Newspaper comic strips just aren't as funny as they used to be. Occasionally, I get a great laugh, but most of the time I don't get so much as an itch. It would be incredibly easy to blame this quality shift on the loss of Bloom County, Peanuts, and Calvin and Hobbes. But there are still plenty of professional talents out there, most of whom are not performing up to par. If Berke Breathed could do it, what's the problem with today's pros?
I'll tell you what the problem is. It's the politics of the industry. The most important thing is money, money, MONEY! In the Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book, Bill Watterson, who drew the boy wonder and his tiger buddy, writes:
"Over the last several decades, comic strips have been reduced and reduced and reduced. Cartoonists have acquiesced that cutting everyone's size is better than cutting the number of strips a paper will print. Up to a point that's true, but I think the reductions have now gone so far as to take a serious toll on the art. The possibilities for expression are diminishing, and as a consequence, we don't have well drawn comics any more."
Back in the '30s, for example, the Chicago Tribune honored their cartoonists with almost a full page per Sunday comic. Today, as many as five strips are sometimes crammed together on a single page. Since the boom of syndicate control, newspapers have urged their cartoonists to have gag-a-day material instead of well developed story lines, the reason being that newspapers want their readers to be able to follow strips without having to read them every single day. Ignoring these rules puts a cartoonist at risk of being booted for the next up-and-comer.
Watterson constantly played with continuing story lines. However, he also managed to make individual strips interesting regardless of whether or not the reader followed the strip daily, a difficult task, especially given space restrictions.
It gets worse. Unless the cartoonist is profoundly well-known, like Charles Schulz, getting a job as a cartoonist means signing over the rights to one's ideas. The syndicates then own the characters and can commercialize them as they please. Worse yet, if the cartoonist refuses to sign this contract, he loses his spot to the next guy. If he does sign but fails to fulfill the syndicate's expectations, they can fire him and carry out his strip under someone else's authorship. Where is the art in cartooning when the cartoonist has no control?
Charles Schulz and Bill Watterson both were able to keep their rights. But Watterson never went a day without fighting the syndicate to maintain those
rights. "During my fight to keep the syndicate from licensing my work, I sometimes drew strips that had additional private meanings for myself," he said. "I wouldn't have drawn these if the material didn't stand on its own, or if it was in any way inconsistent with the characters, but cartoons such as these helped me laugh at my predicament at a time when very little about it seemed funny."
Ten years and over a thousand strips since the birth of Calvin and Hobbes, Watterson called it quits. Spending every day fighting to maintain the integrity of his art, while watching others steal their colleagues' strips under the command of the syndicates, became too much of a burden. It's easy to understand why.
What to do? Where to get our daily laughs? Calm down. There is hope, and it's right under your fingertips. Remember that old thing we call the Internet? It has everything, including online comics. Rejected cartoonists are there. Aspiring artists are there. Even those who just love cartooning as a hobby are there. The web offers an abundant selection of independent comic strips, many of which take the opportunity to break those aforementioned limits. The only true limit of the web cartoonist is file size. After all, no one wants to wait an eternity for a page to load.
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