To the Columbus Dispatch: A Call For a New Comics Page!!

The Other Paper also reports this week that The Columbus Dispatch will be cutting staff and cutting some syndicated features, which, Dispatch associate publisher Mike Curtin explains, are readily available right here on the Interweb, in favor of more locally oriented features. Specific examples sited are the stock listings and the Op-Ed page.

What about the comics page? All of the comics the Dispatch carries, from Pearls Before Swine to Peanuts, are available on-line. Not only that, but this city is home to a plethora of highly talented and unfortunately unknown cartoonists, myself included, who would jump at the chance to be seen in the town's largest daily paper. The Dispatch could ditch its generic, cookie cutter comics page that looks like that of every other daily paper in every other city in America in favor of something truly one of a kind with a distinctly local flavor. And if it succeeds, soon papers across the country will be spotlighting local cartoonists and the Dispatch will be hailed for leading newspaper comics into the new century.

Mr. Curtin, I urge you to have the vision and courage to do this. Be a man and print my comics!!