I don’t want to bury lead here. You may have already noticed – especially if you were like me when I was a kid – that we don’t run the comics page today. It was not a mistake, nor temporary. We will no longer distribute comics in Craig Press in the future.

Everything may change in the future, but at least for 2022, it’s a decision we made as an entity, and we understand that it might not be popular with those who love Funnies.

I understand. Believe me. I grew up reading the Funny Pages. That’s how I got introduced to the newspapers, really – that and the sports section. I remember jumping from the first two sections of the then extremely rugged San Jose Mercury News for years and years as I ate my morning cereal only to turn to the back of the Arts and Entertainment section to pour on this which was then two pages of comics on weekdays and, if you can believe it, at least four pages in color on Sundays.

That was the time, guys. I’m with you in lamenting that much of what I mentioned in that last paragraph no longer exists – or at least not in a recognizable format. The Merc is still around and doing a great job, but their print section is nothing compared to the old days. I highly doubt the A&E section even exists, though I haven’t been there in a long time, and I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that they’ve whittled the Funnies down to a page or less. All this, unfortunately perhaps, is the way of the world.

Here’s the thing, though. When I was growing up, there were far fewer outlets to regenerate and refresh daily content. For a kid in the 90s and early 2000s, these pages were sort of the world of entertainment if I wasn’t watching cable TV or listening to the radio. Yes of course the internet existed, but I could read from Peanuts all the way to Marmaduke and back before a single Calvin and Hobbes panel was loaded on the old dial-up – if such a thing even existed back then , which I doubt.

Today it is hard to imagine that. Today, in the era of 5G and high-speed wireless and everything that is on the horizon, not to mention the legions of entertainment options they bring with them, comics n simply don’t occupy the place in our entertainment offerings that they once did. do.

And so, really, I mourn the end of an era in Craig, and I hear those of you who are probably mourning with me. But as all of these changes that I mentioned above have happened, the news industry has also changed. And here is the truth.

We need to be as lean and nasty a news publishing machine as possible. We must devote all our resources to collecting important and critical local and regional news which we strive to deliver every Wednesday and Friday in print and daily online. We’ve got a long way to go to be everything we should be, but the sad truth is that providing one of the frankly dozens of ways to read daily comics, let alone the thousands of ways to find a moment of Frank and Ernest-type laughter in your daily entertainment regimen, is not in the interest of achieving these noble and crucial goals.

So we hope you’ll forgive us as we shed a tear together for the end of Dogbert and Odie, the Grizwells and Rose and Jimbo, at least as they appear in the pages of the bi-weekly Craig Press. There are plenty of ways to find your favorites online or in dedicated print, and I hope you’ll seek them out and stay up to date with their laugh-worthy hijinks any way you see fit.

Puzzles are here to stay, however. Find crosswords and Sudoku on page 6 most of the time. We are not monsters.