There’s nothing sacred in the funny paper world anymore. Maybe there never was, but back in earlier times, those who wanted to opine on the state of politics — or make commentary on any of the vagaries of life — would do it through editorial cartoons.
The comics, what many of us older folks lovingly refer to as the “funny papers,” were reserved for humor. No more.
I’ve written before about the strips I like to call “soap opera comics,” because they tend to deal with an ongoing saga. Lots of times, if you don’t get in on the beginning of a segment, you get lost and never do find out what is going on. Apartment 3C was one of those. I use that one because in the metro paper I read every day, Apartment 3C no longer exists.
And that’s part of the new news about comic strips. The metro daily had the most comics of just about everyone on Earth after the folks there picked up the ones from the Houston Post when the Post died. (There are some of us who are still mourning the loss of the Post.)
The Houston Chronicle has pared itself from four comic pages to three. The Chronicle folks figured they would pacify the readers, I guess, by putting one of the pages in color. Daily color. Not just on Sunday.
To me, it looks kind of strange. I carefully check out each page figuring the page with the puzzle and Heloise contains the least popular comics, the full black and white page has the next favorite bunch and the colored comics are supposedly everybody’s favorites.
The problem with this is, I don’t agree with the choices and I don’t know who decided the positions. My two favorites, “One Big Happy” and “Sally Forth,” are both on the black and white, middle choice page.
Incidentally, when they made the announcement, they said everything missing off the pages would be in the online comics collection. I got online and counted 225 comics, more than anybody ever had.
But back to politics. “Doonesbury” has been, near as I can tell, blatantly Democratic and militantly anti-Bush for years and years. I think most of the media usually lean more to the left.
There was a strip called Millard Fillmore that was definitely Republican, but it is gone. OK, I found it online, but here’s what I think about that. With a real paper in my hands, I’m not going online to read the news, or the comics. Many of my friends read the paper only online. I may get there some day, but not anytime soon. Old fashioned.
There are black comics and Hispanic comics and teen comics and they all reflect their own signs of the times. Our very own Daily News has two popular antiques that don’t appear in the metro — “Dick Tracy” and “Snuffy Smith.”
Sally Forth’s husband lost his job and he is presenting a perfect picture of a man trying not to be out of work — but not too hard.
Funny paper people are getting to be more and more like real people — more’s the pity.
Cathy Gillentine is a columnist for The Daily News. She may be reached at cgillentine1(at)sbcglobal.net.
