Greg Bardsley

Okay, this one is a bummer. Major bummer.

The legendary Weekly World News, the fictional tabloid-news rag that brought us Bat Boy, the Catkins Diet and Hillary’s alien lover, is shutting down. Its last printed edition is slated for later this month, at which point the world will get a little more serious, a little more self-important, a little more dull.

In recent years, I had come to accept that the WWN wasn’t for everyone. Some people had a taste for stories like, “Chimp Explains Why We Must Pay Taxes,” and some didn’t. Some people didn’t want to read about the discovery that polar bears actually build and manage “crude refrigerators” stocked with “seal steaks, walrus breasts, soup made of otter blubber and fresh spring water.” But I sure did.

A few years ago some Sun coworkers and I decided to create an April Fools tabloid in the WWN’s likeness. In a nod of respect for the genuine article, we called our April Fools creation the Weekly World Sun — and, man, did we have fun designing and writing it.

I will miss you, Weekly World News. I will miss those moments in the supermarket, after work when my bones were aching and my mind was heavy, when I’d spot you in the racks, your headline blaring, “Redneck Vampire Attacks Trailer Park.” I will miss taking you home, where I would read some of your stories to my sons and mildly tolerating wife, where we would laugh and point at the doctored photos and unlikely events that unfolded in the very singular world you had created.

Rest in peace, Weekly World News, giver of laughs and hilarity, enabler of intellectual escapism, relentless tickler of my funny bone. I will not soon forget you.