By Bill Plante Jr.

You find the news disturbing? The Russia and Georgia thing? Obama and McCain, neck and neck? Palin up-staging Hillary? The Patriots without Brady?

Hah!

You want disturbing? I will give you disturbing.

Berkley Breathed is parting company with Opus, the most preyed upon penguin in comic strip world captivity.

Breathed is the cartoonist with a penetrating sense of the ridiculous who created Opus, and, if I am right about what's been going on between the two of them, he is saying goodbye to my favorite penguin on the comic pages of the nation's newspapers. An army of readers surely grieve his departure.

You don't read Opus? For shame.

But you do read Doonesbury?

Let's face it. Doonesbury's a great, satirical strip that will be faced with a dilemma when George Bush leaves the White House, but so then will editorial page cartoonists.

You don't read any comic strips? No wonder we can't get out of Iraq, the economy is in the toilet, and the tank is running on empty.

Well, okay, most of them aren't funny. Some are adventurous, some are of everyday life with comedic incidents, and some are satirical: but where on earth can you expect to touch base with sanity any place else?

Opus is satire, but it's also funny. There's that with some of the others, too, and they must have been vetted for humor in one of its castings by whoever makes the buy for newspapers these days.

Back when I was the one buying comics I bought Peanuts ``over the transom'' from a traveling salesman. Peanuts' creator, Charles M. Shultz, died, but Snoopy and friends live on. If I read the signs right, ``For Better or For Worse'', a soap opera in print, is in reprise. Great. Human nature doesn't change.

I hope Peanuts goes on forever.

Major newspapers run pages of comic strips, especially on Sundays, and that, given the cost of newsprint these days is no small statement of their worth.

My grandfather took the local paper when six pages was a lot, and 10-year-old me couldn't wait until he threw it on the floor, saying ``There's nothing in this damn newspaper!'' -- after he had read it from the upper left hand corner of page one to the lower right hand corner of the last page.

I discovered ``Tim Tyler's Flying Luck'' which wasn't funny, but adventurous, when I picked my grandfather's newspaper off the floor, and I was hooked for life.

That would have been something like four years after Lindberg had crossed the Atlantic.

Neither of us had a clue that, one day, I would become the paper's editor, but I am absolutely certain he would have said the same thing had he lived so long because all news is local in the sense that if we're not interested in the subject, we skip it.

Newspaper editors try to hold up a three dimensional mirror to their readers every day, but it's an impossible task because each of us lives in two worlds, the one that's out there doing things over which we have no control, and the one we live with, hour by hour and day by day.

My grandsons do not read the ``funnies.'' They're into things that require screens and buttons to push.

Hey! Opus! Wait for me!
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Bill Plante Jr. is a columnist for the Newburyport, Mass., Daily News and the paper's retired editor. Contact him at plantejr@comcast.net.