The Washington Post Writer’s Syndicate has announced that Matt Janz has changed the title of his comic strip feature, Out of the Gene Pool, to Single and Looking.
The reason reflects a change in focus, but it is somewhat unfortunate since I personally enjoyed the married couple as well, while finding the dweebish brother of the wife as well has his fuzzy bear male chauvinist roomie rather annoying, actually. The black single mom character Jackie (who works with Andy, the married mom, in a boring office job ... the fact it doesn't pay much was suggested by the fact Andy and her husband worked one Xmas season to get extra money), however, has a lot of good material. She is basically a lovable goofball sort.
Meanwhile, though Doonesbury and For Better of For Worse continue to shine, though some weeks are better than others, Get Fuzzy seems to have hit a dry spell of late. This includes a few too many strips focusing on Bucky and Satchel's weird friends. Pearls to Swine has mostly kept to its high quality, btw, surely when the stupids predators are around. A few others, like One Big Happy continue to make me smile now and again.
The NY Daily News editorial department, however, appears to have shifted in a more conservative direction, suggested not only by some of the editorials, but also by some of the editorial cartoons. A few are downright offensive knee-jerk conservative drivel. Firing my favorite columnist, Lenore Skenazy, didn't help. The days of the likes of Lars-Erik Nelson are no more. The best pieces tend to be off the opinion pages, like Juan Gonzalez.
Oh well, this was about comics, right? Anyway, it has a decent general news coverage for a local paper, the D.C. articles actually pretty good at times. And, the entertainment, sports, and so forth are probably the best of the lot. Not that the NY Post is exactly a worthwhile competitor (except as to sports ... but even there, the newsprint stinks) ... NY Newsday has its charms though, even if it did away with a NYC edition years back.