Pink Panther

It looks like four silent penultimate panels for this championship Sunday:

Foxtrot by Bill Amend
Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis
Piranha Club by Bud Grace
Dog Eat Doug by Brian Anderson (four in a row!)

Darby Conley shows how to stretch a one panel gag across four:


For unknown reasons, the L.A. Times dropped the Sunday Heathcliff. No real loss there (one can only stand so many reader-submitted clever cat stories,) but the chosen replacement is very puzzling:


Pink Panther? A comic strip based on a forty-year old cartoon based on a movie's opening credits? Is there any one who would be interested in this? The reason's for this strip's existence can't be based in nostalgia. The only thing the Pink Panther reminds me of is insulation commercials. There is one possible explanation for its appearance in the L.A. Times--it is syndicated by Tribune Media, the mega-company that owns the Times. This is probably just another cost-cutting measure designed to homogenize together the worst aspects of the Times, Chicago Tribune and Baltimore Sun into one third-class budget newspaper. But, really, could the fees for Heathcliff really have been that high? Puzzling, very puzzling.