After dithering about this decision for months, I finally pulled the trigger: “Pickles,” Brian Crane’s consistently funny comic strip tracing the lives of a retired couple, Earl a

nd Opal Pickles, and their family and friends, now appears on the Gazette-Times’ daily comics page.

The switch occurred on Monday, and I was going to write a note for that day’s paper, but I simply forgot about it. Sorry.

“Pickles” moves into the slot that was occupied by “Crankshaft,” but “Crankshaft” fans need

not despair just yet: I’ve moved that strip into the classified section of the G-T, where it will appear with old “Peanuts” strips.

I know there are “Crankshaft” fans out there, since every time I’ve written in this space about how I should shake up the comics page, I hear from you. For the time being, my plan is to keep the strip in the G-T print edition — even though, for my money, “Pickles” is a much funnier strip.

And you need no introduction to “Pickles,” which has run for years with our Sunday comics.

I’m not

done tinkering with the comics page this year, by the way. I’m looking at a relatively new strip, “Cul de Sac,” which I might test in the spot now being held by … gasp! … “For Better or For Worse,” which is essentially in rerun status anyway. And I’ve always thought that Corvallis, such a dog-crazy town, would love a strip I’ve been watching for a few years called “Red and Rover.”

Do you have any favorite comic strips I should look at? Or are there strips that we’re currently running that I should dump? Let me know. Send me an email or a postcard or give me a call.