Denver Post readers are serious about their comics.
We knew that even before we started tryouts of new strips we’re considering putting in the paper. But it was hammered home in the 2,000-plus e-mails we’ve gotten over the past several months as we tested Frazz and Non-Sequitur (“Yes!” readers said), as well as Pooch Cafe and Intelligent Life (“No!” they wrote) and a few others.
“The Denver Post comics section should certainly have room for the following comics,” wrote L.H. Gibbard, “even if it means an extra page needs to be added in order to accommodate them: B.C., the Wizard of Id, Andy Capp, Non Sequitur, Lola, Tundra, Mr. Boffo, Rhymes with Orange, Hagar the Horrible, Peanuts, Bizzaro, and Argyle Sweater.”
In the interest of pleasing all of our readers, we’d love to be able to run more than the 40-plus that appear in our pages — Tundra and Peanuts (Sundays) are among them, by the way — but newsprint is limited and change is inevitable.
Our journey into the funnies began last year when a couple of things happened. First, we stopped carrying “Get Fuzzy” because the cartoonist wasn’t regularly providing new material and we wanted to be able to give our readers more timely features. Then, last fall, Ed Stein stopped drawing “Freshly Squeezed,” in order to devote time to a web-based comic and story feature,
That gave us an opening to offer readers some new options. We offered two-week trials of eight different strips and invited reader comments.
Comment they did, often using colorful — and unprintable — language. We were schooled on what readers thought was funny, what they thought of the artistic abilities of various cartoonists, and even the fact that some strips have too much text.
“I must address a separate issue: Fred Basset,” wrote Val Tretter. “I believe the Fred Basset comic is a useless, irrelevant, and utterly unintelligent waste of space on the comics page. This comic is completely unrelatable in today’s society and has no trace of humor.
“If you could disregard my age and take my words into consideration, it would be greatly appreciated,” added Tretter, who is 14.
Others were less polite, calling us idiotic, cheapskates.
“You’re batting a thousand so far (in the wrong direction) with the new comics,” wrote Dorothy Winfield. “I wouldn’t bother reading any of them. I do not find any of them funny, and the drawings were pretty bad in a couple of them. Why not bring back The Wizard of Id, Berke Breathed, or Gary Trudeau?”
Some readers want tradition with their daily comics. “Why don’t you try the long-standing strip Prince Valiant, popular in other papers since the 1930s?” asked Bob Schuster, who says he’s a 50-year subscriber to The Post. “It has always been a great comic strip with history, pathos, and a comic element.”
Please add your voice by rating our complete comics lineup on page 1C. We’ll share the results soon.
Suzanne S. Brown: 303-954-1697, sbrown@denverpost.com or twitter.com/suzannebro
