The strip is TEN years old...in fact, it started in Sept 09, making this a very special month: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Get_Fuzzy Makes it all the more sad that it's starting with a week...or more...of reruns.
deandome, Get Fuzzy has been around for quite a while. His latest book, advertised on this site, are all strips from before this site's earliest archive. Search your local bookstore and find the latest Get Fuzzy book and look at the list of titles of previous books. Then you might get the scope of Get Fuzzy.
Occasionally, Darby will incorporate a Sunday strip into an ongoing daily narative. Seeing as, for most traditional newspapers, Sunday strips have to be prepared weeks in advance, the dailies that follow it would have to be submitted later so that they would run following the incorporated Sunday strip. I don't think this is the case here. Most likely the week's worth of dailies weren't ready on time. Darby even did a story line about such an event. Bill Watterson (Calvin & Hobbes) was the master at Sunday inclusions into daily naratives.
Fuzzy is hardly 'long running'. Take a look at the 100 or so strips offered here..how many of them disappear for a week 4-10 times a year & leave the paper holding the bag & the readers rehashing old strips? Have you ever seen Scott Adams take a break on Dilbert? NO Chares Schulz? NO (over 40 years!!) The only 'vacationers' in the comics world are super-heavyweights like Garry Trudeau & Cathy G. Heck, even Bob Keane gets his kids to do Family Circus when he takes a break (groan) And they clearly PLAN on their absences, where Fuzzy's numerous "New strips were not available at press time, so...." situations clearly indicate they are unplanned. The only thing I'm angry about is that Darby is jeopardizing my ability to enjoy his strip in the future, because his CUSTOMERS (newspapers, not us!) are not getting what they were promised, ergo the contract can & probably should be terminated.
This has nothing to do w/comics.com...these strips are first & foremost PRINTED...THAT is where he makes his money. This is just a convenience, and if papers drop a strip, they'll disappear altogether, including here. If you can't come up with & execute a comic strip EVERY DAY, you have no business being/pretending to be a daily comic writer who's syndicated in national newspapers. EVERY other comic writer, save for a small handful of longtime veterans, plays by these rules, and if Darby doesn't, he'll soon find himself being dropped by major & minor newspapers across the nation. Charles Schulz didn't miss a strip in over 40 years, for chrizzakes. If it's too much, and if you can make a living at it, cut back to Sundays only, like Bill Amend did w/Foxtrot. Darby's been pulling these absences for years; if it's due to health issues, I'd think the papers would know that and he'd probby even make it public so we'd cut him some slack. I don't think...or hope... that's the case. I'm not breaking badly on him to be mean, or even just to complain about reruns. It just seems clear to me, now that the Trib is running a replacement strip instead of reruns, there's a very real danger that Fuzzy won't be in any Chicago newspapers. And if he loses enough others, the strip will die altogether
This has nothing to do w/comics.com...these strips are first & foremost PRINTED...THAT is where he makes his money. This is just a convenience, and if papers drop a strip, they'll disappear altogether, including here. If you can't come up with & execute a comic strip EVERY DAY, you have no business being/pretending to be a daily comic writer who's syndicated in national newspapers. EVERY other comic writer, save for a small handful of longtime veterans, plays by these rules, and if Darby doesn't, he'll soon find himself being dropped by major & minor newspapers across the nation. Charles Schulz didn't miss a strip in over 40 years, for chrizzakes. If it's too much, and if you can make a living at it, cut back to Sundays only, like Bill Amend did w/Foxtrot. Darby's been pulling these absences for years; if it's due to health issues, I'd think the papers would know that and he'd probby even make it public so we'd cut him some slack. I don't think...or hope... that's the case. I'm not breaking badly on him to be mean, or even just to complain about reruns. It just seems clear to me, now that the Trib is running a replacement strip instead of reruns, there's a very real danger
It may be annoying to come to this free website and find your favourites unrenewed, but personally I couldn't come up with a new fresh idea every day for weeks, months, years...granted an artist is supposed to be more inspired than the rest of us, but they are human. They get sick, lose family members, have problems etc. just like the rest of us, and that must take its toll. Even without that, it must be tough to keep going sometimes.
Comics.com costs us nothing. I live in Europe and I don't even have to spend the price of a newspaper to see the comics. And I too could use a break sometimes, even though no one is sitting there with bated breath waiting for me to be "funny" or make their day.
I hope this isn't a case of Darby thinking he's "all that and a bag of chips" and that no one can touch him. On the other hand, maybe he has personal issues that prevent him from dedicating his time to his strip. We could think in the direction of compassion.
