A comic serial with your cereal?

At least in The Orlando Sentinel, the traditional serial comic strip has no representation. No "Mary Worth" or "Dick Tracy" or even "Ric-O-Shay and Hipshot" or "Gasoline Alley." Perhaps alluding to the short attention spans of folks in the central Florida region (must be all the Disney), most strips are get-the-joke-out jobbers that don't require you to follow along with any idea about character development or situations.

There are a few exceptions, like "For Better Or For Worse" and the always-excellent "Doonesbury" (I wonder how Duke will act now that his namesake, Hunter S. Thompson, is dead?) But a constantly-evolving strip that I've actually followed since my junior high school days (and that dates back to the late 70's) is also dishing out continuous story lines, one of which reached some incredible completion today. In the strip "Luann", brother Brad has finally become a firefighter after barely surviving a punch to the stomach during academy graduation from love-interest Toni Daytona's jealous boyfriend Dirk. Dirk was arrested, Toni coddled Brad, and today - he's announced his assignment location.

It's a tribute to Greg Evans, the strip's creator, that I actually thought "yes! he finally did it!" Of course, he's not at the same station as Toni, but something tells me that it's a good thing, for the sake of us, the comic-reading public.