"one of the few new comic strips offering original and relevant humor for the '80s…." After 11 years and about 3,000 comic strips, Downs discontinued Downstown on February 1, 1986. Downs said, "It’s gotten harder and harder for me to do Downstown. I finally had to ask myself if it was the kind of strip I wanted to be drawing 10 years from now, and realized that it wasn’t.” In short, Downs was living a married life with a son in San Bernardino, California, making it challenging to continue writing about characters based on his college roommate. He noted, "In some ways, the strip is the victim of my growth. To bring it in line, I would have to make radical changes—like marrying Chuck and giving him kids. I'd rather fold it up and start something new." However, Jim Creighton, features director of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, noted, "Tim Downs decided to give it up because the strip was not being purchased by enough newspapers to make it worth continuing." If fact, the Los Angeles Times dropped Downstown in 1985, only to bring it back when "extremely loyal" readers sent a "flurry of angry letters." When it ended, Downstown was only in 15 newspapers, representing about 2 million readers. Downs ended Downstown with a week-long farewell party attended by characters from other comics, including Charlie Brown, Duke from Doonesbury, Cathy, Little Orphan Annie, Garfield, and Spider-Man. (In what appeared to be a collaborative effort, Garry Trudeau killed off Duke the same day.) The last day, the character Josh used a pickaxe to break through the panel border, letting the characters fall through, with the final panel being empty white space. Downs says, "I feel that the Downstown characters will always be floating in the margins of the newspaper somewhere." Characters and plot Downstown originally featured the antics of a group of three friends—Josh, John, and Fred—in a college in a place named Downstown. In a single-cell promotional comic by Dwonsthat ran in The Daily Illini on October 4, 1975, he describes Downstown as, "the ins and outs, the ups and downs, the joy and tears, the love and hate, the war and peace, the fear and loathing, the dribs and drabs of campus life. by Tim Downs, a student at Indiana University." The main characters were: Josh was the optimist and "Renaissance man manique" who lived in an off-campus apartment