→2025→06→01→Comic strips→Comics Kingdom/King Features→GoComics→Web Sites→GoComics Short Sheeting Readers
Comic strips Comics Kingdom/King Features GoComics Web Sites

GoComics Short Sheeting Readers

1 minute 9 comments

While GoComics has developed a habit of not including the black plate on a Sunday strip or two this year since their Great Reset, that oversight is usually corrected within hours or at least before the day is over.

What continues to irritate me is their refusal to post the complete Sunday of a lot of their comics. While the Creators Syndicate and Tribune Media comics are printed in full, the Andrews McMeel Syndicate (AMS) are often abridged at GoComics.

Dark Side of the Horse by Samson – April 6, 2025 (GoComics)
Dark Side of the Horse by Samson – April 6, 2025 (Facebook)

Some Sunday comics have an unchanging top tier for the full strip (Foxtrot, Arlo and Janis, Ziggy), but some (Dark Side of the Horse, Garfield, Jumpstart) have original content. Dark Side of the Horse has a joke or two that we miss when GoComics posts the third page rather than the half page version. The top tier of the half page JumpStart usually has an vital introduction to the main comic.

And then there is the confusion as to which panel to print when going the tabloid route.

Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau – June 1, 2025
Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau – May 18, 2025

A recent development with Doonesbury is whether to drop the title panel, the past practice for years, or to dismiss one of the other top tier drop panels, a recent pattern. A solution would be to print the entire Sunday.

GoComics even chops the sacred Peanuts.

Peanuts rerun by Charles M. Schulz – June 1, 2025
Peanuts by Charles M. Schulz – June 4, 1978

Of late GoComics has been alternating between full comics and incomplete versions. Today (June 1, 2025) 9 Chickweed Lane, Alley Oop, Arlo and Janis, The Born Loser, Dark Side of the Horse, Doonesbury, Foxtrot, Garfield, JumpStart, Marmaduke, Monty, Nancy, Peanuts, Pearls Before Swine, Rose is Rose, and Ziggy were all diminished in some way.

As for Comics Kingdom – they have been posting the complete King Features Syndicate comics for some time now. Although I do object to their post Mary Worth in the small quarter page format rather than the half page.

Mary Worth by Karen Moy and June Brigman – June 1, 2025 (Comics Kingdom)
Mary Worth by Karen Moy and June Brigman – June 1, 2025 (Washington Post)

Previous Post
CSotD: The Children’s Hour
Next Post
CSotD: Start Your Week by Overthinking

Comments 9

  1. I’ve noticed Gary Varvel and Steve Kelly have quit posting new cartoons to GoComics. I’m having to go to Arcamax if I want to catch up on their latest drivel.

  2. GoComics is doing a disservice to their creators and to the (paid!) subscribers who are the fans of those creators. I want to see the cartoonists’ entire work! Unlike in print format, surely space is not an issue? I’m gonna go yell at some kids to get off my lawn now.

    1. Please tell GoComics. I, too, want to see all of the Dark Side of the Horse and other strips that I follow.

  3. Even worse than chopping up the Sunday strips (and forgetting the black layer), another big defect of the relaunched GoComics website is that they no longer post the comics (on any day) at a reliable time. One could count on the old website to publish every single feature by 1am (East Coast time). When I check my comics on the new site, the calendar may say “Tuesday”, and the icon may claim “updated”, but the strip shown is still from Monday. Because of that unreliability (and not to mention their new mercenary paywall), I have moved almost all of my daily comic links to Arcamax.

    1. I generally read GoComics sometime in the morning; even before the relaunch a strip or two would sometimes update later in the day. Putting all the strips that did not update [yet] today at the bottom of the custom page, and removing the “see previous strip” arrow, makes dealing with these much harder.

      In general custom pages have reduced functionality with the new design, evidently in support of a “cleaner”look; a poor tradeoff!

  4. This is so confusing. Are they aware that there are no space constraints on the Internet?

  5. Besides the fact that GoComics has moved the entire comic archive behind their new paywall, they have also eliminated the “search” functionality that used to be the best feature on the entire website. Although many comics did not have a text index (like B.C. and Bloom County), many others (like Calvin & Hobbes and Peanuts) had a complete index of all the dialog, making it very easy to find any particular strip, as long as you could enter one distinctive phrase into the search field. All that has disappeared. It is just barely possibly that GoComics might have preserved the search and moved it behind the paywall, but since they are not advertising it at all, I think it is much more likely that they simply discarded it. Even if it did not work for all strips, it was the only feature that kept me coming back to GoComics.

Comments are closed.

Search

Subscribe to our newsletter

Get a daily recap of the news posted each day.

^ Top