What happened to Beetle Bailey
Idon’t know whether El Centro Mayor Cheryl Viegas-Walker got the call this week, but I do know there was a distinct possibility one of our readers was going to reach out to her to protest changes we made to our comics section.
That same reader also suggested he would be calling the television newsrooms over in Yuma to ask them to investigate us.
I suppose turnabout would have been fair play given all requests we had to investigate why, for a few months, the NBC and CBS affiliates weren’t being carried on local cable. That was true even after we explained what was going on.
Fact is, I spent a fair chunk of my week fielding calls about the funny pages. The gist of it was, they are no longer funny.
To be honest, I began to lose patience about it after a while. There is only so much criticism my income can bear.
But I did review the new comics again after the tsunami of complaints, and honestly, I didn’t find them any more or less funny than the previous lot. They were just different. Let’s be honest here: Beetle Bailey (with due respect to my fellow Mizzou alumnus, the late Mort Walker) has been recycling the same jokes for decades. Beetle Bailey is conniving and lazy. Sgt. Snorkel is fat and abusive. Pvt. Zero is dumb. Gen. Halftrack is clueless. And the whole operation would run a lot smoother if the general’s secretary, Miss Buxley, were in charge.
Nevertheless, I do understand there is something comforting about the familiar and true, so I’ll venture to explain why we made the changes we did.
Not to put too fine a point on it, it’s about money. The comics that we run — as well as columns such as Dear Abby and Dr. Roach — are purchased from syndication services. A few years ago, when we were running a much fuller comics page, we were purchasing from multiple syndicates and paying a king’s ransom for the privilege. So we streamlined our selection down to the six titles we’ve been running for the past couple of years, at considerable savings.
Recently the time had come for us to renegotiate our contract for those last six comics. In the course of our research, we learned another service with which we do business offers a prebuilt page containing comics, a daily crossword and a Sudoku puzzle, plus a daily horoscope for those who are into that sort of thing. It was part of a package we were already paying for, so we could stop paying extra for comics and bring the daily crossword and Sudoku puzzles under direct control of the editorial department — as opposed to the classified department.
Have I ever mentioned how many calls I get when there’s problem with one of the daily puzzles? I figured as long as I’m going to be blamed for them, I might as well make the problems my fault.
The bottom line is that our new comics page gives us more consistency and better quality control, at a savings of thousands per year. From where
I sit, if changing the comics means I don’t have to cut back on personnel, then I’m going to make that choice every time.
Nevertheless, I do understand why readers are disappointed. I still miss Calvin and Hobbes, and that’s been gone more than 20 years. I’m also able to empathize with my predecessor from decades ago who had to go through the same thing when Lil Abner and Pogo ended their runs in the ‘70s.