Tomorrow has created the album-cover art for Pearl Jam‘s next release, due out September 20. Fans can get a free downloadable mp3 of a track from the album, Backspacer, by doing a sort of “internet Easter egg hunt,” as Wired puts it, searching for all nine of Tomorrow’s images in order to get the freebie.

In January, City Pages editor Kevin Hoffmann told the Minnesota Independent he hoped the economy would improve enough to bring back cartoons in the second or third quarter of this year — i.e. approximately now. I emailed him to see if strips like “This Modern World” might be coming back.

His reply:

Sadly, as you know from watching the news, the economy has not improved as fast as Obama (or any of us) hoped, so we’re still in cost-reduction mode. That means hiring and wage freezes, a continued 10-percent salary cut for both me and the publisher, and, unfortunately, no Tom Tomorrow for now (though I continue to be a fan of his work and hope to include him in the paper when the economy improves).

City Page’s annual “Comix Issue” comes out August 19, and local artists are encouraged to submit work. Unlike Tomorrow, these artists will get paid, according to a communique by City Pages art director Nick Vlcek: $25–50 per piece.

Here’s all nine of pieces of the cover art:

Confirming the network-wide move, City Pages editor Kevin Hoffman said he expects some reader backlash over the suspension of “This Modern World,” which he called a popular feature. “I’m a big fan, but unfortunately it’s one of those functions of a bad economy,” he said. Cutting out syndicated comics, he added, is part of an effort to “trim where we can while inflicting the least damage — realizing that we’re already cutting bone.”

City Pages finished out 2008 by laying off food writer James Norton and Assistant A-List editor Ben Palosaari. Hoffman said Norton was offered a job blogging about food for the City Pages Web site, but because he already writes at Chow.com, he refused. (At his blog, Norton wrote that he’ll be “starting up a new venture, a web magazine dedicated to food in the Upper Midwest).

Food blogging is one area Hoffman said the paper is hoping to make gains. And it’s part of the mix that’s delivered success to the paper’s online endeavors. According to internal numbers, Web traffic was up 40 percent in December, Hoffman reported, with The Blotter blog doing much of the heavy lifting. In October, Hoffman said, the blog garnered around 35,000 page views; by December, that number rose to around 250,000.

He said he hopes that in the second or third quarter of the year, the economy will have improved enough that cartoonists (and theater reviewers, he said) can be brought back on. The belt-tightening now only affects network-wide cartoons, Hoffman says; other syndicated features — like Dan Savage’s “Savage Love” and Rob Brezsny’s “Free Will Astrology” — will continue to run at City Pages.