As noted here, cartoonist Aaron McGruder is taking a six month hiatus from producing his newspaper strip, Boondocks. During that period, newspapers will either run reruns or some other strip entirely.
Back when Garry Trudeau started this practice, taking some time off from Doonesbury, a number of older cartoonists criticized him. The criticisms were along the lines of "These kids today are so lazy." And it is true that in the "old days," a guy with a syndicated strip could only take a vacation by getting ahead on his work, and that most strips then required somewhat more drawing on a daily basis and a lot more on Sunday. Strips now are smaller and simpler, and a top creator of one current comic strip once estimated to me that, even putting in as much detail as he dared, there was still less drawing in a whole week's worth of his strips (7 days) than George McManus used to put into just the Bringing Up Father Sunday page.
I'm not sure why McGruder needs six months off, especially if it's true that he no longer draws the strip himself. Comic strips don't take that long to write. But let's say he does need to get away for a bit. Only a writer or artist truly knows the way in which his work fatigues him and what is necessary for recovery. Still, if I were the editor of a newspaper that has been buying Boondocks for years, I think I'd be annoyed. Boondocks is at its best when it's topical so reruns are really going to feel like a cheat. And if I bring in another strip to take its place for six months, am I not risking that my readers will forget about Boondocks and not welcome it back? Or want to see that replacement strip displaced? Reader loyalty to the comic strip page has already gotten pretty fragile in some cases and this won't help.
I wonder if the syndicates would consider offering some strips as time-shares. Maybe a strip doesn't have to run seven days a week. Couldn't it run Sunday through Friday, and then give the Saturday slot to some new feature? Perhaps the answer to shrinking newspaper space is to double-up. Instead of two cartoonists straining to produce seven strips per week and burning themselves out, maybe they could share one space — one strip on Monday, Wednesday and Friday; the other on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, and then they take turns doing a Sunday page. Some strips might profit creatively from such a schedule.
Maybe it isn't that much of a problem. Most cartoonists don't take sabbaticals. Then again, most of them don't have a loyal-enough audience that they dare.