Roger already knows how I feel about this, and I won't repeat my initial reaction to the news here. Suffice it to say, he's accepting this bean-counter decision with far greater grace and dignity than I would have, which is a mark of the man.
I'm in the same business, and although I believe this is the wrong decision (if the Star is doomed, then it should have gone down with Beau Peep still on deck - it's the last thing that should have been thrown overboard!), I know only too well how desperate things are these days in the newspaper industry. The only good news is for trees! I understand the need for cuts, and cartoonists are certainly not the only ones to be affected at the moment.
That said, if you're trying to hold onto readers, you don't jettison the best part of your product, and this doesn't augur well for the rest of us. If there is a plus side to this, we're in transition at the moment, and the future of news will be (if it isn't already) the Internet. That's all still finding its feet at the moment, and what we need to do is convince those at the front line that cartoons and cartoon strips work every bit as well on screen as on paper, if not even better.
It may take a bit of effort, but there is hope. Voices of support meanwhile, would do no harm. It's difficult to get people fired up about losing their favourite cartoons when there are actually more devastating events going on in the world, and so people tend to accept such things without much of a whimper. But they are missed when they're gone, and it's easy for the powers that be to ignore that, if their attention isn't drawn to it.
It's been a magnificent run, Roger, which you and Andrew can be justifiably and immensely proud of. You don't get that amount of time for a cartoon strip without it being of the highest quality and much loved. It actually deserves a much wider audience than it's had over the decades, and I still hope yet that you might get that.
