2 October 2010
Matt Zoller Seitz has a nice piece in Salon.com on the death of the daily comic strip. I’m not sure I quite agree with him. Daily comics are going strong, perhaps even stronger than ever. I don’t really follow the form, but with entries like xkcd and Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal catching my interest nearly every day, the form is still quite alive. And there must be other contenders out there on the interwebs.
But Seitz does have a point about individual strips rising to national prominence through the medium of the daily newspaper. Never again will a strip like Peanuts be read by so many every day. And charting the progress of a strip’s importance in the national psyche as it rises through the comics page, as Seitz does with Calvin and Hobbes, is a thing of the past. But also now there is more “space” available for strips, space that is no longer ruled by editors who keep strips long past their prime, like Apartment 3G, Mary Worth, and, let’s face it, Peanuts, which was a wasteland for at least thirty years and is even now keeping some new strip out of the newspaper with its reruns. (Bill Watterson and Gary Larsen had the good sense to end Calvin and Hobbes and The Far Side before they ran out of creative juice.) So I wouldn’t pronounce the death of the daily comic strip just yet.
There is also a feature in this month’s Atlantic on Doonesbury. I have yet to read it.
