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Taking the comics seriously
Among the numerous childish things I failed to put away when I became a man were the comic pages in the Sunday newspaper. I still glance at them to see how things are going with “Popeye,” “Blondie,“ “Charlie Brown,” and all my other old friends. And whenever I do, I invariably think back fondly to those long ago days when my sister and I would sit on the living room floor in the home where I grew up in Bergenfield and fight over “the funnies.”
“Gimme those,” she would say as she snatched the section from Hearst’s long defunct Sunday Journal-American right out from under my nose.
“I’m not finished yet,” I’d protest, taking them back.
“I want Krazy Kat,” she’d say, starting to whimper, and my dad would tell me to stop picking on my little sister. There was no way an older brother could ever win an argument like that.
Of course, my sister and I have grown up – and grown old – since those days, but somehow Olive Oil and Wimpy and all those other characters whose words float above their heads in balloons must have discovered the fountain of youth. They haven’t aged a day. Consider “Blondie,” one of my favorites.
I came across an item in the newspaper the other day, which indicated that the strip made its first appearance on Sept. 8, 1930. I had my 8th birthday that month. Come my next birthday I’ll be 86, but Blondie and Dagwood seem to have hardly aged. Considering that they were already courting in that first strip – the news item says they got married in 1933 – they’ve got to be in their nineties by now. You’d never know it by the way they behave.
Unfortunately, the people who ink in the characters and put the words in those balloons have never been able to discover the same key to immortality for themselves. “Chic” Young, Blondie’s creator, died in 1973 and his son Dean now produces Blondie’s continuing saga. “Peanuts” and its gang of endearing kids didn’t make its debut until the 1950s, but Charles Schulz, the creator of those loveable characters, has also left us. However, Charlie Brown, Lucy and Snoopy live on in the form of “Peanuts Classics,” a daily repeat of the strip’s most memorable panels.
When I was growing up, back in those days before television, the daily comic strip was such an important factor in our lives that during a newspaper strike in the 1930s, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia of New York, “the Little Flower” as he was affectionately known because of his first name, made sure we didn’t miss anything by reading them over the radio. New York City had a lot of newspapers at that time – The Daily Mirror, Daily News, Journal-American, Herald Tribune, World Telegram and Sun, Evening Post, The Times – and all of them, except for the always serious Times, ran comics. Each evening during the strike, LaGuardia, a funny looking man with a chubby, cherubic face, managed to get copies of the most popular strips from newspapers in other cities. Then, he would share them with us over WOR.
“In the next panel,” he would say in his high pitched voice with its raspy New York accent, “Little Orphan Annie comes into the room and Sandy looks up at her and says, ‘Arf.’” He claimed to be doing it for the children but everyone listened in.
Of course, if you ask, most people will deny that they read the comics, just like our parents made believe they weren’t eavesdropping on Mayor LaGuardia. Readership studies, however, tell a different story. They indicate that more people today read the comics than the editorials in the same papers. Again, consider Blondie. According to King Features, which handles its syndication, it appears in more than 2,000 newspapers every day in over 50 countries and it is read by more than 250 million people.
So how do you explain the popularity and staying power of the newspaper comic strip? Could it be that, in an era when our movie and television screens, and even most best selling novels, are filled with sex, profanity and violence many people welcome an opportunity to return, however briefly, to the innocence of their childhood? Comic strip characters never curse, except, perhaps, to utter an occasional “##*!.” Dennis the Menace may torment Mr. Wilson but he’s never really malicious; Dagwood and Blondie have remained married for 75 years and neither one of them has had an extra-martial affair.
But maybe it’s silly to take the funnies seriously. Maybe they have no redeeming social value at all. Maybe some people read them because they can’t help themselves, because, like me, they have never fully grown up themselves. As Popeye says, “I am what I am and that’s all that I am.”
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