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Brooks Peterson
Brooks Peterson's column is published Mondays. Brooks also sits on the Caller-Times editorial board and can be contacted at petersonb@caller.com
Monday, May 8, 2000
Where have all the funny-paper heroes gone?
Now, where were we? . . . Oh, right: We were pondering the symptoms and implications of Mallard Filmore Withdrawal Syndrome.
If by chance you were not with us here then, I should explain that last week's column centered on the sense of loss experienced by fans of "Mallard Filmore," a comic strip detailing the tribulations of a right-wing duck in a world he never made.
I don't propose to linger over that; we gave it a pretty good going-over last time, and it's highly doubtful that the Mallardista Liberation Front is going to cool down any time soon.
Meditating on the l'affaire Mallard, however, led to me to a larger and more transcendent issue: the role (if any) that the funnies play in our lives.
I know some of you consider the comics beneath your dignity. Fine with me. I think, however, that you're missing something more than a little special, for the funnies are not only amusing in themselves; they're meaningful in that they hold a sort of fun-house mirror up to us, suggesting, not always flatteringly, who we are and where we're going as a society.
Consider the changes wrought since those long-ago days when as a mere slip of a lad I first pored over the Austin paper's comics pages.
It strikes me that we are light-years removed from where we were back then. For one thing, where are the continuity strips? A continuity strip was simply one that told a story. There were endless examples back then, all reflecting a dedication to the yarn-spinner's craft.
Remember "Dick Tracy"? It featured the square-jawed detective and his supporting cast: sidekicks such as the euphoniously named B.O. Plenty and such surpassingly weird heavies as Mumbles, Flattop and on and on. Truth to tell, the strip got progressively weirder as time passed, with such bizarre characters as Moon Maid crashing the party, and little boxed messages from the cartoonist, Chester Gould, warning, "The Nation That Controls Magnetism Will Control the Universe." Or words to that effect.
And let's not forget the military-themed strips: "Terry and the Pirates," first drawn by Milton Caniff and subsequently handed over the George Wunder, and "Steve Canyon," the strip Caniff started up after ditching "Terry." I guess ol' Buz Sawyer might qualify, too, though as I recall he was in and out of the military. Bit of a trifler.
And of course there were the soap-opera strips: "Mary Worth" and "Rex Morgan, M.D." Would "Brenda Starr" fit under this rubric? Perhaps. Fer sure, she was responsible for selling a couple of generations a wildly unrealistic vision of the purportedly glamorous, exciting life of a journalist. (Here I am, bathed in the baleful, antiseptic glow of my computer's video screen: Sound glamorous and exiting to you, spud?)
What else? How about "The Jackson Twins," with the impossibly nubile Jan and Jill, their endearingly pesky little brother, Termite, and their high-school steadies, Nightowl and Wiffie. Seriously. I mean it. (I can't begin to communicate the sense of betrayal when I reached high school only to learn that this Arcadian vision was a cruel hoax.)
What these strips all had in common was that they required a smidgen of commitment from the reader: You had to keep up with them to know what was going on.
These days, virtually every strip invents the world anew each morning. Sure, a few have shards of a story line - "Luann" and "For Better or Worse," for instance - but for the most part today's strips are one-shot affairs, tied together by only the most tenuous of themes.
And I haven't even mentioned content: Back in prehistory, the comics presented a generally reassuring, though occasionally naughty (Tracy, et al), world. The gentle but inspired "Pogo" was about as political as it got. Today, the funnies are awash in Relevance: AIDS, gay rights, sweatshop labor, and on and on and on.
Is this a Bad Thing? Not necessarily. It does, however, confirm that these days the comics are about in-your-face advocacy as they are about the innocent and, yes, sometimes puerile escapism of yesteryear.
Like it? Hate it? Either way, get used to it: That's the way the wind is blowing. See you in the funny papers.
(Peterson can be reached by phone at 886-3772, or by e-mail at petersonb@caller.com.)
Brooks Peterson
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