Do you read the comics in your newspaper? I do. I shouldn't bother. When I do, the irritation I feel usually outweighs whatever humor I find. Cracking a smile at any newspaper comic is rare for me, much less laughing out loud. It wasn't until I discovered webcomics that I began to realize just how shitty the comics in the newspaper really are — and how cool a medium comics can be. The artistry and creativity that goes into many webcomics astounds me.

This began as an essay about the impact of the internet upon the comic strip; that will have to wait, though, because by the time I got done writing the background bits, I had already hit this rather unwieldy length. This is part one, then, of a longer work, but each part should stand alone. Part two concerns webcomics and how the medium has been altered by the internet.

Background blatherings

Comic strips, in the form we know them, began in the nineteenth century as brief, humorous interludes printed in newspapers. These cartoons were generally topical, and in particular were known for lampooning political figures and were popular in both Europe and the United States. Gradually, the familiar form of comics as a type of storytelling emerged from these, with a comic usually printed at the bottom of each page of a newspaper. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, comic strips appeared featuring regular casts of characters; eventually, bound collections of reprints of newspaper comics began to appear, and these books subsequently developed into comic books.

Of course, telling stories through sequential artworks is older than that; works that some have described as comics appeared in ancient Egypt. (The earliest known example shows a character whose name has been reconstructed as Dgwd. He runs out of his hut one morning, late for his shift slaving to build a pyramid — and crashes headlong into a scribe.) The invention of the printing press in early modern Europe permitted the creation of popular works using pictures and text to tell stories; the familiar convention of the speech balloon emerged in this period. When exactly comics began depends on how you define them — something that is not actually very easy to do. The combination of pictures and text seems like a key to the definition of the comic, except that one occasionally sees comic strips entirely without dialogue. Sequences of images don't seem to be a defining characteristic of comics, since comics like The Far Side and Dennis the Menace normally appear as single panel drawings. Nevertheless, most of us would agree that a Far Side episode featuring no speech is a comic, while, say, Picasso's Guernica is not, though it arguably contains a narrative. The style of drawing seems like a fruitful path to a definition, but it's hard to define a comic strip's style, particularly when you consider both ordinary humor strips and soap opera-style strips like Judge Parker and Mary Worth. This difficulty in defining what a comic is and isn't has become even harder with the development of webcomics. The line is now blurry as many artists have altered or entirely sacrificed some of the conventions of the medium, an opportunity that doesn't exist in newspapers.

What happened to the comic strip?

Even since my childhood, the comics page has gone downhill — particularly with the endings of Calvin and Hobbes and The Far Side, which stand as the enormous, towering, really fucking huge pillars of the modern era of newspaper comics. Why have the few really good comics disappeared, and why are so many of the ones that remain downright awful?

Size matters

The comic strips in the newspaper have changed very little over the years. Daily comic strips are printed in black and white, as color is used fairly sparingly in newspapers to save money. One change has occurred, though. Over the years, newspaper comics have become much smaller, as editors have attempted to cram more of them in less space.

This is particularly noticeable with the longer Sunday comics. Sunday strips, back in the old days, used to routinely be as much as a page in length, but they have grown steadily smaller over the years. As a matter of fact, a typical Sunday strip today is smaller than a daily strip from the forties. In order to accommodate the desires of newspaper, the rules for Sunday artwork became so precise that a specific panel formula arose that permits papers to assemble Sunday comics into different shapes. It starts with two panels that include either a throwaway gag or a dispensable bit of dialogue that can be freely removed without disrupting the strip's narrative. The other panels are designed so that they can be rearranged into two or three lines as newspapers wish. Bill Watterson, the author of Calvin and Hobbes, famously defied this arrangement beginning in 1992, which left newspapers with the choice of either devoting half a Sunday page to the comic or dropping it, and his comic was so popular that virtually every paper that carried it kept it. This gave him the freedom to arrange panels as he wished or draw the strip as a single large panel. It also drew the ire of newspaper editors and even some comic artists, who claimed he was arrogant for refusing to play by the rules.

Tacky sentiment

Newspapers have a broad audience, and they're not known for being terribly daring in their content. Naturally, any comic a newspaper publishes has to be "family-friendly" — that is, appropriate for children. Moreover, it has to be appropriate for old people, who constitute a growing share of the declining readership of daily newspapers. This phenomenon is clear in the now routine substitution of saccharine sentimentality for humor in newspaper comics. Bil Keane, the author of Family Circus, has admitted that he doesn't even try for humor in his comics. To quote his official biography printed at his syndicate, King Features,

Keane does not always try to make his cartoons especially funny. "I would rather have the readers react with a warm smile, a tug at the heart or a lump in the throat as they recall doing the same things in their own families," he says.

The same maudlin and unfunny approach to family can be seen even more intensely in the execrable Rose is Rose, created by Pat Brady. Sticky sweetness pervades the comic; its main "artistic" touch involves showing the parents' irrepressible delight in random occurrences by depicting them as children with impossibly huge and impossibly genuine smiles, while their heads are surrounded by shapes apparently inspired by the marshmallows in Lucky Charms cereal. Those of us with even dim memories of childhood will remember that children are, at least occasionally, capable of feeling emotions aside from pure ecstacy. Perhaps the comic can be salvaged if the drawings are taken literally, depicting hallucinations brought on by whatever drug it is that makes the characters so goddamn joyful at every moment of every day.

Newspaper comics weren't always this bad. I'll prove it to you. You see, once upon a time, Dennis the Menace was funny. No, really! In its early years, Dennis the Menace depicted the trials and tribulations of a family dealing with, well, a little menace. Dennis wasn't rotten to the core, but he had his rough edges. A 1951 comic shows a babysitter talking on the phone. "This is Polly, Mrs. Mitchell. How do you make Dennis go to bed? Oh, really? Well, where do you keep the club?" The comic actually had a joke! A funny one! A lot of early Dennis the Menace comics were like this — clearly, Dennis's parents loved him. But just as clearly, sometimes they felt like strangling him. Or, in this case, beating him into unconsciousness with a club to earn a few hours of freedom from him. Families aren't always happy; in fact, one of the funny things about family is that people sometimes get angry with those they love. That sort of juxtaposition is the kind of thing humor is made from; when you decide to depict your family members as grinning, lobotomized buffoons who are endlessly delighted with everything they see around them, humor is simply not possible.

Nowadays, Dennis has been turned into a mindless vehicle for mawkish nostalgia. A typical 2005 comic shows him with his family at a picnic. The caption? "I think this is gonna be one of my good ol' days." Ha ha! Dennis, you irrepressible scamp! The comic changed during its run from a funny illustration of the sometimes frustrating world of family to the same irritating, unfunny dreck as Family Circus. It is bland, inoffensive garbage, and it's what fills the comics page nowadays. I will forcefully object if you refer to them as the "funnies", because they simply are not.

I cribbed the Dennis the Menace comics in this section from David Malki !'s column The Comic Strip Doctor, cited in the references section.

Formula

Not only have comics become cloyingly trite, they have stopped changing. Most comics nowadays have very small casts of characters; the old convention of characters that don't age at all has expanded into characters that don't have experiences at all; few changes happen in most comics — but more troubling, few things happen at all in the comics. Most of long-running comics are striking for having so few jokes; family sitcoms are fresh and exciting in comparison. A quick glance at a recent comics page from our local newspaper shows Dagwood eating a large sandwich. Beetle is slacking off, and Sarge is mad at him. The Gumbo family (from Rose is Rose) appear to be cumming in their pants at the sight of corn muffins. And Garfield is talking about how much he loves sleeping!

Of course the medium dictates a small cast of characters. Generally, even in comics that do feature continuing storylines, each comic has to have a joke and the sudden appearance of new characters may be confusing for irregular readers. But many long-running comics have become so stagnant that the mere introduction of a new character is a major event. In 2002, Beetle Bailey debuted a new character — one whose personality can be summed up as "computer geek", which would have been a cliché had it appeared ten years earlier. This was clearly a momentous occasion! So the artist ran a write-in contest to name him. The winning name? "Chip Gizmo." (Get it? Because he likes gizmos! Gizmos that contain computer chips! Ha ha! You guys kill me!) Interestingly, the comic began in 1950, but the inhabitants of Camp Swampy somehow avoided the Korean War, the Vietnam War, Grenada, the War in Afghanistan, and two wars in Iraq. I guess actually depicting soldiers as soldiers would be a downer. Besides, showing a war would interfere with great storylines involving Sarge beating Beetle up.

Garfield (and I urge you to check out Kizor's writeup on it) is the best example of the comics page's decent into mediocrity. Garfield, in my opinion, was never brilliant, but it used to be reasonably funny. It also used to feature a cast of characters and storylines that ran longer than a single strip. Originally, the cast included Garfield, Odie, Jon, Liz the veterinarian, Irma the waitress, Jon's roommate Lyman, Garfield's girlfriend Arlene, the annoying kitten Nermal, and occasional visits to Jon's family. Now, the comic has been almost exclusively pared down to Garfield, Odie, and Jon, it has no storylines longer than a day, and virtually every comic takes place in Jon's house, without even furniture as a backdrop. (Liz did, however, appear again briefly in 2006, as part of a tie-in with the plot of the second Garfield movie.)

Garfield was always a vehicle for merchandising. Jim Davis, who no longer takes an active role in creating the strip, has admitted that his entire goal in creating the comic was to find "a good, marketable character" who would sell tie-in products (though it's hard to imagine even he anticipated his eventual success.) Inoffensiveness was his goal from the beginning, and yet even this mercenary comic has managed to become blander and less interesting over the years.

Stasis

It's remarkable how little change there is in a typical newspaper's comics page. Editors seem unwilling to change the comic strip lineup; new comics have a difficult time making it into the newspapers and, before they develop a large following, have to take special pains to be inoffensive because only a few complaints are enough to cause a paper to drop a strip. And likewise, anticipation of just a few complaints will cause a newspaper to retain a comic for years — or decades — beyond its relevance. Who cares that Garfield hasn't been funny in years? It's not worth the potential loss of a few subscribers if the paper drops it.

Hank Ketcham died in 2001. I bet you didn't notice the change in Dennis the Menace. That's because he didn't draw it anymore. He had long since handed that task over to his two assistants; even before that, he was unashamed to admit that a team of people helped him write it. Most long-running strips are like that. Blondie has been in the papers for over seventy-five years; it's now drawn by the original creator's son. Nancy appeared in 1939, but it was a spinoff of a comic that started in 1922; during its run, it has had several authors. Bil Keane still draws Family Circus, but his son inks and colors it and is no doubt prepared to carry the torch on after Bil's death. We've already discussed the artistic process underlying Garfield. Even more recent comics suffer from the same decent into boring sameness. Dilbert used to be funny; it also, once upon a time, didn't take place exclusively at the office. (When's the last time we saw Dogbert?) But the comic found its niche as the office comic, and so there it stays; Scott Adams has unabashedly followed in Jim Davis's footsteps in creating a comic as a source for merchandising, whether or not that compromises the comic's humor. Once he hit on a formula that sold coffee mugs and calendars, Adams stuck with it.

Perhaps the clearest illustration of this is the fact that B.C. is still a popular comic. The last ten years or so of B.C. have not been interesting for the quality of the comic — rather, they have been interesting as the output of a mind gradually falling into senile dementia. Johnny Hart is now seventy-five years old; his comic has run for nearly fifty years. I'm told that it used to be funny and even edgy in its early years. It's still controversial, but only for its author's ham-handed attempts to proselytize his Born Again Christian faith, complete with occasional insults to other religions.

A few years ago, he drew disapproval for a comic depicting a menorah changing into a cross (suggesting that he adheres to the fringe Christian doctrine that Christians have replaced Jews as the Chosen People.) More recently, controversy surrounded a comic that seemed to contain a cryptic insult to Islam. On the anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attacks a few days before the time of this writing, B.C. featured a "Wiley's Dictionary" entry: "Infamy: A word seldom used after Toyota sales topped 2 million." The comic is of course quite wrong, as the Pearl Harbor attacks, along with the phrase "a day that will live in infamy," are of course still quite well-known to the average American. Really, the only possible interpretation of this strip is that Johnny Hart thinks the United States has forgotten its history in order to purchase consumer goods from Japan. Even though the Pearl Harbor attacks happened two generations ago and few of the perpetrators are still alive, even though Japanese society underwent dramatic and fundamental changes in the wake of World War II, in Johnny Hart's mind, by purchasing Japanese products, Americans have somehow abandoned our history.

But his religious zealotry and bizarre xenophobia are all too rare exceptions that at very least liven up the comic — generally, his work lurks somewhere between completely unfunny and completely incomprehensible. What is plain is that he is no longer competent to draw a newspaper comic — when he's not insulting people, he's simply not coherent. And yet such is the unmoving nature of the comics page that he is still printed in thousands of newspapers each day.

See you in the funny pages

Newspaper comics have never been high art. However, a quick look through history shows how much the medium has stagnated. Perhaps it's tied to the general declining readership in newspapers — large papers like the New York Times (which is, of course, comic-free) remain fixtures in the U.S. media, but smaller papers are having a harder time getting by. So long as it's not driving away readers, the comics page is likely the last thing on the mind of anyone on a newspaper's staff. And they're likely right about that — few people will start to subscribe to a newspaper to get one particular comic, while no doubt there are numerous cranks who would stop buying one if it carried a comic that offended them.

The newspaper comics page is in grave peril; it is fortunate, then, that the webcomic has developed to fill that niche. Webcomics are not obliged to be inoffensive; they are not obliged to fit into a box an inch and a half tall and five inches long. They can play around with the conventions of comics in ways that would be unpopular or even impossible in a newspaper. The Old Media comic strip is on life support; the webcomic is the medium's only hope.

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References

King Features' biography for Bil Keane (http://www.kingfeatures.com/features/comics/familyc/bioMaina.htm)
"The Comic Strip Doctor: Dennis the Menace" (http://www.wondermark.com/tcsd/stripdoc_9.html)
"The Comic Strip Doctor: Garfield" (http://www.wondermark.com/tcsd/stripdoc_5.html)
Watterson, Bill, 1995. The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book.
"Garfield: Why we hate the mouse but not the copycat." Slate, 2004. (http://www.slate.com/id/2102299/)
Adams, Scott, 1997. Seven Years of Highly Defective People.