Death On Paper

We used to joke on Boy Scout hiking trips that in spite of the mountains and canyons we traversed, we had the benefit of a 'zero net elevation gain'. This was funny to us because the pain of hiking a steep uphill grade was not helped at all by the knowledge that we'd just be hiking back down it on the way back. In a way, life is like that in reverse. You spend the first part of your life investing in people and things emotionally, and then you lose them all if the second part of your life lasts long enough. At my early age, few that I care for have died, but there have been more things I loved that are gone now. Some that may seem trivial but mean somewhat less than nothing to me are in my reading.

I love comic strips, as you may recall . Even though I don't subscribe to a newspaper anymore, I still love reading lots of the strips. They're available online, and are part of my morning routine. I read a lot of the funnies as well as the serious ones I used to dislike and skipped easily since they were at the bottom of the page. Editorial cartoons are great too (my policy with those being to read all the ones that are drawn well, trusting that I will be able to enjoy that as well as a diversity of viewpoints). Now, if I had to pick my favorite current strip, I guess that it would have to be 'Sylvia', although 'Zippy' is close.

It used to be 'Little Orphan Annie', which I found to be the most interesting- remarkable since it is a legacy strip older than many strips which keep going in spite of having lost steam long ago. In what is such a common injustice, those strips go on while Annie has been moldering in the ground for six months. It was well-written and well-drawn, and those two qualities would seem to have been its undoing. Such is the only conclusion I can draw. Another great strip has recently received the death sentence, with sentence due to be carried out next month: 'Brenda Starr'. It's a terrible shame, but the symptoms of a strip not long for this world were there to be diagnosed: It's smart, funny, relevant and well-drawn. Naturally the thing to do was can it.

At the risk of sounding arrogant, I consider myself a smart guy. I appreciate some things that have kind of a steep learning curve. To me those are the things most worthy of acclaim. What's unfortunate is that the cohesive audience to which I belong is far too small to sustain anything it likes by itself. If you're like me, you'd better hope that by chance the things you like also manage to appeal to a broader audience, because you'll get your heart broken by unjust cancellations every time, and may as well get used to that fact. If you want to change that, we're going to have to change society itself, and that's probably going to be too long a process to keep your pet 'on the brink' thing afloat.