Confessions of a Comic Book Guy is a weekly column by Steve Bennett of Super-Fly Comics and Games in Yellow Springs, Ohio.  This week looks at long-running comic strips getting canceled, the mainstream take on Life With Archie, the upcoming Super Dinosaur, and the appearance of Squirrel Girl.

After the Annie comic strip ended in June (see "The End of an Era") I knew it was only a matter of time until we saw more classic comic strips come to a close, so I wasn't exactly surprised when the cancellation of Brenda Starr was announced.  But in all the stories of its demise a couple of points were usually overlooked.  One: the remarkable job Mary Schmich and June Brigman did of crafting a thoroughly modern adventure strip with strong characters and torn from today's headlines continuities.  They made it something altogether their own while always staying faithful to the Dale Messick original and, just as importantly, kept the franchise alive for a whole new generation.

And two: since the character never generated much in the way of merchandise, other than some comic book and the legendarily awful 1989 movie starring Brooke Shields, I'm afraid this might mean the end of Brenda altogether (see "Confessions of a Comic Book Guy--Going the Way of Mutt and Jeff").  Clearly I'm happy about the upcoming Brenda Starr collection (see "Hermes Gets Brenda Starr") but that's just preservation of the past; I hope the Chicago Tribune Syndicate does what it can to make sure the character has a future in other media.

As to which will be the next comic strip to go if I was going to start a ghoul pool. (Ordinarily I'd call it a "dead pool" but wouldn't want to have a game of prediction involving when someone will die confused with the Marvel character of the same name.)  I'd say Judge Parker, Mary Perkins and Rex Morgan, MD. all have a better than average chance of seeing the end of the next decade, seeing as how they all have the kind of readership that tends to bitterly complain  when a newspaper pulls their favorite strips.  Me, I'd put money on Dick Tracy which still somehow manages to cling to life support in spite of the fact these days it looks like an ugly smudge that's had some random word balloons struck to it.

It's always nice, kind of, when "serious" sites take notice of comic books, like last week when Slate.com ran a piece by Ruth Graham on the Life With Archie magazine titled "Archie Gets Married and Goes to Hell."  It contrasts its articles on teen celebrities with it's two comic features, "Archie Loves Veronica" and "Archie Loves Betty," and declares "the result is a truly bizarre artifact; a teen magazine with the soul of a Russian novel."  I wish I could say Graham was taking the comics too seriously but frankly the material takes itself entirely too seriously already; as someone who's read it I must confess there's something extra dismal about seeing Archie Andrews hopelessly suffering all the problems of adulthood.

It's always nice having something to look forward to, especially when it's comics, but I'd be the first to admit that it's sometimes hard for me to find a comic worth looking forward to this week, let alone months from now.  But now I have good reason to look forward all the way to Free Comic Book Day 2011 because amongst the selections publishers are offering next May is Super Dinosaur from Image Comics and Robert Kirkman's Skybound imprint (which is supposed to "focus on cultivating young talents in emerging comic book genres").

Kirkman has created what he describes as "a Pixar movie on paper," the all-ages adventures of a boy and his missile-enhanced intelligent dinosaur who fight evil and just generally bust stuff up.  After repeatedly stating that there's "no comics kids can enjoy" he's come up with a premise that seems to be composed almost entirely out of pure wish fulfillment and I suppose that if I wanted to be cynical I could suggest this project seems like a calculated effort to create a franchise that will launch toys and an animated series.  But frankly if Super Dinosaur delivers even half of the entertainment that it promises I'll be happy; it's the kind of comic that I wish they had published when I was ten.  If kids today like it too, so much the better.

And finally, being the big Squirrel Girl fan that I am it's nice to see that as of the just released New Avengers #7 she's now in residence in Avengers Mansion as nanny to Luke Cage and Jessica Jones' daughter.  I only hope that Brian Michael Bendis can resist the temptation to kill or otherwise debase the character, which is too often the fate of 'fun' characters these days (though he's already off to a bad start by suggesting she'd have anything to do with Wolverine).  But, where's her squirrel partner Tippy-Toe?

The opinions expressed in this column are solely  those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.