Aside from the completely wishful thinking statement at the end about people preferring to read their strips in the paper rather than online, CNN’s article on the state of the syndicated comic strip is a good one. The fact that the average newspaper reader’s age is 55 says a lot about how they’re are becoming more and more obsolete in the digital age. We still subscribe to the Sunday paper in my house, but that’s mainly for the coupons, to be honest. Like most of us, we get the majority of our news online nowadays, and that’s also how I keep up with my favorite strips as well.

Younger readers complain about older-skewing strips, says Rizzo, and older readers don’t understand the humor of something like “Pearls.” Meanwhile, his newspaper, like most in this time of shrinking circulations and aging newspaper demographics (the average age of a newspaper reader is 55, according to a 2005 Carnegie Corp. study), is trying to attract new readers — an area in which comics can play a key role.

“They do help sell newspapers,” says Rizzo, pointing to surveys ranking the importance of newspaper features to readers. “[Comics] are one way of having readers get attached to the paper.”

But some newspapers are nervous about taking on edgier strips, says “Get Fuzzy” cartoonist Darby Conley. He observes that he’s received complaints from papers about using the word “butt” in his strip, “but then you turn on ‘South Park,’ and you go, what? It’s a really weird situation,” he says.

“Newspapers are, in my guess, in 1959 in terms of morality,” he says. “They’d rather have a dead comics page than have people writing in.”

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