Originally published March 1, 2002, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1476
A couple weeks ago, I was told one of the topics being discussed in CBG would be newspaper strips. At the time I was writing about other things and so didn’t have the time or space to get into that. But I’ve got some free time now, and so thought I’d give a quick perusal of the funny papers and talk about the stuff that’s making an impression on me these days, both good and bad.
Understand going in: I think the hardest comics-related job there is is producing a daily strip. Particularly a gag strip. I can’t even conceive of doing such a thing myself, and even those strips that I’m lukewarm on, I’m still impressed that the writers and artists are able to hit their deadlines week in, week out. I could never, ever do it. With that said…
Peanuts. I think it may be time for me to reassess just how much I enjoyed the strip. That’s a painful admission to make, but it’s unfortunately true.
Ever since the unfortunate, although amazingly timed, passing of Charles Schulz, the strip has been in repeats since it was his wish for the adventures of Charlie Brown and the gang not to continue beyond his death. That wish has been respected, and all for the good. What’s not for the good is that I’ve been reading Peanuts every day for… well… forever. And I’m continuing to do so. What I find disturbing… is that I don’t remember them. One here or there has rung a very vague bell, but for the most part, it’s as if I’d never seen them before.
When I pick up collections of other old strips at random, I’ll invariably find myself smiling and saying, “Yes, I remember this one, ah yes, that was a funny one.” When Doonesbury artist Garry Trudeau takes a week or two off and they drop in a recycled strip, even if it’s not one of the ones that requires timeliness to be effective, I’ll always recollect having seen it before.
Peanuts just isn’t having that impact on me. Each day is as the one before it, and the one after it: Nothing all that interesting or different occurs to the characters, and the gags themselves, for the most part, aren’t especially amusing. Eminently forgettable. I know, because I’ve forgotten it. Is Peanuts the only strip that would fit this description? Heck no. But it’s Peanuts, for heaven’s sake. To discover mediocrity in what you once thought was great is kind of disheartening. Like tuning in to those old TV shows you used to groove on when you were a kid, only to discover as an adult that it was such drek that Barney or Power Rangers look like “Masterpiece Theater” in comparison.
Liberty Meadows. I have only read Frank Cho’s brilliant cast of characters—most particularly his lovelorn veterinarian (by pure coincidence, I’m sure) Frank, and the object of his affections, animal psychologist Brandy—in the collections rather than in any newspaper. (I also perversely admit I get a kick out of Brandy’s mom, the woman so frosty she leaves icicles on the panel borders and probably roomed at Prep School with Mrs. Robinson.) On the one hand I regret that I can’t just turn to it every day in the paper. On the other hand, considering the horror stories that Cho has described in his dealings with the censorious hand of the syndicate, it may be better that I haven’t.
It’s also moot, since Cho has announced that he will be taking the strip solely to collection format, abandoning the newspaper venue altogether. This strikes me as dangerously eggs-in-one-basket thinking, but it’s his call to make. For a while now I’ve been on the Liberty Meadows comp list. But now that it’s his sole source of revenue, my warrior princess Kathleen is going to be buying the new issues when they hit the stands in order to show support.
Zits. I’m sure that parents of teenage boys will relate even more to this strip than I do, but there have been enough dead-on depictions of classic teen attitude in this series that I can say with confidence Zits cuts across gender lines. The protagonist, Jeremy, is aggressively clueless, as opposed to his parents who are, I believe, both bereft of names. They have no need of them. Like the point of view provided by Calvin, they exist only to serve the needs of the kid, and have neither persona nor requirements of their own beyond that. Any time I’ve called parents to RSVP on Ariel’s behalf for a birthday party and said something like, “Hi, Samantha’s mom? This is Ariel’s dad,” there’s a tacit and amused understanding that once upon a time, we had our own identities… but those are long gone. The most amusing moments are when Jeremy’s mom tries to apply advice taken from those books on parenting that always seem to have been written in a vacuum (considering how much most of them suck). Invariably her frustration mounts as the advice from the experts proves maddeningly inapplicable to her eternally frustrating son. And the best thing is, you wish you could look twenty-five, thirty years down the road to when Jeremy has his own kid… who will hold him in as much disdain as he does his own parents. And you just know his own parents will be around snickering at Jeremy’s comeuppance and spoiling their grandkid behind his back.
Mallard Filmore. There are certain strips where you just kind of go, “Okay, I get it, you’ve made the point so many times that it’s lost its point. Move on.” Kathy falls into that category. The number of times Kathy stuck her tongue out and said “Acckkk!” over the pitfalls of single womanhood eventually dragged a funny strip down into repetitiveness. Dilbert treads the line, but the style is so minimalistic and the variations on corporate stupidity are so diverse that it continues to hang on. But Mallard Filmore… geez. My guess is that this ultra-right wing strip is presented to be some sort of counterpoint to Doonesbury. But Trudeau deftly skewers all sides of the political spectrum. Heck, family man Mike Doonesbury is a Republican, while ultra liberal Mark Slackmeyer has been shown presenting on-air diatribes on radio so over the top that even he was mortified. Mallard Filmore, on the other hand, has one joke: Liberals are stupid. Left wingers are stupid. Anyone not conservative is stupid. There’s no cast beyond the titular duck who appears to be a TV broadcaster commenting on how stupid liberal viewpoints are. If you’re a conservative reader, you might be a bit embarrassed about the one-note opinion. If you’re a liberal reader, you probably think, “Okay, we get it. You think liberals are stupid. Do you have anything else to say?” The answer seems to be “no.” Of course, arch-conservatives might say, “Ha! You just can’t stand humor at your expense!” The response naturally is, “Sure I can… if it’s funny and consistently innovative.” Mallard Filmore is neither.
Boondocks: In comics pages replete with interchangeable bland gag-a-day strips, Boondocks abounds with attitude and is anything but bland. It’s also, more often than not, anything but funny. The strip initially centered around the adventures of two young black kids, Huey and Riley Freeman (Freeman. Get it?), and their dissatisfaction with their grandfather’s choice to move them out of the ‘hood and into the most whitebread suburbia this side of Family Circus. Lately it’s just kind of wandered around (as have the characters), looking for humorous opportunities and instead just coming across as forced. Artist/writer Aaron McGruder renders the strip in a Doonesbury-esque style, and we can take comfort in the knowledge that Doonesbury was no great shakes when it started out either. The strip is at its best when the kids are either butting heads with their no-nonsense grampa, or gleefully exploiting the obvious fear they inspire in the WASP mentalities they encounter. But the cast has yet to fully click as individuals, and when the strip is off, it’s way off. But there are the seeds of something truly great there, and I’m looking forward to seeing where it goes.
For Better or For Worse: When I first started reading this strip years ago, it just bored the hëll out of me. Over the years, as the family has grown in both height and number, it has morphed into my single favorite strip. By turns touching, tragic, and always true to life, the Patterson family is the only one in comics you could actually see yourself hanging out with. A personal chart of Lynn Johnston’s brilliance is that the youngest daughter, April, was born within a few months of Ariel, and their development has been pretty much consistent with one another. There have been moments where the drama of their lives has tripped over into melodrama… but the same has happened in my life as well, so it’s understandable and even believable. If Johnston ever retires the strip, then more than any other strip that’s gone away, I’ll feel like I’m losing touch with true friends.
(Peter David can be written to at Second Age, Inc., PO Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705.)
• 
Heh. You said
Were you aware (at the time you wrote this) of this? (Quoting the Wikipedia article on the comic):
Additionally, Jeremy’s dad is named Walt, and he’s an orthodontist (same occupation as Mr Patterson from FBOFW, coincidentally). I remember this little random bit of name trivia from a short arc way back where Jeremy insisted on calling him by his first name for a spell (“we’re equals”).
Amusingly, when asked why he wasn’t calling his mother by her first name, he replied “because I’m not stupid, Walt.”
The Boondocks has not, in any way, shape or form, gotten funnier, that i can see. Of course, i look at it only slightly more often than i do Mallard Fillmore (to which it seems a complement, actually). Less funny and more preachy than Wee Pals ever was.
As to For Better or for Worse, you know how that ended up.
There’s a Photoshopped Mallard Fillmore strip that gets posted from time to time on the Internet. It just has him saying “Liberals liberals liberals” in the first two panels, and then in the last, “Whoops, I forgot to tell a joke!”
Boondocks was a meh strip but made a very good animated series, which indicates the creator probably agrees with you on the difficulties of making a gag strip work on any consistent basis. Most of the strips ran out of gas years ago, can’t recall the last time drones bury elicited much more than a smile.
Zits has the smarts to employ the CHEERS format of comedy writing; introduce a group of stock players with one- joke premises and run with it. If one has the talent to occasionally draw in some shades of depth, all the better.
mallard Filmore must exist only for some ideological quota system, ironically enough. If one needs conservative thought in their comics, read Day. By Day. Well drawn women as well, which does not hurt.
Sure do miss Calvin, Far Side, and Bloom County…those were the days…
Cheers didn’t have one-joke characters until the Charles brothers stepped away from the show, around about season seven. Up till that point, I was impressed with the shades of depth they brought to the people on the show.
Really? Ragging on Power Rangers? You’re better than that, PAD.
Tattooed Teenage Alien Fighters from Beverly Hills, maybe. But not Rangers.
I remember a time when I was a kid, maybe 12 or 13, when my family and my best friend and I were discussing comic strips. Everyone was naming strips they liked. I chimed in and said, “I like B.C.!” To which my friend responded, “I don’t like B.C.”
This blew my mind. So, wait, we can dislike comic strips? This was something that had seriously never occurred to me. Comic strips had always just been there, these tacitly obligatory institutions, never to be judged or evaluated, but simply accepted as a part of life. And that’s when I realized: I don’t have to like B.C., or Crock, or The Wizard of Id, or any of the umpteen mediocre space fillers they put in the paper every day. I could actually form opinions about them and say, you know what, Peanuts really isn’t very good. Peanuts isn’t good! This was very shocking and revelatory, like admitting you don’t like a family member.
This same friend later introduced me to his collected editions of The Far Side. Just like it had never occurred to me to dislike a comic strip, it had never occurred to me to particularly like them, either; to value them as comedy or even art. The Far Side had been just another comic strip, barely noticeable amid all the longer, multi-panel strips, until I started reading them all together. Suddenly, I “got” it, what made it something special and set it apart from other strips. I ended up buying all the collections myself. Greatness in a syndicated newspaper strip! This was also very revelatory.
To me (and, i’m sure, others among us) who recall Steve Canyon, Pogo, The Spirit, L’il Abner, Alley Oop, Mandrake the Magician, Ðìçk Tracy, Little Orphan Annie, Gasoline Alley and many others in their heyday, the fact that someone not THAT much younger than us can say “Greatness in a syndicated newspaper strip! This was also very revelatory” is one of the sadder things i’ve read in a while.
Your comments, Mike, make this a great opportunity to tell anyone here who doesn’t know that Ðìçk Tracy is currently being handled by Joe Staton and Mike Curtis who are doing a great job on the strip. The current storyline actually brings in a movie villain, Gruesome, who was played by Boris Karloff. To make it even more fun, Gruesome found himself in a revival of Arsenic and Old Lace in the role that was played in the movie by, yes, Boris Karloff.
Actually, Raymond Massey played the part in the movie – Karloff played it on Broadway (it having been written for him).
“He said I looked like … Boris Karloff!”
Unfortunately, the daily strips, much like the floppy comics, and, hëll, various forms of popular cutlure ranging from pop music to professional wrestling, seemed so much better 20 years or so ago (with a few notable exceptions). Still not sure if this is an objectively demonstrable drop in quality or just “fogeyism” on my part.
But as far the dailys go, man oh man do I miss the original Bloom County. What started out as a strip about the dynamic between liberal-minded Milo Bloom and his conservative leaning Uncle set against the backdrop of running a boarding house morphed over time into something so much more wonderful, surreal and utterly creative than anyone could have predicted. The last strip of the original run still leaves me in tears. While Berkley Breathed tried going in a completely different direction a few years later with Outland, it just morphed back into a watered-down version of Bloom County (and lost it’s daily continuity as it was solely a Sunday Funnies strip at that point). When you talk true brilliance in the daily strips, few equalled, let alone bettered, the original Bloom County.