Whither the Funnies?

Do you read comic strips?

There was a time when that would have been a ridiculous question -- of course you did. *Everyone* did. From the turn of the century to the 1990s, the newspaper comic strip was as close to a universal media form as we've ever had, and by and large the funnies were for everyone -- universal characters based on universal themes.

If you grew up in the teens, regardless of your social class or where you lived, you knew the Katzenjammers, Jiggs and Maggie and Mutt and Jeff. In the twenties, everybody knew Andy Gump, Barney Google, and Uncle Walt and Skeezix. In the thirties, Dick Tracy, Flash Gordon, and Popeye were universally known and loved. And in the latter half of the century, there wasn't anyone who didn't know Charlie Brown and Snoopy.

So what happened? Where did all that universality go? The funnies still exist, but they seem to be more and more niche-driven, and if you aren't part of the niche targeted by a particular strip, why bother to read it? I suggest that by going to such a niche-driven approach, whether in print or online, the funnies are abandoning the very thing that made them a great, universal art form -- and that a few years from now, when the last funny page disappears from print, people will look back and say the last great comic strip, fit to stand alongside the ones mentioned above, would be "Calvin and Hobbes." After that, after the kid and the tiger walked off into the woods in 1995, it was all over.

What do you think? Do you still read the funnies? Is their slow, sad decline of any importance to you? Will there ever be great, universally-known and loved funnies again?

Nope. Not anymore. I grew up reading Blondie and The Phantom on a daily basis. I still miss Lee Falk ... that man wrote some great strips.

Lizzie, this really is something to ponder. I was born in 1953 and read the comics every day (or had them read to me on my father's knee) from probably about 1957 until about -- you guessed it -- 1995. AND, we read pretty much every one of the strips. My favorites were Li'l Abner, Alley Oop, Dick Tracy, Pogo, The Wizard of ID, BC, Peanuts... (Gosh, I've forgotten SO many!)

BTW, to jog your memory, here's the ultimate list: www.toonopedia.com

The comics were a Sunday morning escape, even though they were available every day in smaller, b&w form. I remember when niche strips (one in particular) started. The author always had sort of agenda, often race and/or politically driven. I remember thinking that these were editorial cartoons disguised as regular comic strips. I had always read the comics and fully enjoyed them. When I started to get agitated by their contents, it was the beginning of the end.

Everything once-popular goes thru a process of cultural decay. A lot of the time it's similar:
1. it's widely accepted
2. it's tired and dopey
3. it's niched, ie, only certain kinds of folks still do it
4. it's stereotyped (along the lines of the folks that do it)
5. it vanishes completely.

Comic strips as a medium appear to be somewhere between 1 (a few online strips, along with clever non-narrative stuff like Bizarro) and 4 (does anyone not involuntarily confined still seriously follow Mary Worth?)

It gets bizarre, admittedly, when once-universal cultural touchstones end up niches or stereotypes. You begin wondering how they ever could have been.

For me, the beginning of the end was around 1978, when Milton Caniff saw one too many Charles Bronson flicks and started introducing graphic violence into Steve Canyon. A lot of papers dropped Canyon.

These days, I buy some of the collected volumes of "Popeye", "Dick Tracy" and "Bloom County". Down here in my neck of South West Florida, the local newspaper does a Sunday color comics supplement (printed on heavier newsprint, no less!) but with the exception of "The Piranha Club", most of the strips are either reprints (no offense to "Peanuts") or classic stuff, that should have been retired long ago. There are some really good stuff on the web these days. The adventure strip is much alive there.

Funny thing. Back when I was younger and starting out, I was working in the same building that "King Features Syndicate" uses. Now across the street, was a rather high end, high-rise apartment building. Around the corner was the famous "Palm" Steak House, which figures pretty important to fans of comic strips. This was the place that was made famous by the newspaper comic strip artists who use to hang out there. The walls are full of painted originals by these guys. I mean literally painted on the walls!

Now, I mentioned that High Rise across the street. Well, I met one couple who use to live there and they frequented the Palm quite a bit. Their usual table was right across from the bar which would be very much appreciated here on "The Fedora Lounge". The couple was Mr and Mrs Milton Caniff!

I'm an avid reader of the funnies still -- but it's more out of habit than anything else, which is kind of what prompted my question. I suspect my generation is the last one which grew up reading a lot of the "classic" strips because we actually enjoyed them, and not out of some kind of ironic snarkiness.

One of my favorite features from childhood on up was "They'll Do It Every Time," which dated back to the twenties and ran right up until a couple years ago. It was a panel cartoon that dealt with the day to day frustrations of life, the sort of things people do that irritate everyone, the sort of foibles that everyone recognizes. It was a great feature for a very long time, and its greatness was its universality. Everyone recognized the characters and situations -- but somewhere along the way we lost that universality. We can't seem recognize ourselves anymore in a comic strip or any other form of media unless it's specifically targeted to our subgroup. And there's what I find so distressing about the decline of the comics. Are fragmentary group identities so much more important now that we can't recognize the traits and experiences we have in common with everyone else? If that's really where we're heading, I think the end of the funny papers is just a sign that we're losing something much more important in ourselves.

LizzieMaine said:

I'm an avid reader of the funnies still -- but it's more out of habit than anything else

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That's always the beginning of the end for any product - cultural, material, etc. When something's made for a habit driven market, it no longer has to be good. Soon it can't afford to be. You end up with shoddy felt hats that shrivel in the rain and Hershey bars that taste like wax lips.

I think the end of the funny papers is just a sign that we're losing something much more important in ourselves.

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I think it's a sign that we've just about lost that something. Our common humanity has withered drastically from lack of cultivation.

I read comic strips every day, but for the most part I have them e-mailed to me. I get selections from three different sites plus I visit a few "web-comic" sites.

I've been hooked on comics since I began working as a paper boy at the age of 7 as I would read the paper while folding and putting rubber bands around each newspaper prior to beginning deliveries. I guess that means I started in '67. I have to have them delivered electronically now as the local newspaper isn't worth a farthing and the one I would like to subsribe to doesn't deliver this far from Columbus.

Some of the cartoons I read have become, in my mind at least, classics themselves. For example, Arlo and Janis, Funky Winkerbean, and For Better or For Worse, though the last one has ended and shifted to reruns--a now fairly common situation. I'm not sure those would be considered "niche" comic strips as I think they have wide appeal. I enjoyed A&J and FBorFW despite being single most of my adult life, for example. Others that I like, such as General Protection Fault, The Help Desk, and User Friendly are definitely niche comics.

We can muse for quite some time on the splintering of comics into niches, but just as with music or video entertainment I think a lot of the reason behind it has been the growing diversity of delivery methods. The three niche comics I mentioned are all web-comics, though they have all also been printed in books. The long, slow decline of the newspaper has contributed to it, along with the shrinking of the space allocated to each comic. I think that the ever-expanding types of entertainment that compete for the reader's limited time is yet another contributor to the dying off of the universally-appealing comic strip.

One of the major concerns of the loss of newspapers is the fact that they are still the primary source of steady revenue for most cartoonists. I know, when a statement like that gets made the "Well the cartoonists will just have to get used to having a day job and publishing online or otherwise figure out a different way to make money off of publishing online without actually charging for their comic" pundits start their yammering. I suppose that may be somewhat true, but it doesn't mean I or they have to like it.

I don't really like starting my day without my daily comics--I hope they never go away!

Cheers,
Tom

Used to a ritual for me to read the funnies every day after school. Stopped reading them about 10 years ago, started gettting the daily paper again, and found reading them again that I didn't laugh, chuckled, or even ponder what I just read. Not funny at all.

It seems to me that. as much as anything, dwindling newspaper sales are probably behind the changes, as they shift to better reach the niche audience of an individual paper. I read Nemi every weekday; that's about it. I find it difficult to find the time to read a paper with any regularity, so I mostly just see the freesheets.

Oh Calvin and Hobbes, how I miss thee...

I would read the funnies in the paper whenever we had enough money to subscribe to the newspaper (we were a victim of the farm crisis in the 80s and penny-pinched a lot), so I really only remember Peanuts, Family Circus, and Garfield as the ones I enjoyed.

However, these days I'm a huge Pearls Before Swine fan, and my collection of Snoopy paraphernilia has reached massive proportions

Peanuts, of course. Archie, Terry and The Pirates, Steve Canyon, Ripley's Believe It or Not, other strips.

Currently on leave, Illinois Covid mitigation restricted somewhat; vicarious concern and juvenile
prurience over Occident and Orient cookies, caught inside labyrinth of rhyme and reason.
Terry and The Pirates and Harold Teen, regular daily dosage New York, Chicago papers and sordid
and not so sordid goings on from yesterday. Legal embroglios. Fun and frolic, marital economics,
and the Piper gets paid at the track window.