CHANGE COMES slowly here at The Pine Cone, especially to something as venerable as our police log. No matter how hard we work to break important news stories, provide insight to ongoing controversies and document noteworthy events in Carmel and the entire Monterey Peninsula, it’s invariably the police log that gets mentioned as our readers’ favorite part of this newspaper. We would not think of changing it.

However, when we saw the cartoon blog of former Big Sur resident Owen Cook, we realized the police log’s ironic content provided the perfect opportunity for artistic interpretation, and we loved his gritty take on the never-ending small-town quirkiness that ends up in local police reports.

Cook, 29, is a 2001 graduate of Carmel High School. He lives in New York and is an animator and cartoonist whose work has appeared in Rolling Stone, Arthur magazine, and Maximum Rocknroll magazine. When he’s not drawing comics, he teaches animation and works as a cameraman. You can find lots of his work at www.theeowencook.com.

This week, we are proud to announce the launch of Owen Cook’s “Police Log” comic strip as a regular feature. It will appear each week on an inside page.

While the text of his strips will come verbatim from recent police log items, the depictions of the characters will be purely the invention of Cook’s mind and will not, as they say, be intended to resemble any person, living or dead. So if you see yourself in one of the strips and don’t think it looks like you ... well, it’s not.

The “Police Log” strip is part of a program of expanded content and circulation we plan to institute in the coming year. While newspapers around the country are struggling to make ends meet, if not going out of business entirely, The Pine Cone had strong revenue growth and circulation gains in 2011, and we’re expecting another good year in 2012. We intend to build on that success by making our beloved newspaper even better.

So whether you enjoy laughing at the nutty things that make people decide to summon the police, you’re trying to figure out why so many people don’t bother to lock their cars, or you read the police log simply to remind yourself about your good fortune to live in a place where such things are news, we’re sure you’ll enjoy “Police Log.”