Ben Claassen’s Dirtfarm strip, which he allows to be printed for free in City Paper rather than have it disappear.

The Chicago Reader has announced that the Washington D.C alternative weekly, City Paper, will save $8,000 by dropping all of its syndicated comics.

This comes on the heels of Village Voice Media’s decision to drop all syndicated cartoons from its 15 newspapers nationwide, with no firm date when or if they’ll bring them back. “We’re going to take another look at the end of the quarter,” associate executive editor Andy Van De Voorde told The Reader. “There are no guarantees.”

Simpson’s creator Matt Groening, who still syndicates his Life in Hell strip to about 40 or 50 papers, thinks something has happened to alt-weeklies that he doesn’t like.

“There’s a lack of enthusiasm and a lack of strategy and certainly a decline of design,” he tells The Reader. “Alternative newspapers don’t seem to be the hippest thing around.”

Both City Paper and The Reader are owned by Creative Loafing, which slashed it’s budget and filed for bankruptcy in September of 2008.