Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun, New York Daily News, Orlando Sentinel, etc.) make their own national comics page with a mix of Andrews-McMeel, KFS, and Tribune Content Agency comics that newspapers can pick in groups. That way the Tribune owned strips Dick Tracy, Broom Hilda, Animal Crackers, Middletons, Bound and Gagged, Brewster Rockit, and maybe – if it still goes on – Gasoline Alley could get back in some papers? But if the Tribune owned papers go with Garfield from A-M and Dennis the Menace from KFS that could be worse for Chicago Tribune’s rival Chicago newspaper the Chicago Sun-Times (Of course, the Chicago Tribune carries Grand Avenue 7 days a week and the Chicago Sun-Times as of June 2024 still hasn’t dropped from its Sunday comics Grand Avenue as of yet! I have written to the Sun-Times many times to drop Grand Avenue from the Sunday Sun-Times comics mostly with suggestions for a Grand Avenue replacement (I suggested Sunday Arlo and Janis, Sunday Frank and Ernest, Sunday Little Oop – a Sunday spin off of Alley Oop, and newcomer Crabgrass, but never got any responses at all at least for now.