Cleats (comic strip)

Cleats
Author(s)	Bill Hinds
Website	Cleats on GoComics.com
Current status / schedule	Concluded, in reruns
Launch date	November 26, 2001
End date	October 31, 2010
Syndicate(s)	Universal Press Syndicate
Genre(s)	Humor, Family, Sports

Cleats is a comic strip by Bill Hinds. Cleats features a group of young kids, coaches, and their parents as they deal with the day-to-day trials and tribulations of being on a soccer team (Although there are storylines that have the kids engaged in physical sports other than soccer). Cleats was carried in over 75 newspapers The last iteration of Cleats had been run on 31 October 2010, in the form of a special Halloween 'exit' strip. Bill Hinds stated that he had ceased producing Cleats because the strip "had suffered in many newspaper comic polls over the past nine years."

In many newspapers, editors have chosen to run the earliest Cleats strips again, allowing readers to compare Hinds' initial style and characters against their more recent development. This has resulted in previous Sunday strips appearing on weekdays, but has opened to broad examination the processes by which a professional cartoonist evolves his work over years of production.

The October 31, 2010, strip showed Peri, Mondo, Abby, Jack, Edith and Dee as ghosts playing soccer in the Comic Strip Graveyard. Abby has her giant ponytail back. Jack asks a trick-or-treater in a Spider-Man costume for help in getting back the soccer ball, which has fallen outside the cemetery wall.

GoComics began, on December 2010, to show reruns. These go back to November 26, 2001.

Fictional characters who have made special guest appearances in the strip include:

A compilation of Cleats comics named Who Tracked Soccer Through the House ?: A Cleats Collection was published in March, 2004 by Andrews McMeel Publishing.

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