Broom Hilda Won!

Broom Hilda has beaten F Minus! A few months ago I reported how The Chicago Tribune was running an online survey to see which of those two strips would be retained on their comics page and which one would be relegated to the junk heap.

The cartoonist of F Minus lobbied on his website for reader support, whereas Broom Hilda's Russell Myers couldn't be bothered. Starting next week, the triumphant Hilda will face a new challenger in the Tribune's Comics Carousel. Hilda has now bumped off three or four consecutive challengers and you'd think the (dizzy?) comics page editor would begin to see the light that his survey process is flawed and that Hilda will probably continue bumping off the newbies ad infinitum.

I saw the vote tally on a dedicated Tribune Comics Carousel web page: 15,387 votes in favor of Broom Hilda and 4,044 votes for F Minus. I was impressed to see that so many readers had been involved and interested enough to cast a vote.

(I went back to the same page a few days later, but the vote tally was nowhere to be found. In its place was the below drawing of "Colonel Tribune" and a terse explanation that the web page I was looking for no longer existed. It seems the newspaper intends some of its links to be very short-lived, but how peculiar that they would in this manner mock Colonel Robert R. McCormick (1880 - 1955), an early owner and publisher of the paper! )