Starting today, the funnies page in the Washington Post will be looking a little different: Mary Worth, Cathy and Broom Hilda have been given the boot to make room for Agnes, Brewster Rockit: Space Guy! and Brevity. Who could have foreseen that America’s appetite for comics about stupid, nosy and/or shrew-like women would ever subside? We guess that Cathy’s audience eventually found reading the strip to be a little too self-deprecating.

There’ll be a few other changes, too, including the removal of some panel cartoons in favor of others and the tossing-in of six-days-a-week Scrabble Gram and Stickelers puzzles. Change is hard, we know. But unabashed fans of the strips getting the axe needn’t worry: you and your fellow funny page dead-enders will be able to keep up with your favorite characters and their endless variations on the same tired gags via the Post’s website.

Anyone who followed Gene Weingarten’s frequently-comics-related Post chat knows that these changes probably didn’t come easily: Weingarten maintains that there’s a surprisingly large contingent of readers that’ll become incensed if you take their daily dose of Blondie away from them. So we applaud the Post’s long-overdue editorial bravery — as the surfeit of excellent comics on the web proves, there’s no reason why panel-based strips have to be terrible.

But we are a little sad to see Mary Worth move on. Not only because its absence will undercut the hilarity of a few classic Simpsons gags, but also because there was something sort of remarkable and strange about its unrelenting banality. Don’t believe us? Then check out this live-action adaptation of Mary Worth (complete with matching shot-for-shot cinematography) and tell us there isn’t something profoundly disturbing about it.

Tom Lee contributed to this post.