Comics Page Changeover

Doonesbury has been going in and out of reruns for a while now, but with the news that Garry Trudeau would be taking a rather longer break this time at the very least the newspaper I have a subscription announced it was going to hold a poll for what would replace it on its comics page. The readership, though, would just get to vote in an online poll for one of three choices. At first glance, I had the impression I might have liked more choices; on taking a little longer look at sample strips I began to think I preferred "Dustin," whose capsule draw was "a recent college graduate is stuck at home still looking for work," the most of the three. I had the impression "Pickles" (which I'd heard of and read before) would get the most votes, though, even if this did seem to tie into inescapable thoughts of "old" media and the corresponding age of its majority demographic...

When the announcement was made today, though, I was just a little surprised to see I'd voted for the winner in the poll and "Dustin" would be showing up on the comics page. However, it also turned out that where Doonesbury had been printed at a larger size than everything else, now all the strips had been reduced to the same confines. Memories of Bill Watterson complaining how comic strips don't get the respect they could use (and that they might be a better draw for the newspapers if they were larger) did come to mind; that, though, does keep me thinking how I can't quite seem to find "webcomics" suitable to really grab my interest.