Back On Top

Something I've always enjoyed is reading comic strips. I think I've mentioned that. It used to be that I could only see what was in the Arizona Republic, which wasn't that many. We had most of the typical funny strips, and maybe four of the serious ones (which were at the bottom of the two adjacent pages and which I then skipped). Today I can more or less read whichever I like. I don't read them all, but I read a fair number.

It gets to be that I cannot handle the burden of reading them. Sometimes it's for a day or two, and sometimes it's for longer. Recently, which things like the big sketch-writing month, auditions and illness occupied a good amount of my time, I was kept from reading my comic strips for much of the last two months. One or twice I made small efforts to get caught up again, but I found that the backlog was most persistent.

Back On Top

I remain awfully fond of reading newspaper comics. I have not in several years not subscribed to the newspaper in print, but I read a broader and generally more rewarding cross-section of comics now than I did then. There's such a relentless flood of them that I cannot take much time off before it begins to be a prohibitive burdon to get caught up. In fact, I recently did have such an incident, and recovering was some task.

I'm not sure how it began that I neglected the task of reading them at first. It wouldn't have been more than a day or two that I somehow didn't have the time, but each day makes the next harder, and before I knew it I had a backlog hundreds of individual strips on multiple websites. I did manage to keep up on some of them, but the bulk remained to be read when I went on vacation. At that time, it was something like two weeks or so of strips.

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.

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.