Meet MSNBC.com's new comic strips
Posted: Friday, April 27, 2007 6:00 AM by Gael Fashingbauer Cooper
Filed Under:
Comic strips
It was way back in January that we first started discussing updating MSNBC.com's comic-strip offerings. The much-beloved "Fox Trot" had moved to Sundays only, and "Boondocks" has been on hiatus for months, with no word as to when creator Aaron McGruder might bring the strip back.
I offered up the list of comics we could use to replace the old strips, and we received more than 400 comments discussing and debating the potential newcomers. We know we can't make everyone happy -- though we have dozens of comics to choose from, some of you clamored for different strips. (We answered some of your questions about that here.) Many readers were upset that fans of "Dog Eat Doug" staged an online campaign to dominate the voting in our online poll, feeling that this was unfair.
But the online poll didn't determine the final choices, and neither did the posted Weblog comments. Yes, we took your feedback into consideration, but we also know that online polls can be manipulated in numerous ways. We'd be stupid to trust them too implicitly. We let your feedback be a guide, but editorial opinions also played a role.
Still, in the end, the two comic strips we chose to add to our online lineup are "Lio" and, yes, "Dog Eat Doug."
"Lio" reminds me a little bit of the legendary "Calvin and Hobbes," and there's something creative and fascinating about how the strip has no dialogue, yet artist Mark Tatulli manages to make Lio come to life. In the sample strips our supplier offered, Lio beats Death at the board game Life, and helps a rabbit escape a trap by trapping the rabbit's pursuer. You gotta love a kid like that.
"Dog Eat Doug" didn't get all those readers to flood our poll by accident. This cute strip features two hard-to-resist stars -- Sophie the dog and Doug the baby. Whether you have dogs, kids, or neither, you may find you can relate to these cute rivals-turned-pals.
I wish we could add more strips, because among my top choices would be "Get Fuzzy" and "Red and Rover" (love the recurring Marcia Brady jokes!). But thankfully, both of those strips are easy to find online elsewhere.
And as we have discussed here before, the classic strip "For Better or For Worse" is heading to a kind of hybrid format in the near future. "FBOFW" will combine old strips with new bits, such as having a character appear and muse upon old times, thus leading into a vintage storyline. So we may have another empty comics space to fill sometime soon. For now, check out our new new additions to the comics family, and we hope you get a laugh or two. These days, we all need all the laughter we can get.
