One of very few interests I have is comic strips. I enjoy reading them, and I especially like their uniquely American history. I didn't realize until a few weeks ago that The St. Paul Pioneer Press had stopped running Charles Schulz's Peanuts. This may not seem like a big deal, but Schulz grew up in St. Paul, and the Pioneer Press bought Schulz's first comic. It was also one of the first papers to run the very first Peanuts strip back in 1950. The man is an icon in St. Paul, but for some inexplicable reason they've pulled his comic.

Yesterday I picked up the paper and found a new strip on the front comics page. It was called Santabear, and it wasn't really a comic, it was an advertisement for Marshall Field's. It also took up about half of the page. I'll be the first to admit that comic strips don't have the allure they once did, and that the landscape is pretty much littered with antiquated strips still being churned out even though the creator is dead (Schulz is dead, but he has a unique attachment to St. Paul), are poorly-drawn Dilbert-esque gag comics, or, in the case of Garfield, are now drawn by a company. Contemporary artists like Bill Watterson and Berkeley Breathed have fought for more space on the comics page, but it's a battle most people really don't care too much about.

I understand this ad was designed especially for the comics, and I understand that papers make money through advertising, which is why I didn't angrily rip the paper to shreds when I saw it. Nevertheless, the paper seemed just as willing to slap on an egregious advert as it was to discard one of the most popular comic strips of all time (and one with which it holds an intimate connection). It's just business as usual, but it's also further evidence of the deterioration of a once great art form, and one which used to garner much more respect.