Thursday, October 15, 2015

See you in the funny pages





Never mind Europe’s schizophrenic opening and slamming of doors to the Serbian refugees or the latest hijinks of Hillary and The Donald.



 
There is real news circling cyberspace: after 25 years, Berkeley Breathed and his Bloom County have returned.




When I was growing up, my family had a deep fondness for the comics in the newspaper. They were read as faithfully as the editorial section, which some might find surprising, considering my father’s Masters from Princeton and my mother’s graduate degree in English.

I remember trying to decipher the cartoons in my parents’ New Yorker magazine as a child, and my bliss at finding whole volumes of Charles Adams in our library in Arlington, Virginia.

I have fond memories of visiting my Aunt Dottie and Uncle George in Connecticut where we would spend hours on the beach, or drive over to Madison to see Aunt Nell and Uncle Ed and eat cherrystone clams in the summer twilight. But best of all was the giant box of comic books at the top of Aunt Dottie’s attic stairs. My cousins Tommy and Camp had long since grown up and moved away and the box was mine, all mine. I sat up in that hot and musty attic, lost in a Looney Tune world. 

          When my mother, sister, and I moved to live with my grandparents, I was disappointed at the comic pages in the Tulsa Tribune – meager compared to the princely four pages in the Washington Post. Still, I hit pay dirt when I found my Uncle Sam’s (doctorate, 35 year career as a college English professor) old stash of thick Pogo paperbacks in a forgotten cupboard. 


          Comics are the most condensed form of escapism, demanding only a few moments of your time. When life feels messy, I still disappear into the alternate world that a novel can provide, but for a quick trip to somewhere else, I recommend a few minutes with the back pages of section C. 


          I still miss Prince Valiant. 
         And whatever happened to Brenda Starr?

21 comments:

  1. Now I am thinking I ought to buy a batch of comics for a box in the basement for the grands.

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  2. Great idea, Tabor. I've been popping them into Christmas stockings over the past few years.

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  3. B.C for me and if Calvin and Hobbes would come back I'd be in heaven,

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    1. Calvin and Hobbes! Me too.

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    2. Yes. I think Calvin and Hobbes is my all-time, no holds barred, humdinger favorite.

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  4. When I was a kid, my siblings and I used to fight over the Sunday comics. One of our favorite family games is still the New Yorker cartoon game -- the one where you get cartoons without captions and everyone has to write a caption.

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    1. One of my favorite parts of the New Yorker.

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  5. I was a faithful reader of comic books until I hit high school I guess or maybe before. my mother caught me with a romance comic book once and she hit the ceiling. I was not allowed to read that trash. I also loved the comic pages in the paper though that came to an abrupt end when we finally quit taking the paper about 10 years ago.

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    1. Our local paper is still limping along; one of the main reasons I would continue to take it is for the comic section.

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  6. Yea for the comic section. My parents started with the news, the kids with the comic section. I can remember the Sunday cartoon secton in black and white at my great grandparent's house. At four or five I read Katzenjammer Kids and deciphered Rube Goldberg.

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  7. Definitely Calvin and Hobbes here. I have, and read the collection.
    And Charles Addams. And Ronald Searle.

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    1. I wasn't familiar with Ronald Searle, but after checking with Professor Google, he looks like someone I would enjoy.

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  8. I've nominated you for the One Lovely Blog Award! (And not just because you were my teacher. I really do think your blog is great.)

    https://cmblackwood.wordpress.com/2015/10/15/one-lovely-blog-award/

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  9. Think she ran off with the guy wearing the eye patch.
    That really brought back memories. I use to love the comics in the paper and in book form. I don't even recognize what are called comics today and sadly I haven't bought a newspaper in ages. Guess I am part of the problem.

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  10. Now there are many cartoon novels(I'm not sure that's the right term) and kids are eating them up (well not really) . Kids are reading them. My parents also read the "funnies" to us.

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    1. Yes, graphic novels. I've never gotten into them. I guess I prefer my novels as novels, and my comics as comics and never the twain shall meet.

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  11. I used to look forward to the weekend papers which had two full pages of comics. Now only the Sunday paper has two full pages, but far less comics as the panels are printed so large. I think there's only seven now, where there used to be about a dozen.

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  12. I now read my comics online and follow eight of them faithfully. I pull them up in a separate window, read them and close the window. The next day, I get the latest ones without having to work at them. I love comics! :-)

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  13. Gosh, am I that much older than everybody! I loved the comics too; Dagwood and Blondie, Nancy, Little Henry, Little Iodine, Snuffy Smith, Popeye, and Dick Tracy. There was another one I liked but can't remember the name, but the girl in the comic always wore boots and gloves. I enjoyed this post...as usual!

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