Comic Book Resources

"The unique problem of the Funny Pages is that no new generation has emerged to accept the mantle ..."

IS that the problem? Or is the problem that there have been few opportunities for a new generation, given that tired-but-familiar strips like Blondie, Hagar, Beetle Bailey, etc., remain on the page (often, long after their creators have passed them on or simply passed away) and attempts to replace them are likely to produce more complaints than seems worthwhile?

Especially in a media that's in a terminal decline, anyway? Indeed, I would say that in the larger picture, the looming extinction of print dailies is the only serious problem of the Funny Pages; everything else is just arguments about deck-chair layout on the Titanic.

I'd concur with Wraith - even if the media format wasn't in decline, the funny pages would be irrelevant anyway. It's a rerun channel for aging baby boomers. Too many strips have outlived their usefulness by being handed down to multiple generations of creators or worse yet have just gone into reprinting classic material ala Peanuts or For Better or For Worse. The only voice of the 2000s that I'd consider would be the creator of Boondocks, and even he jumped ship to translate his vision into television.

You want quality comics, find a good webcomic which is were the medium is best translated these days. I'd stack up Perry Bible Fellowship against anything offered in the daliy funny pages.

Stewart’s statements about today’s strips not measuring up to the 80s and 90s stuff is baffling for a number of reasons.

1) Schulz may have been working in the 80s and 90s but he certainly wasn’t part of the same “generation” as the others.

2) Aaron McGruder’s Boondocks was every bit as smart and politically charged as “old-school Trudeau”. Plus, like Larson and Watterson he was smart enough to get out while he was on top. (Now if only he’d made better decisions in television)

3) Sure Zits may technically be a late 90s strip and Jerry Scott’s slice of life writing hardly groundbreaking but Jim Borgman creates some great artistic compositions that really bring the whole thing to life.

4) Pearls before Swine is kind of the opposite of Zits. Even Stephen Pastis himself will point out that he’s a lousy artist but it doesn’t matter. PBS is the only newspaper strip I still read on a regular basis (though I follow it online and pick up the treasuries rather than read them in the paper). The series is funny, smart, and surprisingly dark for a news strip.

5) With newspapers dropping strips left and right, most cartoonists are turning to webcomics instead of trying to get syndicated anyway. It’s hardly the creator’s fault that newspapers don’t want anything new because it’s safer to run Family Circus instead of something that might scare away readers the papers can’t afford to lose. I mean, can you imagine the letters to the editor if Penny Arcade was in newspapers?

I'm glad you pointed out the fact that the two people from the library who decided to be censors were not actual librarians, but circulation staff members. Librarians need a Master's degree and follow the ethics code of the ALA (or should at least) that says that no one shall be denied a book for any reason (or something to that effect). I'm not a librarian, but my wife is.

Comics in the newspapers are drawn so poorly today that I can't develop interest in them. And part of the problem is that the small size allowed today makes it hard to do good art. The newspapers want to squeeze in as many strips as possible, yet they want small sized art so they can keep all the comics on one page.

Newspapers are the reason newspaper strips are failing.