Butting in

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I may have confused some of you and understandably so. When I speak of “the United Media Web site,” I mean “comics.com.” Comics.com is where you find comic strips distributed by United Media. I am so accustomed to using the two names interchangeably that it never occured to me readers cannot be expected to automatically know this. To further cloud the issue, United Media is made up of two syndicates, United Feature Syndicate and Newspaper Enterprise Association, commonly referred to as NEA. This is the vestigial effect of a long-ago merger and makes little practical difference today, even to those of us associated with United Media. UFS and NEA have the same offices, the same editors, the same accountants, the same telephones, the same deadlines, the same break room… well, you get the picture. For the record, A&J is an NEA strip.