“Cathy” is kaput.
Cathy Guisewite, creator of the iconic comic strip, says she’s capping her pen. The last panel will run on October 3.
"I suddenly found myself up against this wall,” Guisewite told the Chicago Tribune. “If I don't quit now, then when? My daughter is 18, and she is going into her last year at high school, and I want to be completely available for her before she moves out. My parents live in Florida, and I really need to be available for them too. Also, I am 60 and I just realized that there is a lot more that I want to do creatively."
The 34-year-old "Cathy" strip — detailing the trials and tribulations of a single woman — currently runs in about 1,400 newspapers. It first ran in 1976.
"I have been in various states of denial about how much of me is actually in her,” Guisewhite said. “But definitely the weak and triumphant moments in Cathy's life are right out of mine."
While the strip has been criticized over the years as being anti-feminist, “Cathy” wasn’t on the radar of one of the biggest feminists I know, TheFrisky.com blogger Jessica Wakeman.
"I honestly thought it ended years ago," Wakeman told the paper. "It seems so retro, like a thing of the '80s, when being a single woman was a big deal. Now we have glamorous older single women like Jennifer Aniston, and it is less stigmatized. Being single is just not that big a deal now."
The death of "Cathy" comes a little more than a month after the Tribune Company killed "Annie" in print, saying its future was online.
