For the past several months, the Chicago Tribune has run a “Comics Carousel” in its Sunday comics pages, a space where two potential strips run side-by-side with readers voting their preference.
Now the paper is going to use it “as a court of last appeal” for strips that the Trib is dropping, Associate Managing Editor / Entertainment Geoff Brown wrote in Sunday’s paper.
“If we decide to discontinue a strip, we will give its fans a chance to keep it alive in the Carousel -- when possible,” he wrote. “There may be times that we elect to drop multiple strips; Carousel can handle only one at a time.”
“Broom-Hilda” will be the “first strip in search of a reader bailout,” Brown wrote. It will be pitted against “Free Range,” which was the most recent winner of the Comics Carousel.
‘Comics Carousel has turned out to be a wonderful way to get the reader’s voice into the equation,” the Tribune’s standards editor, Margaret Holt wrote – despite evidence that the cartoonists urged fans to stuff the ballot boxes.