I miss Opus and Bill the Cat

Calvin and Hobbes. The Far Side. Bloom County. Peanuts.

Do you remember how much of a joy it was to read the comics as a kid? I swear that at least half of the comics section was filled with strips that were outstanding and the rest at least at the Hagar the Horrible / Beatle Bailey level where you might simply chuckle but you still read them. The first group that I mentioned were simply required reading. Part of the reason my family subscribed to both Chicago papers was to read all four of them on a daily basis. And the amazing thing is, while we all remember these strips fondly, they have been out of print for at least a decade.

There are a few points to make about this. The first is that only now do I understand how tough it must be to write a daily strip and why some of the most successful people retire when they are seemingly at the top of their form. I struggle with the blog when I try to write five days a week and I have an audience of maybe twenty. Imagine what it was like for Gary Larson to write for an audience of millions who are all waiting for him to be ingenious and clever every single time. That is just so incredibly difficult that it must be maddening. Drawing comics might seem like a dream job and I bet for everyone in it it truly is but the challenge of staring at a blank piece of paper and telling yourself “Ok, now be funny” is so daunting most people wouldn’t even put pen to paper.

It is also interesting to note that nothing has really taken up the mantle from the classic strips and carried it into the new millennium. Dilbert has a loyal following amongst those of us who dwell in cubicles but I would say that it has fallen off greatly as of late. Fox Trot in many ways carried on the Calvin and Hobbes tradition but it too has been retired and now exists in a Sunday only format. I’m a fan of Get Fuzzy, which can at times be outrageously funny and I would like to name my next dog Satchel, but it has never really taken hold in the culture. To be honest the one strip I make sure to read every day is Doonesbury and this may just mean that I am old and curmudgeonly. In a few years I will simply find myself reading Mary Worth.

But the big thing is that the rise of the Internet and the death of the newspaper has also caused the death of the comic strip. Now, I know that the strips are available online and that in reality the business model should be the same either way. A comic strip is easier to check out online than a comic book or a newspaper article but for some reason it feels completely different. Maybe it is because we all grew up as kids stealing the comics from the newspaper so that we could sit on the floor and read them. It is the reason Sundays were fun: there was always a full color comic section to look forward to. I don’t mourn the loss of comics because I miss the humor. That can easily be replicated online. I miss the innocence and the connection to my youth and my laptop simply can’t replicate that.