Comic Strips

I'm a fan of newspaper comic strips. I have been for a long time, going back to childhood when my favorites were Calvin and Hobbes and The Far Side. I still think the former is the best I've ever seen. Most strips about a kid make him or her far too mature, basically a tiny adult. Others go too far in the other direction. Calvin and Hobbes struck it just about right. It's still a pleasure to go back and read.

The comedic strips are the ones with the broadest appeal, but I like the serious ones too. Dick Tracy is kind of stupid, but I like reading ones like Mary Worth, Judge Parker and Rex Morgan. They don't deliver the kind of dramatic content you get from a book, movie or tv series, and are often rather cheesy, but are still fun.

Maybe the most admirable ones are the editorial cartoons. One of the greatest pioneers in print journalism was Thomast Nast. At the time, wide swathes of Americans were illiterate, and unable to read the paper. Although they weren't objective, and Nast had his faults (among them anti-Irish sentiment), his drawings conveyed the information of the story without using words.

Today there are many good strips, and great cartoonists drawing editorial work. The fall of the American newspaper is dragging the cartoonist down, but I believe that good ones will continue to do well online. Indeed, I feel that in that environment we will see the evolution of the comic strip into a whole new form free of the limits on space that formerly constrained the artist into a few short short panels every day. I look forward to seeing what develops.