Sorry, technogeeks! This column has nothing to do with WiFi speed terminology. It’s about a fading entertainment medium, that has stubbornly held on for centuries with little to no publicity.
You’ll never see features on people of the likes of Chester Gould, Alex Raymond, Lank Leonard, or Mort Walker in “Entertainment Weekly” or “Variety.” Yet they and their creations have been entertaining millions, in some instances, since the latter part of the nineteenth century.
I’m referring, of course, to the comic strip. Like most kids, I’d tear right through to the mid-section of our evening paper to get a chuckle from “Peanuts” and “Blondie,” but more importantly, I wanted to see what would happen next to my favorite detectives, “Kerry Drake,” “Rip Kirby,” “Mickey Finn” and “Dick Tracy.”
One of the most genius minds to succeed the legacy of Charles Schulz was Bill Watterson, whose seminal “Calvin and Hobbes” continues to repeat in hundreds of newspapers today. Watterson hung up his pen all-too-soon, NOT because he was out of ideas, but because of the increasing amount of restriction to his art that was placed on him by newspapers. The comic strips these days rarely cover a full page of the newspaper. Even their Sunday pages, which used to be one of the largest section of the weekly tribune, has shrunk to half its former self.
Think about the travails of the cartoonist, particularly ones that pen the serial strip, such as “The Amazing Spider-Man” or “Mandrake the Magician.” They need to keep in mind that some fans see only the daily strips … some only the Sunday strips. So they have to propel the story forward in such a manner that they hold interest during the week, but also so that the Sunday readers can keep up AND the daily readers don’t feel like Sunday’s just a dull recap of what occurred during the previous week.
The next time you read your favorite Sunday strip, try this little test. Can you start with the third panel and get a full view of what’s going on? That’s because, according to Watterson, the newspaper editors have mandated that cartoonists provide two “throwaway panels,” in order that the publishers can insert more advertising, or squeeze in more truncated cartoons in the same space. Fed up with all of this vandalism on his work, Watterson just simply hung it up on the last Sunday of 1995, just a decade after an imaginative eight year old boy caught a stuffed tiger in a trap baited with a tuna fish sandwich.
More and more comic strip fans (and YES, there are STILL quite a few of us out there) have abandoned newsprint and have subscribed online to services provided by strip syndicators. They enable us, for one annual fee, to subscribe to each and every strip that they provide on a daily basis, delivered to our e-mail. Some of these wonderful strips are over 100 years old, such as “Popeye” and “The Katzenjammer Kids.” Some, like “Peanuts,” “Calvin” and “Bringing Up Father” live on in reruns. I had the distinct pleasure of catching a replay of “Beetle Bailey” from almost the very beginning, when he was a college kid, before he enlisted in his home of the last half century or so, the U.S. Army. What a treat!
James Allen, a good friend and native of Gainesville, is now the artist in charge of the venerable “Mark Trail” comic strip. He does so with the firm support of another acquaintance of mine here in Gainesville, Rosemary Dodd, whose husband Ed, another Gainesville native, birthed Mark in 1946. James is a true inspiration, who has overcome serious vision disabilities to seamlessly pick up, and in my opinion SAVE, a cherished feature the way his hero saves wildlife. He posted last week that plans are underway to close the doors to a comic soap opera that’s been in papers since the early 1960s, “The Girls in Apartment 3G,” now just known as “Apartment 3G.” I subscribe to this feature, but admittedly have little interest in it. It still reads today like it IS in the 1960s, but not in such a way that we believe that it’s deliberate. It is in dire need of updating, and James volunteered to do so to their mutual syndicate. He wouldn’t be the first artist to work in multiple strips … “Rex Morgan, M.D.” and “Judge Parker” are done by the same writer/artist collaborations currently, and Tom Batiuk toils on “Funky Winkerbean” and its superior spinoff “Crankshaft.” King Features politely turned James down. With “3G” distribution as low as it is, they feel that it isn’t worth resurrection. It’s a pity. I’m sure in the first couple of weeks, James would’ve blown something up, and it would have been fun to see Lu Ann stuck in an elevator with that elderly professor and Margo contemplating chucking it all and doing some deep sea fishing.
I scour Ebay listings for collections of Leonard’s “Mickey Finn” strip, which has faded into obscurity, despite being Charles Shultz’s dad’s favorite strip (sorry, Charlie)! “Finn” started life as a patrolman on a very peaceful Oyster Bay, NY beat. Ultimately, he would be promoted to plainclothes detective, and before long, his strip was taken over by his lightly larcenous Uncle Phil, who became the sheriff, who always managed to do the right thing despite himself, largely due to the efforts of Mickey and his brother Tom. I have several hundred of them now, and maybe eight complete stories, and I treasure them.
Bookstores are rife now with reprints of the popular strips of yesteryear. “Kirby,” “Peanuts,” “Calvin and Hobbes,” “Terry and the Pirates,” “Steve Canyon” and “Prince Valiant” are but a few that have been released over the years. “Thimble Theater” is being reprinted, beginning with strips a month or so before the introduction of its breakout character Popeye, in a continuing series. Hopefully, one day, “Mickey Finn” will warrant the same material.
Much as are the daytime soaps, comic strips, I feel, are unjustly maligned. There has been some daring work in these daily strips, dealing with serious issues. But more importantly, many of them exist just to make us laugh … and doing so in three, sometimes four, sparse panels. Think about this … it is possible to be born into, and taken out of, a world that has never known life without “Blondie.” That’s pretty impressive in my book.
Maggie and Jiggs helped us through the Depression. Mort Walker, in his 90s, STILL works us through Obamacare and the Middle East, through the domestic travails of “Hi and Lois” and the forever-peacetime antics of “Beetle Bailey.” How sad to see the newspapers rife with only the bad news of the day, with no respite offered by seeing Dagwood baffle Mr. Dithers, or the innocent philosophies of Bud Blake’s “Tiger.”
Newspapers are dying all across this country, as the internet continues to explode. It could be easily stated that part of the problem is the comic strip. The papers bullied and mangled these works, canceled them at their whim to the consternation of their followers, and we have gone out and found them online. We’re even subscribing for, and purchasing, the reruns! Milton Caniff, the creator of “Steve Canyon” and “Terry and the Pirates” was sitting in a New York tavern in the forties or fifties, with other comic strip artists, when Hal Foster, “Prince Valiant”’s author, was bemoaning about the responsibility of selling each day’s paper. Caniff, with a twinkle replied, “No, Hal, it’s not about selling TODAY’S paper. That one’s already been sold. OUR job is to sell TOMORROW’S!” As the doors close for good on the girls in 3G, we bid farewell to a legacy of fine newspaper salesmen.
Good grief.
