I’d rather write about almost anything other than comic strips, but forces beyond my control have compelled me to do so several times this year, including today, and likely will again in the near future. We have a few changes coming to the print and online version of The Plain Dealer, and one involves comics. I know. Say it isn’t so. Not even a month after the people behind the Spiderman comic decided to call it quits, resulting in us filling the spot with Hagar the Horrible, word comes that Real Life Adventures, a single panel comic, is going away, too. The finale from Gary Wise and Lance Aldrich will publish Nov. 17. Some comics seem to go on forever, with the descendants of the creators continuing them, but some, like Real Life Adventures, expire. Close readers of our comics -- and my email tells me we have quite a few -- will notice the absence and write to ask why we killed it. I tried to get ahead of such questions by announcing Spiderman’s end, but the emails came anyway. It’s futile, I suspect, but I’m trying to get ahead of Real Life Adventures questions here. To keep contracts in order, when one comic goes away, we replace it with another from the same syndication service, and the replacement for Real Life Adventures will be Close to Home, which John McPherson began in 1992. It does not have a continuing plot. It is a one-a-day gag. You can read it online at https://www.gocomics.com/closetohome. That will make three comics we’ve replaced this year, with Crabgrass replacing Dilbert after creator Scott Adams went off the deep end with a public racist rant. I’ve mentioned previously that we want to expand our comic offerings. To do that, we need to partner with our sister newsrooms to have a uniform comics menu. If we can build efficiency into our comics pages across the enterprise, we can offer more comics. We’re working on that. The additional comics would not be in the print edition. They’d be added to the Update section, available only in the online version of The Plain Dealer. The number of people reading our newspaper via the online app has rocketed since we added the Update section, which features late-breaking news and sports, and we think even more people would turn to it for comics. Separately, starting next week, you’ll see another change in the newspaper print and online versions. The most obvious will be our moving the weather page from its longtime home on page A2. You’ll find it on the second-to-last page of the section, instead. We’re reorganizing the front section to make it more cohesive. Because local news is our province, we fill our front pages with it, but those front-page stories now jump to wherever we have space in the section. That’s changing. The front page stories will now continue on pages 2 and 3. You won’t have to hunt for them. The local stories will be followed in the section by regional and state stories and then national and international stories. Paging through the paper will make more sense. We’re putting weather in the back, near environmental, science and technology news. You’ll get the same amount of news you get now – with the extra Update section every day if you read the online version. We are merely changing the order of the pages. We hope this will not be too jarring, but we wanted to let you know of the changes because many of us are creatures of habit. The habit of going to page 2 for the weather is about to change. I’m at [email protected]. Thanks for reading | 