This article is worth a good laugh. It’s from a year ago, and it lays out the “new” comic strips USA Today will unveil in its exciting newspaper comic-strip lineup.
Almost all the comics debuted in the previous century, some in the first half. Most of the characters are throwbacks to forgotten times. Many of the original creators are long dead.
Why would comic strips that haven’t changed in decades—almost a century in one or two cases—be paraded out in the modern age with such fanfare?
In any other medium, audiences wouldn’t tolerate this. Imagine if a studio released the 1938 movie Test Pilot, starring Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy, in theaters today and expected people to buy tickets. We’d be baffled!
Yet that’s how they do things in the world of comic strips. Never mind the fact that they’re still printing them in ink on newsprint and delivering them to people’s homes. Apparently, no one in this chain of doom has ever heard of the Internet or web comics.
Comic strips is the most conservative medium there is. That’s conservative in the traditional sense, not the political sense. This is a medium that cannot and will not change.
It can’t change because if an editor pulls an octogenarian’s favorite comic strip from the newspaper, the octogenarian will write an angry letter, which might get the editor fired.
So, the funny pages remain the same. And strips like Blondie, from the 1930s, runs in modern newspapers and we’re all supposed to think it’s a hoot.
Tomorrow, a look at the second most conservative medium.
It's hard to believe anyone is making money doing comic strips these days. My favorites were "Far Side" and "Calvin and Hobbes." I wonder how much artists earn now versus in the heyday of papers.
"This is a medium that cannot and will not change.
It can’t change because if an editor pulls an octogenarian’s favorite comic strip from the newspaper, the octogenarian will write an angry letter, which might get the editor fired."
You think that's it? Could be. I don't know. It's like old time radio. I think people like having it around. That said, I've become a fan of OTR in recent years.
I was into Mad and Cracked (got my byline in there as an adult) as a kid. Never read newspaper comics, even as a kid. I think I had a few Marmaduke compendium books or something. How can you not like that big stupid dog?
I liked Bazooka Joe comics. Terrible gum though...