Comic Strip of the Day

CSotD: Freshness is not measured by expiration dates

Skip to comments

Mike Peterson Published: March 2, 2012 1 minute 2 comments

Things could be worse, Dagwood.

At least Blondie isn't playing the "Guess which movie we're watching tonight?" game with you. That's the one where she says she's going to let you pick the movie and then vetoes each of your suggestions until you get to the one she wanted to watch in the first place.

Not sure I'd take Dagwood's advice on marketing cold cuts anyway, given that his sandwich shoppes appear to be down to one location. Not that Valpo isn't a great place for a sandwich shoppe.

Blondie seems to be the exception that proves the rule that legacy, or "zombie," strips are punchless, pointless wastes of comics page real estate that could be better filled by new, funny work.

First of all, I am absolutely sick to death of zombie gags. "Braaaains" is no longer a punchline. It has become a way for a cartoonist with a creative block to give it up, phone it in and hope for inspiration tomorrow.

But the term "zombie strip" predates the current cliche, and the cliche is emblematic of the appeal of the zombie strip: There is a type of consumer who wants the familiar, and this is not confined to the comic strip reader who gets a chuckle each time Dagwood runs into the mailman or Marmaduke hands out a sloppy kiss or Cosmo Fishhawk's car goes into the shop.

The people who wish Bill Watterson hadn't stopped drawing "Calvin and Hobbes" apparently didn't read the last year of "Calvin and Hobbes," and I suspect they are pining for more armies of insane snowmen and Sunday strips with realistic dinosaur pictures that end with a panel in traditional style showing Calvin in school, at the dinner table or annoying Susie. The strip was over and Watterson pulled the plug and good for him.

I have "Calvin and Hobbes" and "Peanuts" and daily "Foxtrot" on my on-line comics pages, because they're funny more than once and space there is, for all practical purposes, limitless.

But a newspaper is not a library and it's no place for re-treads, whether they are honest repeats or new renderings of the same old recycled gags.

The artist does not have to be dead or retired for a strip to slip into tedious self-parody. I can think of a couple of strips that burst upon the scene as fresh and new and innovative and now, a decade or so later, are simply filling space with formulaic gags for fans who don't realize that the bus pulled out of the station five years ago.

And if Steve Martin makes a personal appearence, the crowd won't be happy until he sings "King Tut" and says, "Well, excuuuuuuuse me!"

You don't have to be old to be an old fart. Old fartitude is conferred upon you at the point where you lock in your preferences and start shutting down your braaaaaaain.

Blondie, meanwhile, has managed to combine the comfort of familiar gags with the freshness of a changing scene.

Dagwood may still run into Mr. Beazley the postman on his way out the door each morning, but he's late for his carpool because nobody takes the bus to work anymore except those who live right downtown. And the carpool itself provides a different set of people and some new gags, as has Blondie's venture into catering, as today's strip suggests.

There are some cartoonists who are not only still on the green side of the sod but not even yet eligible for AARP membership but who would do well to keep their strips as fresh as Blondie. 

And it may — emphasis on "may" — be because Blondie has apparently been a collaborative venture for nearly its entire run. 

This is one of those stories that is widespread within a certain level of comic lore but which remains unconfirmed. I asked someone in a position to know and his response was, "That's what I've heard, but I've never been able to confirm it. I wish I could."

Chic Young was the creator of the strip and is the father of Dean Young, who now runs the strip but is quite frank about working with artists, though it's only in recent years that they've been credited on the strip itself.

But the story is that Chic wrote and drew the strip in its early years, when Blondie Boop-a-Doop was a flightly flapper and Dagwood Bumstead her wealthy but hapless boyfriend. Dagwood was disinherited when they married and the couple settled down to the middleclass existence that continues to this day.

At a decent interval after the marriage, the happy couple produced a child, who was known as "Baby Dumpling," and this is where the "lore" section of the story begins.

The story is that the birth of Baby Dumpling mirrored the birth of Chic Young's first child, but that, while still very young, the real-life child died.

Chic was understandably devastated and certainly couldn't bring himself to write funny stories in which Blondie and Dagwood cheerfully raised Baby Dumpling. He took a year off from the strip, handing it over to ghosts while he put his life back together.

The unconfirmed rumor is that he never fully returned, that he continued to use gagwriters and ghost artists and to manage and direct, but not actually write and draw, the strip for roughly 40 more years, until his death, whereupon his son Dean took over in much the same capacity.

I don't know if it's true, but I know that some pretty knowledgable people believe it. But I also don't know how much it matters, except that we all seem to cling to this auteur notion of the comic strip, which is in total contrast with the concept of the zombie strip.

How applicable is it, really? First of all, Francois Truffault and Erich Romer and Woody Allen never tried to crank out 365 or 366 strips a year, while Pixar seems to be settling into a groupthink approach to characters and plot that doesn't use its whiz-bang graphics to break a lot of new ground in the storytelling department.

As for comics, Marvel and DC have long maintained stables of artists and writers, and, while the aficianados know who did what and discuss it with great passion, the average reader doesn't know and — more importantly for this conversation — doesn't care.

Are strips better when they work on the auteur model? You bet. So are movies. So are comic books. 

But even Charles Schulz, the indisputable king of modern funny-page auteurs, went through a sustained slack period of Snoopy worship before, towards the end of his life and career, he seized upon Rerun to revitalize what was becoming a profitable-but-lifeless commodity.

Meanwhile, Blondie will turn 82 in September, and the old girl has held up pretty well.

And if you've read this far …

You probably have some interest in comic archives. In that case — with a hat tip to Tom Spurgeon over at The Comics Reporter — you will be interested and quite likely delighted to know that Caitlin McGurk, lately a librarian at the Center for Cartoon Studies' Schulz Museum who was interviewed here, has now, following her year-long stint organizing that collection, landed at (the) Ohio State's Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum, where she has created a blog that will certainly be of interest to fans of the medium.