Filling in the Blanks

A reader recently pointed me to this letter to the editor printed in the Appeal-Democrat, a newspaper in Marysville, California:

Letter: Comics change strikes a nerve
January 02, 2011
Your comics section would be greatly enhanced if you left a blank space in each location currently occupied by "Get Fuzzy," "F-Minus," and "Pearls Before Swine": the clean white paper would be a significant improvement in each case. Add "Stone Soup" back to the format and you will have raised the quality of this section by an order of magnitude.

(Name deleted)

Dobbins, California

That got me to thinking.  Would it be better?

Here is the comics page with Pearls Before Swine:

 

And here is the comics page without it:

 

If you ask me, that's an odd layout.

But then I did some more thinking.  What if a reader used the space?

For example, to write down their grocery list:

 

Or play tic-tac-toe:

 

Or perhaps to write commentary about other strips:

 

Best of all, it would be a great place for my wife Staci to write me a friendly little love note:

 

So to my anonymous friend in Dobbins, California, I say this:  I think the deletion of the strips was the right move.  But the leftover blank space is an oddity that perhaps you didn't fully think through.

Fortunately, I have.  And now we're on to something.

Excuse me while I write a letter to the editor.