First, did you ask your Advisor [the teacher in charge of the paper] or your school's Principal or Vice-Principal if it is okay for you to use comics that are professionally drawn? If not, make sure you verify that they will let you do it before you go through all this effort and waiting time to get permission.
Once you know that it is allowed and you gained permission then you can try to find the e-mail address of the company that owns the comics or even the owner of the comic strip and ask for permission, if it is serving as an educational purpose they might let you do it for free. You could also write them a letter as well and send it through snail mail. Make sure that you state that it is going be used for your school's newspaper that is printed ______ (like daily, weekly, bi-weekly, etc) and that you are a student of whatever school located in *City name, State* and your position for the school newspaper. If you are planning to ask permission to use a comic more than once or use more than one of their comics, its important that you tell them that in the letter/e-mail.
If they do say that it is okay, make sure they give it to you in writing with the company's logo/company address+name or name of the person who is giving you the permission on the paper/letter and their position in the company. You will need to keep a copy of this in case they decide to make a lawsuit and sue you or your school for plagiarism.
The main issue with this though is if they decide to let you use the comic but do not agree with it being used as an "educational purpose." If this happens, you should be aware that they might ask you to offer them payment for reprinting their copyrighted work in your school newspaper. However, whenever money is involved, it is likely that your school will not offer the funding to do this and you will probably realize that it is not worth it to have the comic in your newspaper anyway if they are going to charge you fees to use it.
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