Welcome now to the adventures of Connie Coyne, reader advocate, who fights for the rights of the common reader, champions truth, justice and the American way, and has not been able to leap tall buildings with a single bound since she was 10.
Think of her, dear reader, as a temporary substitute for the likes of “Mary Worth” and “Judge Parker” — who were banished from the comic pages of The Salt Lake Tribune on Monday. (Excuse me while I don my super cape, which is impervious to the slings and verbal arrows of even the most angry subscriber.)
The two venerable comic strips did not draw many votes from readers in a survey the paper ran in September. But when readers looked for their serial strips in Monday’s paper and failed to find them, the flood of e-mails, phone calls and faxes began. Readers reflected on the parentage of those who made the decision to drop the comics; they railed against some of the strips that were running on the pages; they asked if we had lost our minds.
Several subscribers called and calmly told of reading “Judge Parker” or “Mary Worth” with their grandparents when they were young. Reading the strip today made them feel close to those now-gone relatives.
Some callers said they liked the little stories that continued from day to day, because “they are like little soap operas that don’t take long to read.”
And many readers said they liked the strips because they emphasized American values of hard work, truthfulness, sincerity, loyalty and love of family.
These comments from readers did not surprise me. One phone call on Thursday afternoon from a loyal “Judge Parker” fan did: “You dropped this comic right when there is a lady killer stalking the judge and two other men. How will I know if the judge has been shot and killed?” (Fat chance. This is a serial comic strip.)
I feel your pain. At one point in my adolescence, I became addicted to the soap opera “Days of Our Lives” (even though it actually was not necessary to watch this more than once a week because events moved so slowly and were so often summarized). I had to make a decision to stop watching it — even though periodically I would backslide and ask my mother what had happened.
In “Judge Parker,” readers become preoccupied with Alan Parker, Sam Driver, Abbey Spencer and Neddy and Sophie; in “Mary Worth,” they follow the adventures of adage-wise Mary herself, Toby Cameron, Ian Cameron, and Jefferson Cory, M.D. In both strips, readers learn about how to cope with life through highs and lows.
When I was a child, one of the New York City radio stations used to read Puck the Magic Weekly (a collection of color comics on Sundays) every Sunday morning as parents and children followed along. Carrying on the tradition of former New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, who read the comics on the radio during a newspaper strike, the radio actors read the various parts and narrated what was going on in each panel. I have fond memories of “hearing” “Prince Valiant” when I was 8. (In fact, I might have had his haircut at the time.)
If you feel passionately about the comics, then keep writing, calling and e-mailing your responses. The Tribune staff likes to get feedback from readers.
Cryptoquote fans: The most frenzied of the comic page feature fans, however, are (hands down) the people who work their Cryptoquote every day. They rose up in 2002 when the editor tried to replace Cryptoquote with what they considered to be a dumber crypto panel. He was forced to back down.
They rose up again this past week with calls, electronic messages and letters.
The passion they have for this decoding puzzle was expressed by one woman who wrote: “Please return our beloved Cryptoquote!
“We seniors need a reason to creak downstairs in the a.m. If we can’t solve the puzzle, we don’t drive.”
One woman from Logan complained, “Whoever made that decision should probably be taken out and shot.”
That may be how some readers felt, but, legally, we have not been able to get away with shooting our employees for at least the last 15 years.
Over the river: I am going on vacation over Thanksgiving, so my voice mail may get filled. If you have a complaint or a suggestion, please take the time to send an e-mail to me care of the newsroom assistants, since my e-mail probably will get jammed up, too. You can reach them at newsroom@sltrib.com.
The Reader Advocate’s phone number is (801) 257-8782. Write to the Reader Advocate, The Salt Lake Tribune, P.O. Box 867, Salt Lake City, Utah 84110. E-mail: reader.advocate@sltrib.com.
This Week’s Stats
304 Readers who want Judge Parker back in the comic pages
302 Readers who want Mary Worth back in the comic pages:
503 Readers who wanted Cryptoquote back in the paper
137 Readers who called to thank The Tribune for putting Cryptoquote back in
