Confessions of a Comic Strip Reader

March 1992
Confessions of a Comic Strip Reader
By Bob Coskrey


I feel a certain emptiness on days that for some reason I don’t get to read the comics section of the newspaper. This happens very seldom, usually only when I’m out of town and just don’t have an opportunity to pick up a newspaper.

Life is quite serious. And this is exactly why we must be able to laugh at it. I think the psychologists call it a coping mechanism. Sometimes you not only need to laugh, but also to escape, and for me, reading the comics accomplishes both of these things.

When I read the headlines about the economy’s decline, people killing each other over chia pets, and the prediction that by the year 3,000 the earth will be 1/3 Styrofoam, and 1/3 asphalt and 1/3 water (polluted), I immediately search for the comics section where I am able to find a brief solace, fantasizing that there really might be a 6-year-old boy with a stuffed toy tiger that comes to life as a regular-sized one with the assistance of the boy’s imagination.

Yes, “Calvin and Hobbes” is my all-time favorite comic strip. Calvin is no ordinary child or even human being for that matter. He apparently has the intellect of a Mensan, but his cognitive precocity is vitiated by his 6-year-old emotional development. Calvin’s behavior can easily be characterized as fiendish. In 70s argot, he would have been described as “Dennis the Menace on acid,” but his most salient quality is his extraordinary imaginative powers, which frequently lift him beyond the tenets of his reality-grounded adult world into his own fantastic futuristic place, where he may confront teacher/space creatures as the courageous space man, Spif. Or, he may step back in time to the Paleolithic Period, where his mother/tyrannosaurus may challenge him to pick up his clothes. In between time and space travels, he hands out with his stuffed tiger, Hobbes, who fluctuates between helping Calvin perpetrate demonic pranks on a little girl named Susie and serving as his superego, all this, of course, while he’s in his real tiger transmogrification.

My fascination with Calvin may, in fact, have something to do with the fact that he reminds me somewhat of myself at that age: an imaginative only child, who enjoyed playing by himself, maybe a little too much, the only difference being Calvin is a lot smarter and somewhat more felonious than I was. I even had a stuffed toy animal, a white rabbit in a yellow and blue Easter suit named Georgie. In fact, he’s still up in my attic, where he’s been waiting some 46 years for me to resume our parlous partnership. “Bob and Georgie.” I don’t think so. It just doesn’t have good ring to it.

Prior to Calvin and Hobbes’ arrival, I guess my favorite comic strip was “B.C.” with the “Wizard of Id” following closely. I especially like B.C. when it features the ants because it’s sort of fun to imagine insects with names like Claude and Shirley. Not only do I usually like the contents of these two cartoons, along with the likes of “Show,” “Garfield,” “Hagar the Horrible” and “Foxtrot,” but I also think that the deadpan expressions the artists put on their characters augment their punchlines.

Many of them also have their perpetual whipping boy figures such as B.C.’s peg-legged Wiley, Clumsy Carp and the Snake, Shoe’s Professor, The Wizard of Id’s king, Sir Rodney and the Spook, Garfield’s John Arbuckle, and Foxtrot’s feckless father character. It’s mildly uplifting to realize while I’m muzzle-loading my face with Nutri Grain Wheat cereal and bananas every morning that at least today I won’t be pulverized by a fat broad with a stick or eat swill in a cell, and that even if I went to Hell and was sentenced to watch Dick Van Patton commercials for all eternity, I would never experience the infinite boredom of John Arbuckle.

There has never been a more worthless, mean-spirited, philandering little libertine than “Andy Capp.” Yet oddly, I have the urge to have a couple of beers with him—probably at Big John’s. This does not speak favorably for my sensibilities, I’m afraid, but luckily I have been able to blame it on Andy’s composite similarities to some drinking buddies of the past. I am also intrigued, I will confess, by the mystery of his hat hiding his complete identity. Will we never see the rest of his face? Oh, I read some other comics, such as Doonesbury, Mark Trail and Blondie. But Doonesbury is really more of a satirical cartoon on American politics and lifestyle. Mark Trail is actually a nature lesson taught by a blatantly asexual forest ranger, who lives in the forest with his 250-year-old St. Bernard, Andy, and calls on his ironically named girlfriend Cherry, only when he has a hankerin’ for some home-cooked vittles. Blondie, a misnamed strip, whose bungling protagonist is actually Dagwood, Blondie’s husband, has been in the paper ever since I can remember, and I continue to read it, even though most of the time it’s not even funny, for the same reason that I still like to walk through a dimestore. I can remember my mother and other family members laughing at Dagwood’s goofball antics over 40 years ago. With everything else in life changing at a seemingly accelerated rate, as I grow older, Blondie is one of its few constants. The Bumstead family, dogs included, look just like they did in 1948. And even the humor is the same. It was simplistic then and it’s simplistic now. So I will continue to read this strip even if it gets worse. To repudiate it now would b like serving my nostalgic umbilical cord.

Of course, there have been numerous strips, some even worse than Blondie, by today’s more sophisticated standards, that have disappeared over the years: Maggie and Jigs, Terry and the Pirates, Mandrake the Magician, The Phantom, Mutt and Jeff, Dondi, Henry and Nancy. It’s just as well that they have all ceased to exist, since if they were still in print, I would be compelled to read them.

One that I do wish would return is the metaphysically hip and occasional risqué Bloom County, with its strange little neurotic penguin character, Opus, and psychotic Bill the Cat. There were times I didn’t understand it, but it was always interesting.

There are a lot of comics that I don’t read because I have no emotional linking with them, and I doubt I ever will, unless maybe some of them are still here 25 or 30 years from now.

While I’m at this, I may as well tell you that I read Mary Worth, which I think also means that when I retire, I will spend more of my afternoons watching soap operas. I feel a need to explain why I like to read this strip, because I am haunted by the feeling that no male in the Western Hemisphere even glances at it. I could lie and say that Mary reminds me of my late grandmother, but I can’t do that. I can only say that I haphazardly read her once about eight years ago and have kept up with the stories ever since. Maybe I should check my testosterone dipstick more frequently.

I have purposely saved one cartoon for last, The Far Side. And that is because it is so completely different from all the rest. What makes this creation so distinctive, of course, is author Gary Larsen’s nonpareil sense of humor. He’s sort of the Miles Davis of cartoon artists with a comic mind that seems to function in another dimension. Today’s offering is a perfect example: A large python relaxing on a TV-fronted sofa with an even larger pig stuck down his throat. He helplessly mutters, “damn!” to himself, as the telephone rings. Even his characters are extraordinary, with the children all looking like fat, buck-toothed, bespectacled little nerds, the women, cow-sized with beehive hairdos, and tacky 60s-looking eye glasses, and men all resembling Larry “Bud” Melman. I keep looking for information about Larsen, a brief bio in the newspaper, an interview, but I never see anything. I’m very curious about what sort of environment and or chromosomal interplay created this individual. A talk show appearance would be neat, too. What does he look like? Could he possibly be Larry “Bud” Melman?

And so, there you have it—from Calvin and Hobbes to Blondie to the Far Side—I have confessed my pitiable dependency on the comics. I have shown you that without my daily escape into Stripsville, life is just too oppressive, too onerous, too damned serious!

Dwindling readership: Get one, Bob!

Me (pitifully): A paper, you want me to get a paper?

Dwindling readership: No, a life!