The Decline and Fall of the Funnies

[ChiTownScion]

I developed a real liking for the strip, "Annie," (formerly "Little Orphan Annie") while a law student. Not for the artwork or the plot but for the wonderful punny names of some of the characters.

A ballet diva named Mademoiselle Onya Toze. A banker named Mort Gage. A pharmacist named Mort Pestle. A very bright but somewhat caustic kid named Huck Flynn. You get the idea.

 

[Just Jim]

I follow some comics online, but the papers lost me long ago. I haven't seen any reason to read the funny pages since Calvin and Hobbes went away. It felt too much like endlessly re-reading the same Sugar and Spike comic book.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I developed a real liking for the strip, "Annie," (formerly "Little Orphan Annie") while a law student. Not for the artwork or the plot but for the wonderful punny names of some of the characters.

A ballet diva named Mademoiselle Onya Toze. A banker named Mort Gage. A pharmacist named Mort Pestle. A very bright but somewhat caustic kid named Huck Flynn. You get the idea.

Annie still lives on, sort of, as an occasional guest star in "Dick Tracy," a strip which has undergone a small-scale renaissance over the last five years or so. A new writer/artist team took it over and has for the most part given it coherent story values and decent art. The main complaint I have with it is that it tends to be over-immersed in fanboy trivia -- if you haven't been reading Tracy continuously since 1931, many of the continuity and character references will go right past you.

There are very few continuity strips still going. The soap opera strips have been reduced to three-- Judge Parker, Rex Morgan, and Mary Worth, all of which often verge into self-parody. "Apartment 3-G" ended a few years ago when its artist seemed to descend into senility on-panel -- the final storyline was completely incoherent, accompanied by disturbing, hallucinatory art. And Juliet Jones and the Jackson Twins are long gone.

The Phantom and Mark Trail are still around, and The Phantom can occasionally be pretty good. Mark Trail, though, can't decide whether it wants to play it straight or pander to the internet comic snarker crowd.

Gasoline Alley is still around, havng recently celebrated its centennial, but in full and absolute zombie mode. Uncle Walt is now 120 years old and is somehow still living in a semi-lucid state. Skeezix turned 98 a couple weeks ago, but no notice was given the birthday in the strip, which has all but abandoned the Wallet family in favor of sub-Hee Haw hillbilly hokum. The "southernification" of this strip really bugs me -- the original setting was a Chicago suburb, not some two-bit Appalachian Dogpatch, but the artists following on after the death of the creator went in big for a cornpone setting, to the detriment of the strip.

 

[ChiTownScion]

I get a laugh or two from, "Garfield Minus Garfield, " ... dedicated to removing Garfield from the Garfield comic strips in order to reveal the existential angst of a certain young Mr. Jon Arbuckle. It is a journey deep into the mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness and depression in a quiet American suburb. "


Sample:

 

[wallypop]

The new "Nancy" is a travesty on comic strips. The perfect example of what we don't need!

 

[MisterCairo]

Bloom County/Outland was the last strip I read regularly. Non Sequitur had me for a while, the little girl and her imaginary creature were fun to follow.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Bloom County is back in business, sort of, in an online-only, when-he-feels-like-it format. The art is a lot looser than it was in the 80s, and the cast is smaller -- you never see the rabbit or the gopher anymore -- but the overall flavor is the same.

I'm a big fan of Non Sequitir -- the cartoonist, Wiley Miller, has Maine ties, and he does a good job representing our general attitude here.

 

[MisterCairo]

Bloom County is back in business, sort of, in an online-only, when-he-feels-like-it format. The art is a lot looser than it was in the 80s, and the cast is smaller -- you never see the rabbit or the gopher anymore -- but the overall flavor is the same.

I'm a big fan of Non Sequitir -- the cartoonist, Wiley Miller, has Maine ties, and he does a good job representing our general attitude here.

I should give NS another try.

And if Portnoy and Hodgepodge are no longer in Bloom County, count me out...

 

[Nobert]

I think the last newspaper strip I took any interest in was Mutts. Is that even still running? By the end of Calvin and Hobbes, I still enjoyed it, but more in the collections than on a day-to-day basis.

As far as I'm concerned, the comics page has been on the slip for pretty much as long as I've been alive. I know I did read them as yung'un (my mother told me it's how I learned to read), but not many of them stick to my memory, other than in name. When I learned to adore Peanuts as a kid, is was through the anthologies of ten to twenty years prior, not what Schultz was doing in the 80s. The old classics were usually slogging through the motions in the hands of those who inherited the titles from their original creators. Gould, DeBeck, Gray, McManus, Kelly, etc. were either dead or had left their strips in the hands of assistants. Beetle Bailey was always just kind of "there," and still is. I was a fan of Bloom County for a while, though when I read it now, it's sort of like listening to pop songs that I was briefly taken with in Junior High School. Breathed was, at any rate, always a better cartoonist than Trudeau.

I just found out today that The Far Side is returning in some format or another.

The papers just aren't invested in even giving the space to comics that they need to really flex. Waterson outraged editors and publishers when he made it part of his contract to only sell his strip as he formatted it. There will never be another Windsor McCay in this climate.

 

[LizzieMaine]

"Mutts" is still around -- I see it when I buy the New York Daily News, but I think that's the closest paper to Maine that carries it unless the Boston Herald does (a paper I won't even look at if I find it lying on the ground.)

The reduction in page space is really a problem. For a long time papers were shrinking strips down smaller and smaller, but they finally reached the point of illegibility, and now the trend is simply to print fewer strips. The glory days of the Globe's two full pages of daily strips lasted into the early 2000s before the implosion began -- the "two pages" they now feature are clotted up with puzzle features, the horoscope, and other inconsequential stuff.

I also don't like the trend of printing dailies in color. The color printing is usually poorly accomplished and badly out of register, and at times it makes the strips almost impossible to read. They look even worse when viewed in color online -- whatever third-world contractor does the color charting often doesn't, or can't, read the strips and whenever there's a gag or a plot point relating to the color of an object, they blow it every time. Bah.

I saw that blurb about the return of the Far Side, and I was even more excited to see that "The Boondocks" might be coming back -- that was one of my favorite strips of the late 90s/early 2000s, and its edginess is very much needed in these days of corny "niche strip" humor.

 

[wallypop]

When I opened up my copy of the Boston Globe on Christmas Eve, I was shocked and appalled to find that the editors of that good grey sheet had seen fit to slash its daily comic strip section by half -- where the Globe once boasted two fully-packed pages of comics, it now offers only one lightly-packed page -- and two of the strips it carries are in perpetual reruns. I enjoyed "For Better or For Worse" the first time around, but I don't need to go thru the whole story again, and rerunning the daily "Doonesbury" without any of the political storylines is right up there with cutting all the witty aphorisms out of "The Importance Of Being Earnest" on the list of reading experiences that I don't find satisfying. And those current strips that remain are, for the most part, tedious "theme" comics that seem to exist to rework the same one or two jokes over and over and over again. Say what you will about Zippy The Pinhead, at least Bill Griffith was never a hack.

We are not far from the time when the newspaper comic page will just dwindle and diminish into non-existance. There are still a few good strips being published today -- such former Globe strips as "Monty," "Pooch Cafe," and "Big Nate" are strongly missed in comparison to the dreary schlock that remain on the page -- but they're a fast-fading minority. Web comics have a certain vigor, but you miss out on the full experience of enjoying the funnies when you don't have your strips laid out on pages, and you can't develop the habit of scanning up and down those pages in a regular progression every day. As a kid, I always started with "Peanuts" at the top of the page, worked my way down thru "Henry" and "Archie" and "Buz Sawyer" and "The Phantom" and "Snuffy Smith," then over to the second column with "Dick Tracy," "Little Orphan Annie," and "Donald Duck," and such, to end at the bottom of the page with "B. C." and "Nancy." Some were good, some were mediocre, and some were just there, but they were all part of a cohesive whole, and you don't get that kind of organic experience flipping thru comic websites to get your funnies fix.

The comic page is dying, and I grieve its passing. Do you?

 

[wallypop]

I grew up on comic books and newspaper strips. No tv back then.(1940's-50's)
My whole life's knowledge, reading abilities, and love for books were greatly influenced by them.

 

[Harp]

Now that I think about it, our daily college paper had a reasonably robust comic section (a full tabloid page). Do colleges even put out physical papers anymore? Considering the demographic, I assume they've moved to all on-line, but I don't know that, just guessing.

I found a copy of the University of Chicago Maroon student newspaper commuting home one night.
Slim, slick, slip shod schtik. About this time the U-Chicago started advising incoming freshmen that safe
spaces, time outs were puerile and honest debate and free speech campus practice. The University
president was under a magnifying glass, a student accused but never given due process was expelled
for alleged sexual misconduct, and I started reading the UC website only to be appalled.

Surprised people there are not simply sentenced to the stake by the intolerant Inquisition.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Of course, as we see going on at Brooklyn College in the Day by Day thread, politically-motivated attacks against college newspapers were very much rampant in the Era as well.

Meanwhile, today is Skeezix Wallet's 100th birthday -- a full century since he was found on Uncle Walt's stoop, turning "Gasoline Alley" into the longest-lived continuity strip in history. And I had looked forward to today's GA strip in hopes that some commemoration of this milestone would come, but alas, I was disappointed. Current artist Jim Scancarelli gives us a lame Valentine's gag and a generic birthday greeting.

Skeez does look pretty good for his age, though. Nina obviously dyes her hair, but hell, so do I.

 

[Harp]

Of course, as we see going on at Brooklyn College in the Day by Day thread, politically-motivated attacks against college newspapers were very much rampant in the Era as well...

The Era thread has shed considerable light against the dissimilarities of yesterday to the present moment,
in particular legal embroglio, which are given ample analysis and surprisingly detailed coverage.
A recent example is a marital divorce or annulment filed by a bride over decided lack of amorous advance,
her marriage never consummated. Or, a socialite's affair with her common lawful married Negro employee.
Today, such would be largely ignored by current cultural standard; more focused upon hate culture, politics,
anti religious accusatory, gay/lesbian issues, incessant never ending rampant systemic racism, abortion rights,
sexual license ka serra serra. Itza new kick.

But the comics are surprising. The adult level mature content shown and far more complexity.

 

[LizzieMaine]

And of course, politics are rampant in the comics of the Era. Our friend Daddy Warbucks, who recently resurfaced in 1941's "Little Orphan Annie" was an outspoken spokesman for the populist Old Right, and we'll see as we go along with his story there that his creator has a tendency to pontificate past the point of endurance for many of his readers. No strip was more often cancelled due to complaints from readers than "Annie."


Percy Crosby's "Skippy" was another strip with a hard-right point of view, which moved beyond politics into incoherence as its creator made a gradual and tragic descent into paranoid schizophrenia -- but Crosby worked for Hearst, where paranoia fit right in with the house style.

But there was no equivalent left-leaning mainstream strip because the editors of the Era wouldn't allow one to exist. You'll see mild New Deal values expressed in some strips -- "Mary Worth" dabbled in that direction from time to time, and Popeye occasionally expressed solidarity with the proletariat, but there was no mainstream comic of the prewar Era that reflected a solid FDR liberalism as a basic theme, let alone a hard-left point of view. Given the political alignment of nearly all papers at the time, there wasn't much chance of a syndicate ever even offering one.

For real left-leaning comics, you had to go to the Daily Worker, which featured several interesting strips -- an "Annie" analogue called "Little Lefty," about a wandering little kid who fought labor finks, rats, and scabs, and a "Terry and the Pirates" knockoff called "Pinky Rankin," in which the hero was a Pat Ryanish globetrotting antifascist. "Pinky," drawn by artist Dick Briefer under the alias "Dick Floyd," was actually a pretty good strip. Not "Terry" quality, but it did capture a certain Abraham Lincoln Brigade/Popular Front idealism in comic form. Unfortunately, the Worker never developed a "Harold Teen" equivalent -- I'd have enjoyed "Yitzy Of The YCL" and his gang down at the Workers' Sodashop.

 

[Harp]

^^^Speaking of Terry and The Pirates, delightfully salacious reading.
Burma tease and Hu Shee please. Some Puccini plays softly in the background. A double bourbon over ice.
Shanghai. Hong Kong.

Reading between the lines.