Comic Relief

I haven't read a comic strip in ages.

"60 Minutes" re-aired an Andy Rooney essay last night in which Rooney lamented that what used to be called the "funny papers" aren't so funny anymore. I agree to a considerable extent, since I had found myself reading the comic strips in the newspapers and finding myself chuckling mildly rather than laughing out loud. Old favorites have outstayed their welcome in my local paper (some of which have been continued by hired artists after the deaths of their creators), while some strips I like - Jim Toomey's "Sherman's Lagoon," for example - don't appear there. The only strip that still guarantees a real laugh, in fact, would have to be Stefan Pastis's "Pearls Before Swine." But I don't even read that anymore.

One big reason I don't read the comics these days is this: More and more strips - not just the serious ones of the "Mary Worth" variety, but funny ones as well - have ongoing stories. Though my mother and I subscribe to a local paper, we only get it Thursdays through Sundays to save money. If I don't read comic strips like "Funky Winkerbean" or "Louann," which increasingly use ongoing storylines, on Mondays, Tuesdays, or Wednesdays, how I can figure out what's going on? (Tom Batiuk's "Funky Winkerbean," incidentally, is a strip that used to be hilarious but now has grown more serious and brooding, with only flashes of its original brilliance.)

Other strips have disappeared, either dropped by my paper (I miss "Marvin") or discontinued by their creators. Canadian cartoonist Lynn Johnston retired her strip "For Better of For Worse" in 2008, and even though it could be annoying - I sometimes suspected a bit of hostility toward the male sex in this strip about a family of five - it was interesting in that the characters grew and aged in real time. Those readers of the Newark (N.J.) Star-Ledger who want to know what Johnston's strip was like can read reprints of the color strips in the Sunday comic pages. The state of comic strips in general is probably best demonstrated not by the reprints of current strips from creators on sabbatical but reprints of Charles Schulz's "Peanuts," as Schulz died in 2000. The fact that "Peanuts" is still more popular than current strips is roughly the equivalent of people still buying Beatles records because they're just not into the Hold Steady.

Comic strips are clearly going the way of rock and roll these days.

Stefan Pastis himself once dismissed most comic strips as banal and irrelevant, and he's been proven right so much that I don't miss the comic pages on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays. Or any other day, for that matter.