Our local newspaper has just implemented a decision to shake up the comic strip lineup.
Gone are Cathy, Drabble, Boondocks, Hagar the Horrible, and the Wizard of Id. Replacing them are Pearls Before Swine, Watch Your Head, Edge City, and Frazz.
About time. Newspapers are losing circulation and their stock prices are plummeting. Everyone's desperately trying to reinvent what a newspaper is about.
But the funny pages still look like 1974.
I ask you: Peanuts, Blondie, Beetle Bailey, Hi and Lois, BC, Family Circus, Dennis the Menace, Marmaduke?
Sure, these are legacy strips. Let them live online.
Cathy hasn't been funny for years. The same goes for For Better or For Worse, Sally Forth (god awful), and Luann (Brad and Toni Daytona, ecch). Funky Winkerbean? Noble, but not funny.
Okay, I admit to having a soft spot for Garfield. But he could go to the Great Kitty Litter Box in the Sky, too, if you could find a funny and semi-hip strip to replace him with. Besides, Get Fuzzy is just like Garfield (guy, no girlfriend, cat, dog), but with an absurdist twist. Very 21st century.
Maybe the editorship fears that if the paper replaces all the old favorites, all the old favorite readers will cancel their subscriptions-- and they're the only ones left.
That is, if you'll pardon the expression, a profit strategy that'll rake in Peanuts.
P.S. Out of curiosity-- if you get your funnies some other way than the newspaper, let me know how, and how you like it.
Many of those comic strips I rarely ever read. I think some people probably read them more out of familiarity than humor - kind of like a worn but comfy pair of slippers.
Cathy was a wonderful strip when it started (1976) - a woman in a comic strip whose main role wasn't wife, mother or object (i.e. the secretary in Beetle Bailey). But, like so many of the other comics, it now seems to be doing the same thing over and over.
Even though I don't find it funny all that much any more, I still have a soft spot for For Better or For Worse (mother with two older children and one younger juggling everything in her life - kind of familiar).
The comics that really surprise me are the ones now drawn by someone else after the original author passed away. Why not just retire them?
It's hard for new strips to break into comics, though, since so many of the papers syndicate the same ones. My cousin has drawn editorial cartoons for years, but I don't think it's ever become his main job (His incomplete website is http://www.uku1.com/ for the curious).
So, will the next installment be "Myth and the Funnies?" (BWEG)
Posted by: M Light | November 29, 2006 at 04:13 PM