Kevin Siers: You Write The Caption

Credit: Gocomics.com

If you're a fictional character, and no one reads about you any longer, do you cease to exist?

That's the thorny existential dilemma facing four-color gumshoe Dick Tracy, who in today's comic admits that he no longer reads the funny pages that gave him his best known fame. "Don't you read the comics anymore?" asks a disgruntled cartoonist who has been forced to give up the comic she loved. Tracy's response: "Usually don't have time."

His words are more chilling than a face-to-face encounter wtih The Brow, Flattop or B.B. Eyes - longtime Tracy nemeses all. Why? Well, if even the comics-page's best known detective can't be bothered to read the medium which conveys his adventures to the world, well, why should we?

The story goes on to talk about the disappearing readership of newspaper comics, and the worried comments of cartoonists, many showing up as storylines in their strips. Many of the old-time strips are suffering (Phantom, Mark Trail, and, closer to home, Charlotte's own Gasoline Alley), and some (Annie and Brenda Starr) have actually been cancelled.

Is it lack of time? Lack of relevancy? Lack of flashy animation? Why do some old-time strips fade to obscurity and others, such as Blondie, still lead popularity polls? Feel free to chime in with your comments.

Comments

Disappearing comics. This isn’t a new trend. About 30,000 years ago folks took the comic section more seriously. They’d wonder into a cave, torch in hand, and checkout the latest picture stories on the wall. Laughing out loud in a cave was a lot of fun.

But alas, the clay tablet and then papyrus sheet came along. The Babylonians created an alphabet and farmers learned to count sheep by making marks. Education meant putting away foolish drawings and getting about the serious business of words and mathematics. Point-in-case; the authors of the Dead-sea-scrolls were writers, not cartoonist.

For a brief time the cheap thrill of comics made a return. In America, comics were a way to transmit values to immigrants who couldn’t speak English. Comics were a way to learn the language. Our country accepted that if something were funny then it was good; even if it were bad.

In the early 1900’s comics moved back to its cave heritage. People like Walt Disney put drawings on celluloid and projected them on darkened cave-like walls in theaters. It proved evolution. Man and Woman had briefly ventured out of prehistoric times but always felt best sheltered in the cave with its drawings.

So today the comic page is in decline. I’ve seen the history. Comics will return. In the words only a kid of the 50’s and 60’s can comprehend, “What, me worry!”

Bolyn McClung
Pineville

Posted by: Bolyn McClung | November 04, 2011 at 07:33 AM