Dallis’ Judge Parker (1952), and Stan Lee and Roy Thomas’ The Amazing Spider-Man (1977). We might call these the unfunnies: dramatic strips like Ed Dodds’ Mark Trail (1946), Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant (1937), Nicholas P. While we’re on the subject of the comics page’s reliance on old franchises, there’s another category of comics that deserves mention. The “funnies” pages of a newspaper is a sort of cozy living room furnished with fantasies of the American good old days, a place where men and women are dependably tied to traditional gender roles, where queer Americans basically don’t exist, where Mom makes breakfast in an apron on Sunday morning while Dad takes a nap or mows the lawn and the funnies are spread out on the floor all day long. The comics page, particularly the Sunday version, seems to want to create a space that’s essentially domestic, essentially nostalgic, and predominantly for a white readership. But I think the absence of feminist content is actually linked to the presence of all those old-timey strips. Maybe this is due in part to the conventions of the mainstream comic strip, since a short graphic narrative ending with a gag is likely to depend on recognizable stereotypes and as with stand-up comedy, the men-are-like-this-women-are-like-that joke seems to get a laugh every time. It’s not just Blondie that has overstayed its welcome you would be hard-pressed to find much in the way of feminist consciousness anywhere on the Sunday comics page (with occasional exceptions like Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury-which, like literally 95% of the Sunday strips, is by a male cartoonist). Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay Although I suppose I should applaud Blondie‘s longevity, there’s really no excuse for this creaky vehicle for outdated gender roles to have hung around for so long. Of all these old-and-in-the-way strips, the oldest isīlondie, original author Chic Young, which began its run in 1930. Mort Walker‘s Beetle Bailey (inception date 1950)? Or Dennis the Menace (1951, originally authored by Hank Ketcham), Hagar the Horrible (1973, ibid, Dik Browne), Nancy(1938, ibid, Ernie Bushmiller), or, God help us, The Family Circus (1960, ibid, Bil Keane)? (The best description of The Family Circus appears in a lovely bit of dialogue from Doug Liman’s 1999 film Go, by the way: “You sit down and read your paper, and you’re enjoying your entire two-page comics spread, right? And then there’s The Family-fucking -Circus, bottom right-hand corner, just waiting to suck.”) A solid third of the comic strips that are published today were already old when I was a kid. Maybe a little bit too much like that, in fact. So I did, and the Sunday paper arrived with all sorts of interesting and archaic items: things like advertising circulars, and Parade magazine-which I thought had disappeared quietly sometime during the Reagan administration-and of course the well-remembered, full-color, read-it-in-your-pajamas comics page, just like when I was in school. Washington Post if you also agree to let them deliver you a physical copy of the Sunday paper. It turns out that, in our particular historical moment, it’s significantly cheaper to get an online subscription of the So I got an online subscription to my local paper, the Washington Post. But then after Donald Trump was elected US president in 2016 I, like a lot of people, found that I was spending a lot more time reading online articles in various states of panic, anger, and horror, and also decided that the press deserved all the help it could get. As a kid, I always read the funnies, but when I was old enough to start getting a paper myself, it was the New York Times, which famously has no comics section. I really never intended to start reading the comics page of the Sunday newspaper again. Design Face Eye by Geralt ( Pixabay License / Pixabay)
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