Company B, 2nd Battalion, 47th Infantry soldier reads comics (including Snuffy Smith) during the Vietnam War, May 1968. (Photo U.S. Army)
Recently on a trip I picked up a copy of The Southern, the regional newspaper for Southern Illinois, where I grew up. The paper is physically smaller than it used to be, but the fact that it is still printed is remarkable. The Pew Research Center said, a couple of years ago, that circulation of US dailies (both print and digital delivery) was down by two-thirds from its height in 1973, due largely to the ascendancy of corporations over local news, and the alternative entertainments of the Internet. In 2024 only four percent of Americans said they prefer print news.
It was surprising to me too that the paper still has a comics section. How I used to love reading the comics every Sunday with an elderly cousin who served as grandmother to me! It was one of my earliest experiences in literacy.
I was more surprised still when I looked at the eighteen strips in the four-page section. Here (still) were Dennis the Menace, Beetle Bailey, Blondie, Hi and Lois, the “kids say the darndest things” of Family Circus, Hagar the Horrible, and Snuffy Smith. I had to check the date on the little supercomputer I carry in my pocket here in the third millennium CE. Had I fallen through a time hole to my childhood? My parents’ childhoods in the Depression?
Here are the years each of those strips was first published:
Dennis the Menace (1951), Beetle Bailey (1950), Blondie (1930), Hi and Lois (1954), Family Circus (1960), Hagar the Horrible (1973), and Barney Google and Snuffy Smith (1919).
That is a cumulative run of 538 years.
It is odd that certain comics would last this long, given that humor is friable, and these strips do not update themselves well to reflect our times. Beetle Bailey makes me, a veteran of the Reagan-Bush years, feel ill. This guy has spent the last 75 years as a buck private, lazing around some isolated army camp, wearing fatigues that were secondhand in Korea. It is like a much, much worse version of Groundhog Day, the purgatory of a wasted life. In the strip two weeks ago, Beetle and his buddies dig trenches with folding shovels, as if they are training to defend the Hürtgen Forest, given that they argue about why they are called “GI Joes.” Beetle’s platoon sergeant, the abusive, vulgar Sergeant Snorkel, beats him to a shapeless pulp every time he is irritated. (Snorkel is another version of the omnipresent American blowhard Ralph Kramden.)
Even the strips with seemingly average situations go on unnaturally. This week, the father in Family Circus crawls painfully on all fours as his four children ride him like a pony; he imagines he is holding up a horse with the children on the horse. Dad has been playing that loving, generous game for 65 years.
Hi and Lois have a stereotypical suburban family that does not seem overly dysfunctional. (Did you know Lois is Beetle Bailey’s sister? Best not invite him for Christmas; Snorkel is likely to come too.) The strip this week is an explanation of the Groundhog Day tradition, panel by panel. Only in the final panel’s last speech balloon do we get the punchline: “I hope it’s more accurate than the weather lady on TV.” Funny papers? Oof.
Zombie strips, they are called, drawn long after the original artist has died, and going through the motions for syndication. Bill Watterson, adored for his art and admired for his integrity against corporate newspapers and marketing, criticized this phenomenon. It is said Charles Schultz left instructions not to allow it to happen to his strip.
Why bother, I wonder? Watterson stopped drawing in part because corporate thinking killed the soul of comic sections, by making them too small and inflexible for layout, and replacing them with puzzles. How much money could there be in funnies for shareholders?
Besides, what cultural product feels fresh for 50 or 100 years? It is like going to your local multiplex, year after year, and paying to see the same double feature with Lionel Barrymore and Clara Bow. Encountering the old strips is jarring, and I wonder why new artists could not be found, but unfortunately in their current mode they seem the sort of thing AI will be really, really good at.
