I DO LOVE MY COMICS!

Today in The Boondocks comic strip we have Huey putting Lucy Van Pelt into his "hate book," because keeps pulling away the football, when Charlie Brown tries to kick it. Lucy and Charlie Brown are characters in a different comic strip, Peanuts, of course. What made this more amusing than it would have was that The Boondocks happened to be printed right below Peanuts in my Newsday. Too bad Charlie Brown and Lucy weren't in todays strip.

I love it when one comic strip starts referencing another, like they're in their own little world. There was a huge example of this last year, when they all celebrated the 75th anniversary of the Blondie comic strip. Characters in many other strips started talking about going to the anniversary party weeks before. Closer to the date they started appearing in each others strips, getting together for the journey, and finally on the big day they all showed up in Blondie.

I do love my comics. I switched from the New York Times to Newsday when the latter came into New York City with the slogan "Truth, Justice and the Comics." The Times has always been too stuffy to run comics--though that hasn't been a problem for the Washington Post, its closest competitor as "the newspaper of record."

Newsday has cut back on its comics over the years. It used to run three pages of them each day, and now it's only two, minus room for its "Kidsday" articles for/by children. So they've deleted a number of strips, and squished the remaining ones into a much smaller area. They have kept some of the deleted ones on their website, so I still follow one or two there, and there's a couple I find elsewhere on the internet. I sure wish the writer of Helen, Sweetheart of the Internet would return from "sabbatical," though.