Bet Your Bottom Dollar That Tomorrow...

Annie says, "Be sure to drink your Ovaltine!"

…there’ll be no Annie.

Tribune Media Services is pulling the plug on Annie, the daily comic strip chronicling the adventures of the dot-eyed little orphan girl with a penchant for red dresses. According to the article, the strip is now appearing in fewer than 20 papers. Here’s the weird part, though: TMS VP of Licensing Steve Tippie says this about ending the strip’s run:

“Annie is more of a kids’ property, so it’s less relevant to newspaper audiences than say a Dick Tracy or a Brenda Starr.”

Um…yeah. Show of hands: how many of you out there who read a newspaper (or syndicated newspaper comic strips in online form) on a regular basis actually find Dick Tracy or Brenda Starr “relevant?” Obviously, he’s dancing around the fact that in today’s terms, “newspaper audiences” = “people eligible for an AARP membership.” But even taking that as a given, does anyone – other than Josh Fruhlinger – actually care about Dick Tracy these days? To say nothing of Brenda Starr, which appears only once in nearly six years’ worth of archives on Fruhlinger’s site, and that in a post by occasional Guest Curmudgeon Uncle Lumpy. That’s right: even the guy with a bizarre fixation on Mary Worth, Apartment 3G and Judge Parker doesn’t give a rat’s ass about Brenda Starr.

Oddly enough, the two strips he mentioned both happen to be TMS offerings, as well. Okay, so he’s just trying to promote the brand. And maybe the folks at TMS imagine that there are people out there who actually do care about the adventures of Dick and Brenda. But really, if you look at their catalog, the only strip they offer that has any kind of passionate following is the god-awful-but-inexplicably-popular Pluggers.

Of course, when you consider that Little Orphan Annie‘s creator, Harold Gray, has been dead for 42 years, you’re really just left wondering how it’s lasted this long. Dick Tracy‘s Chester Gould retired 33 years ago and has been dead for 25. Dalia “Dale” Messick, creator of Brenda Starr, retired in 1980.

Those ~20 papers that are losing Annie could give that space to something new, something coming from the pen of new talent. Instead they’ll just plug in Mandrake the Magician or Gasoline Alley or Gil Thorp or something else boring and stupid that’s a near-contemporary of the Yellow Kid and is on its fifth or sixth creative team. The editors will say, “Well, sure, we could run something new…but now that we’ve got a spot open, we can finally start running Mutt and Jeff!”

Is it any wonder that younger comics artists are turning to the web?