COMICS AT
100
by
Bill Griffith
THE
BOSTON SUNDAY GLOBE Magazine, 11/10/96
The daily newspaper comic strip is one hundred years old. And
it looks it. Shrunken. Pale. Shaky. One foot in the grave. Diagnosis:
In desperate need of new blood.Instead, it gets "Dilbert".
Dilbert is all the rage. Dilbert is on the Best Seller list.
Like the Ninja Turtles of a few years ago, you cannot avoid Dilbert.
But is Dilbert a comic strip? Kind of. More to the point, Dilbert
is a marketing strategy. It's the most popular and successful
new comic strip in America today. What does this tell us about
the medium? The comic strip exists in that twilight zone where
art meets commerce. Daily comics first made their appearance
toward the end of the last century primarily as a way for publishers
to increase newspaper circulation. The fact that they were graphically
innovative and exciting to read was a bonus. Can the same be
said of today's crop of strips? Comic strips today seem more
of a comfort than an artistic statement. They're there . And,
with a mind-numbing regularity, they'll be there, recycling the
same diet jokes and lifestyle gags again and again, day after
day. They're not really meant to be read. They’re meant
to be scanned, quickly absorbed and just as quickly forgotten.
But this wasn’t always the case. At one time, newspaper
comic strips,along with radio, performed the function in people’s
lives that television does today . They were a powerful mass
entertainment medium. "Dick Tracy" (Chester Gould),
for instance, not only furnished readers with a daily dose of
crime drama and fast-paced action, but did so with a gripping
graphic sensibility. The strip literally leapt off the newsprint.
The same can be said of "Krazy Kat" (George Herriman),
"Popeye" (Elzie Segar), "Little Orphan Annie"
(Harold Gray) and a host of other "classic" strips
from the teens to the fifties. Does a contemporary strip like
"Cathy" draw our eye to its spot on the page? Do the
characters come alive in the way characters from good fiction
or film do? Or are they simply caricatures of life, flat, stereotyped,
and two-dimensional? This kind of work is what gives rise to
the pejorative term, "cartoony". It could be said that
today’s comic strip readers get what they deserve. Long
since psychically kidnapped by the gaudy, mindlessly hyperactive
world of TV, they no longer demand or expect comic strips to
be compelling, challenging, or even interesting. Enter "Cathy".
And "Dilbert". Sure, comics are still funny. It’s
just that the humor has almost no "nutritional" value.
In the tiny space alloted to them , daily strips have all too
successfully adapted to their new environment. In this Darwinian
set-up, what thrives are simply drawn panels , minimal dialogue,
and a lot of head- and -shoulder shots.Anything more complicated
is deemed "too hard to read". A full, rich drawing
style is a drawback. Simplicity, even crudity, rules. And when
the graphics havebeen dumbed down, the writing follows in short
order.What we’re left with is a kind of childish, depleted
shell of a once-vibrant medium. Comics is a language. It’s
a language most people understand intuitively. If cartoonists
use a large and varied "vocabulary" to entertain their
readers, those readers will usually come along for the ride.
It’s not a problem of the audience’s expectations having
been hopelessly lowered, it’s a problem of the cartoonists’
ambitions needing a boost. Even within the size restrictions
imposed on them today, comic strips can be more than filler.
Given the user-friendly, low-tech intimacy of the printed page,
the newspaper comic strip still has the potential to involve
and reward the reader. Unfortunately, both cartoonist and reader
have gone a bit flabby over the decades. Does it have to be that
way? Perhaps, with competition from video games, CD-ROMS, special
effects movies and plain, old TV, comic strips are fighting an
uphill battle for attention. And, on top of that, they play out
their role in the archaic print medium, soon to be relegated
to the communications boneyard , according to common wisdom.
Not necessarily. There may be hope yet. Just as the automobile
did not replace the bicycle, the over-hyped Internet will not
replace newspapers. Newspapers will simply adapt to a different
purpose. "Slate", the on-line electronic magazine ,
recently came out with "Slate on Paper", a real newsstand
magazine. Why? Because people like print. Not to mention the
fact that Slate cartoonist Mark Alan Stamaty’s strip looks
a lot better on paper than it does flickering on a computer screen.
Another factor contributing to the anemic state of contemporary
daily comics is the propensity of newspapers to target their
"product" at readers much in the way that politicians
use focus groups to pander to constituents’ "needs".
Daily comic strips are regulartly subjected to popularity polls
to determine who reads what. Too often, as a result of low numbers,
an interesting or controversial strip will be dropped. Editors
and publishers who lament their narrowing readership are only
contributing to this trend by opting for the lowest common denomenator.
Not everybody has to like "Doonesbury" for it to have
a valid spot on the comics (or, in many cases, the editorial)
page.Is the idea of diversity only to be encouraged in other
areas? Recognizing that one person’s " "Beetle
Bailey " is another’s "Bizarro", can only
be healthy for the survival of the species. Non-mainstream comics
could actually help to bring back those demographically treasured
under forty-somethings, who now flip channels the way they used
to flip newspaper pages. Of course, compelling, regularly published
comics on newsprint do exist. For the most part, though, they’re
found in the pages of weekly, not daily newspapers. Strips like
"Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer" (Ben Katchor),
"Troubletown" (Lloyd Dangle), "Story Minute"
(Carol Lay),"Life in Hell" (Matt Groening) and "Red
Meat" (Max Cannon) are all noteworthy examples.There was
a time about ten years ago when it seemed possible strips like
these could find their way into daily syndication. But, through
a combination of syndicate timidity and cartoonists’ lack
of faith in the flexibility of the daily strip world, not much
happened. There are a few lively, well-crafted dailies bobbing
bravely in a sea of blandness. "Mutts" (Patrick McDonnell)
stands out, as does the venerable "Doonesbury’ (Garry
Trudeau) and the occasionally adventurous "Bizarro"
(Dan Piraro).These few, and a few others, are, however , exceptions
to the rule.Can readers drifting toward brain-death from one
too many "Garfields" ever be expected to enjoy the
charms and subtleties of the quirky Ben Katchor?"Odie"
can rest easy on the daily comics page. He won’t be seeing
competition from the likes of Julius Knipl for a long, long time.
What does the future look like for the daily strip? Some, among
them many comics syndicate executives, believe the brave new
world of comics will have an exclusive on-line address. Forget
about the chore of having to scan the comics line-up for your
favorite strip (and, perhaps, not finding it there). Just click
on "Peanuts" with your trusty mouse and catch up on
Charlie Brown’s latest trials and tribulations. But what
will be lost in that rosy scenario is what’s already disappearing
as digital supplants analog; namely, the gestalt of the comics
pages, the fun of thirty or so different (one would hope) art
styles vying for the viewer’s attention.In the best of all
possible daily strip worlds, it would be a genuine kick to see"Life
in Hell"’s Akhbar and Jeff give Spiderman a run for
his money.
END
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