InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "Always sinful"

dr_hermes (dr_hermes) wrote in scans_daily,
@ 2009-08-19 00:27:00

Entry tags:

char: the spirit/denny colt, creator: will eisner, era: golden age

SPIRIT Splashes
Every now and then, I'd like to do a little gallery of splash pages from THE SPIRIT. The strip appeared as an insert in syndicated newspapers (and as such, the Spirit had an astonishing circulation; many thousands who never picked up a comic book read THE SPIRIT every week). This impromptu selection leaves out several of the types of stories Will Eisner did so well. There were his satires on advertising and consumerism and current fads; there were his whimsical fantasy or science-fiction romps, his tough gangster sagas and locked-room mysteries; the little misadventures that Ebony or Sammy went off on their own; and so many that are hard to classify. You just never knew what you would find when you opened your Sunday paper.

It flummoxes me how heartbreakingly good Sunday comics used to be. From the 1930s to around 1960, you might pick up a paper that had THE SPIRIT, POPEYE, PRINCE VALIANT, TERRY AND THE PIRATES, POGO, MANDRAKE THE MAGICIAN, GASOLINE ALLEY, KRAZY KAT... Then the size of the pages started to shrink faster and faster, the quality of the printing and coloring dropped, the era of high adventure and screwball humor faded away.

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psychop_rex
2009-08-21 06:42 am UTC (link)

If you ask me, that's where the downfall of newspapers began - back when they stopped providing stuff only they could provide. Even before the Internet, newspapers were hardly an unassailable form of media - TV and radio can also provide news, and there are always the people who prefer not to know what's going on, and who just don't buy the things. It was comics that made the newspapers unique - anyone can put ink on paper and call it news, but you can't forge a comic strip - not unless it was a really crappy one. A lot of people, me included, flip to the comics section first - and back when there were some real works of genius being published, that really meant something.
Nowadays, though, that has vanished. Oh, there are still some great strips out there, but they're not as great as they COULD be, because the papers keep shrinking them down. Moreover, they've lost their nerve - newspaper comics are rapidly being sanitized down to the point of bloodlessness, and strips get added and dropped from a paper at the speed of light - all except the 'old classics', almost none of which are a shadow of their former selves. (I still enjoy 'Blondie', but Dennis the Menace? Was that EVER good?) People started predicting this years ago - there's an old 'Bloom County' strip where someone has a nightmare about a future where the comics are shrunk down to the point where you literally can't read them - they're just a large black blot in the middle of the page. There's stuff on the internet which is about a million times better than what you get in the Sunday funnies.
If papers would only start paying more attention to their comics page, they might actually be able to attract more readers, and draw them away from the siren call of the internet. It'd be pretty simple - just don't post any of the daily strips on the paper's homepage until the end of the month or so, and feature comics that are interesting and exciting, and that people will WANT to read - they'll have to buy the paper to read them. But no - they're not going to do that, because they are stupid. The last truly ingenious strip (in my opinion) was 'Calvin and Hobbes', and that folded years ago. The old masters of the form are all either dead or retired, and the fresh blood that could replace them is being poured into the internet instead. I fear we are witnessing the pitiful, piddling end of a once-mighty empire.

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